Philip

Some games just don’t get old no matter when they were released. Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle are one of these rare games from 1986 and 1987 for the Mac that really defined the platform action game for a lot of Mac users back in the day. These days, most people don’t have hardware capable of playing it, so there’s Mini vMac by Paul Pratt (based off vMac by other smart guys) to emulate the Mac Plus so you can play it again in all the B&W glory.

Not content on just beating the game, some people have taken it to the next level by doing speed runs, limited rock, limited elixir and no Shield runs through the game, so there’s people like Richard no Yuuutsu, MacMannz and Phantom Peasant showing everyone how it’s done. The forum can be found here as everyone’s keyed up for the next installment, Return to Dark Castle which looks close to a release this year.

Read about it from Engadget here. Pretty good reproduction of the iPhone called the HiPhone. Don’t think it’ll last long what with Apple getting onto them… Can’t China make its own decent products that don’t rip some other company off?

Linus once again has decided to put his foot in his mouth with sweeping comments about how great his kernel is. I remember the last time I commented about something like this, he was whining about how EFI was crap since it reminded (yes, merely reminded) him about ACPI which he claimed was crap as well and that real men toss the BIOS aside the second they get the chance when booting up.

Anyhow, here’s the comment from SMH, read the full interview here:

Q. Do you have a favourite between Leopard and Vista?

A. I don’t think they’re equally flawed. I think Leopard is a much better system. On the other hand, (I’ve found) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary. I think OS X is nicer than Windows in many ways, but neither can hold a candle to my own (Linux). It’s a race to second place!

Well, given that the usability of the Linux kernel on its own is “crap” and that Linus owes a lot to GNU for providing all those tools that the kernel uses, I think he hasn’t got much of a leg to stand on. Given he also didn’t write ext2 or ext3, I don’t think he’s qualified to make statements about other file systems at this point in time in such sweeping generalisations.

On my last trip to Hawaii I picked up a Pantone Huey Pro as colour calibration has always been a bit of a sticking point with me and the laptop’s not so great LCD screen (which I rarely use nowadays). You can calibrate by eye but it’s probably better to just let a real calibrator do the job for you.

Anyhow, the Huey Pro is a small USB device with stand that plugs in and handles calibration of the monitor as well as dynamic light adjustment which supposedly keeps things fairly consistent across different lighting situations. The calibration is quite straight forward, you simply put the Huey to the middle of the screen and let it display various colours once the monitor is warmed up, it measures and generates a profile to fix any aberrant colour issues.

After calibrating my Dell monitor went from a nasty bright yellow tint to a deeper, richer blue which is what I’m used to seeing now. The best thing is to save your old profile, then switch from the calibrated one to the previous one as a test after a few days of getting used to the new profile to see how bad the old profile was for you.

The Huey Pro software runs under Mac OS X and Windows, however for GNU/Linux users you can get Argyll here which works with the Huey Pro for calibrating under GNU/Linux or Mac OS X. From what I can see you can use the Huey Pro software for simple, fast calibration, or the Argyll software for more in depth (and longer) tests.

Anyhow, worth looking into if you want to make sure those photos and video look pretty close to what you hope they do in real life, unfortunately doesn’t calibrate printers or scanners so you’ll need to get more expensive hardware and software to really get everything calibrated, but for me it’s good enough for the moment.

I recently picked up a 500 GB WD My Book World Edition from OfficeWorks on an impulse buy to start stashing away some extra files. Unfortunately, the thing is abysmally slow at about 5 MiB/sec transfer rates so I guess it’s relegated to being on the network switch to get 2 MiB/sec feeds from my laptop over wireless. However, the good news is that all is not lost - the WD comes with an Oxford OXE800 chip which is a NAS SOC with support on-chip for a ARM 926 200 mHz CPU, 3 USB ports, 10/100 MBPS Ethernet, network co-processor, PCI, serial, SATA and AES-128 encryption. The WD board also includes a VIA 6122 Gigabit Ethernet chipset (not that it reaches that), strange given the Oxford SOC already has it built in.

Using some searching, I quickly managed to access the GNU/Linux on-board so basically I’ve got a 200 mHz ARM CPU that consumes about 14 Watts (about 6c a day) in power for web serving, FTP, BitTorrent or whatever else strikes my fancy. WD even kindly left the gcc compilers and toolchain on the box, so I don’t even have to head out to build one! Talk about nifty. I’ll have to see about speeding it up however, I’d like to get about 10+ MiB/sec from a direct connect Gigabit connection if possible, looks like the DMA and network co-processing isn’t up to scratch by the looks of things. If still no joy, maybe a direct USB 2 to SATA adaptor will do the job, but be nice to be able to use the externally available USB port for that.

Anyhow, check out all the stuff you can do at the wiki here.

I recently picked up a HDFury which finally lets me use my PS3 via the HDMI port to my Dell 2405 monitor in 1920×1200 resolution via VGA, no thanks to the HDMI mafia. As a result I’m a tad more productive than the component leads that left me in 720p with some blurry output, so I’ve had a chance to get Fedora installed and download the latest Linux kernel. The good news is that the new kernels by Geoff Levand support WPA now, so I’m able to use the PS3 wirelessly with Fedora rather than having it tethered via Ethernet which was being a bit annoying.

After getting the new kernel on things speed up noticeably (even Geoff’s precompiled kernel is faster than the stock Fedora PPC one) and using the Cell SDK 3 to recompile MPlayer gives some modest results, letting me run AVI/MKV fine at SD and software scale up to 720p and still keep up. I’ll have to dig into the libswscale to see about writing some SPE optimised scalers and YUV->RGB converters at some point in time. I guess the next step is getting the BlueTooth SixAxis and Logitech MediaBoard Pro up and running properly which means I can get closer to using the PS3 as a dual-boot gaming machine and GNU/Linux based media center over wireless.

I decided to crack out the PlayStation 3 again and try and get GNU/Linux up and running now that the Cell SDK 3.0 has been released by IBM for Fedora Core 7. First step is getting the latest Fedora Core 7 PPC DVD. The second step is figuring out how to make the DVD boot properly so you can actually install Fedora. The issue is that when you boot, by default it reverts to the ridiculously low resolution of 480p which isn’t large enough to see where to click. To resolve this at the kboot screen simply type in ‘cd mnt/root/ppc/ppc64′, then ‘kexec -f –initrd=ramdisk.image.gz –command-line=”video=720p” vmlinuz’ to boot in 1280×720p mode which actually lets you install. (Thanks to Robert Rose for figuring it out here).

After that it’s pretty smooth sailing, however you should get the latest Cell CD from here to install the latest kernel which is snappier than the default Fedora one. After that, it’s installing the Livna repositories here to get the usual packages that aren’t in Fedora on like VideoLAN and MPlayer without a lot of pain going through dependencies. So far from my last tests with YDL the PS3 is able to play back H.264 and MPEG-4 media fine at SD (ie, 720×576 or below) sizes, as soon as scaling kicks in for 720p/1080i things bog down as there’s no SPU support. Oh well!

Now that I’ve got the Cell SDK on, maybe it’s high time to optimise the MPlayer software scaler…

Dongmei Li of NY claims Apple violated price discrimination laws when it dropped the iPhone 8GB price by $200 US just two months after it debuted and alleged it hurt her chances of reselling the iPhone especially as the 4GB model were given less favourable terms. She’s asking for $1M US in damages. A co-worker thinks it’s a vexatious lawsuit given the damages are way out of proportion to the value of the price drop.

Read about it here.

T-Mobile Germany may have let the cat out of the bag with a leaked ad that promises a 3G iPhone with 3G + HSDPA and 16 GB of storage for €499 (about $830 AU) on November 12. This will certainly peeve the US what with only EDGE support and the recent $200 US price drop…

See it here.

After what seems to be several years the courts have finally ruled in favour of Novell that they indeed do own Unix. This effectively means that SCO has very little to go on with their claims of Linux infringing their IP now.

Read about it here.