Bitshift

Could you find it in your heart to love a cleaning brush? What about calling it Mom? No?

Well, don't tell these hedgehogs. These poor babies were orphaned, and have since formed a maternal bond with a cleaning brush at the facility where they were taken after they were rescued.

Not much hackish content here. Just CUTE BABY HEDGEHOGS! Everyone needs pictures of cute baby hedgehogs every now and again.

Hackzine has a great article up describing how to get online securely when using public networks.

Here's a short YouTube clip of an incredible handmade, wooden walking robot based on a mechanism designed by artist Theo Jansen, who who built a very similar walker, but his was the size of a cow!. More about Theo Jansen and his work.

I've wanted something like this for a while now, even though I own and have read most of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. It's been said that Pratchett's books are more valuable without a signature, given how often he manages to go on tour and do book-signings. However, whether you've got a signed or unsigned copy, you may be wondering about the major threads and themes that run throughout his books, and in which order they should be read. With 33 out now, it can get a little confusing.

These folks have put together a very nice visual guide to solve those problems.

The BattleBricks website has a great little page on The RoboFlush, an automatic toilet flusher someone built using the LEGO MindStorms NXT kit.

Got an Oppo 970HD? Annoyed that it'll only upconvert DVDs to HD over the HDMI port, when you've still got a perfectly good component-only HD display? Annoyed that the HDCP crippleware won't let you use your non-HDCP-compatible, DVI-port-having LCD display with the unit?

Well, there's no need to be annoyed any more. Just grab the ISO from this AVSForum thread, and burn a CD-R (this is important, because it won't work with a DVD-R) from it. Pop the burned disc into your 970HD, and follow these instructions.

The ISO contains a patched version of the newest 970HD firmware, which patches out the restrictions on upconversion, and disables HDCP.

Alternately, follow the instructions on this site, and apply the patch to the firmware yourself.

One of the hardest things about hardware hacking is tackling something with a JTAG interface on it. Often, you're reduced to laborious guesswork when trying to figure out just what's going on with the device's JTAG port.

Guess no more! There's now an open-source hardware/software project and wiki set up to automate JTAG pinout discovery. JTAG hackers, rejoice!

Seriously. If you've ever been responsible for a wiring closet, networking rack, or server farm, this isn't something you want to dwell on unless you're no longer in that line of work. It'll just give you nightmares.

This will not be an entry on how to rob a bank. Instead, it'll just be a quick pointer to this article at Business Week, which surveys the most affordable places to live in every state.

Don't think you need this sort of thing? Then you must not live where I do.

While hard at work one day a few weeks ago, a co-worker mentioned his love of the Croque Monsieur, and how very much the sandwich he'd just had wasn't one. I'd never heard of it before, so like any good nerd, I went and looked it up. It does indeed look tantalizing.

I wanted one so much, in fact, that evening I tried to make one using turkey and shredded mexican cheese. I don't think it'd pass muster in Paris, but it still hit the spot. Yum!

Some of you may have heard of DTrace, the rather nifty microscope-like diagnostic/debugging tool from Sun that lets you examine almost every aspect of the operating system's functioning in real-time. It's extremely useful for everyone from developers to sysadmins.

Well, there have been various efforts to port DTrace to other platforms. Apple's got their own effort waiting in the wings as part of the new XCode developer package to ship with Leopard: XRay. XRay is a combination of DTrace and an extremely nice, polished GUI for it. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on Leopard, and this just makes me want it more.

To get some idea of the extreme flexibility of DTrace, have a look at this DTrace script, designed to diagnose timing issues with application/OS DNS queries. Keen!

On September 26, DirecTV finally launched the first 21 of the anticipated 100 new high-definition channels they've been promising. Among them are A&E HD, Animal Planet HD, Discovery Channel HD, History Channel HD, The Smithsonian Channel HD, The Science Channel HD, and multiple Starz and Showtime HD channels.

On the morning of October 3, DirecTV launched another 10 HD channels, including USA HD and SciFi HD! Woo!

We've all been there: After days of prep, you're in the hot seat, meeting person after person in what are seemingly endless rounds of interviews, trying to secure that shiny new job you've had your eye on. You spend the day answering all sorts of questions, helping the interviewers learn more about you.

What many people fail to realize is that the interview process is the perfect time to learn a great deal about your potential new employer, bosses, and co-workers. Rands has a great series of articles on the job acquisition process, and in this article, they describe how to find and use what they call "the button", the weak spot in your interviewer's armor through which you can extract extremely useful information about the person and the company. Worth a read!

Ever wonder what all those numbers next to your favorite piece of software's name mean? This Wikipedia article on software versioning explains exactly what each number means, and what it means to you when you see one of them change.

Not everyone follows the standards described here, but most people who write software with some sort of versioning system use one of the schemes they detail.

The folks over at TRAC have been working on a project to add Ethernet to an Arduino board. I really like the Arduino platform, and these folks have put up a detailed, step-by-step worklog on their efforts, so you can follow along and make one yourself it you wish.

Some of the more avid gamers in the audience may be aware that Valve has been pre-selling The Orange Box, a collection of 5 outstanding videogames for the price of one. It includes Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, the upcoming Half-Life 2: Episode 2, the much anticipated Portal, and perhaps of greatest interest to some, Team Fortress 2, which has been 9 years in the making.

It's a hotly-anticipated title for the first-person shooter set, and you can buy direct access to it via Valve's Steam Network.

If you do, you get to play in the Team Fortress 2 beta until the game's release on October 10. If you're like me, you hate mouse-based menu systems for changing weapons. I've been playing in the beta for a few weeks now, and there's a great post describing how to bind certain keys to various actions in TF2, including switching weapons.

The news just keeps getting better, doesn't it? There's now a point-and-click graphical SIM unlock tool available for those unfamiliar with or uncomfortable with the command line. Rejoice!

The dev team's released their open-source, free software-only SIM unlock for the iPhone. Here is a list of mirrors. So, those of you in the rest of the world, and those of you in the US on T-Mobile, go enjoy your non-AT&T iPhone!

[EDIT 18:56] The steps to use the software can be found here.

[EDIT 19:53] Much better, more thorough instructions here.

The iPhoneSIMFree folks -- the people who were selling a software-only SIM unlock to resellers to mark up as they saw fit (often around $100) -- released their software yesterday. Today, people began posting the app to the net. This afternoon, people began reverse engineering it, because no matter what magic IPSF did on the back end, it still had to modify the baseband memory via software, something that George Hotz couldn't manage without a hardware hack.

In the past hour, it was discovered that there's a bug in the way the iPhone bootloader's checking the validity of the baseband firmware file, and thus making a decision whether or not to execute it. This is what IPSF takes advantage of, and this is what the dev team have independently verified can be used to trick the phone into loading a modified baseband firmware.

There will be a free, zero-cost, open-source full software SIM unlock for the iPhone released to the world in the next few hours.


Keep in mind, however, that this is a bug that is easily patched by Apple in an upcoming iPhone firmware release. This means that the free solution may stop working at any time in the future, and also that the commercial versions will also stop working. Which in turn means that all those people that spent $50-$100 to unlock their phone will be forced to spend another $50-$100 to unlock it again when the software stops working.

Remember the good old days, when every device had a built-in transformer, and power cords were firmly and permanently attached to the device in question? If you don't, ask your parents.

Those days are long gone. Today, devices that still have in-unit transformers had detachable power cords, with several different types of connectors. Some non-grounded cords have rounded rectangular connectors with key grooves on one or both sides, and sometimes one end is squared off. Thankfully, most grounded cords have settled on the standard PC-type power supply connector.

Wall warts, however, do not. The semi-ubiquitous power supply for devices that do not have inbuilt transformers seem to be everywhere, and more often than not, they do not bear any sort of mark or label that associates them with the product they power. Most of the time, they are generic devices from a third party, purchased in bulk by the people who sell you your goodies. They usually specify the input and output voltage and wattage. If you're lucky, there will be a diagram or description specifying how the plug is wired for positive and ground.

The same holds true of power "bricks", those power supplies that do not have the electrical prongs directly attached to the transformer housing, but instead have a brick-shaped block of transformer housing with the cord to the device coming out of one end, and typically a detachable generic power cord coming out the other.

If you're anything like me, you probably have a box of these things, and no idea what goes with what. Every time you plug in a device, you dig through your collection of wall warts and power bricks, hoping to rediscover the right one for the device. You can eliminate the guessing by buying a cheap label maker and printing labels to stick to the wall warts and power bricks, that explicitly state what device they're for. That way, the next time you move, or just put something away for a while, you'll know that you can put it back into service with confidence, and without wasting half a day trying to guess which power supply goes with what device (and hopefully without frying something in the process, which is a real danger when the connectors can fit more than one device!)