Being capitalists, Microsoft will shortly roll out a buyback program for downloaded Xbox Live arcade games. Games can be “returned” for 1000 Microsoft points, with the caveat that if you want to re-download the game, it will cost you full price. Corollary prediction, they will make money hand over fist. That is all.
When I read about Google’s new strategy for cloud printing, I thought “hey that’s great!, wish I could use it before 2011!”. Thankfully, I run linux on damn near everything. As I don’t have an android (which would be a pretty ideal running platform for this…), I’ve used the Z2 as my “drop in” cloud print server. Doesn’t seem like it’ll take the manufacturing companies long to integrate this into new product lines, as it’s pretty simple. Instructions and source code links below!
Ok not really. But it’s pretty sad anyway. Tired of playing games on virtual console, I set out to construct my own nes (and make use of the carts strewn about my closet).
Mark brought over his copy of Make, and it turns out this last Makezine had a great article on building cigar box guitars. It sounded like a really interesting project, so we went off to the hardware store to purchase some oak timber. Many days/hours/blood stains later, the fruits of our labor emerged, tuned and ready to play. . Lots of hack potential, and an easy fix if I break something. Bonus, tablature looks fine in links browser on the Z2, though you will have to scroll quite a lot. I’ll see about getting gnome guitar working, should be interesting (mono bleh). Yet again another use case for the Z2 I wouldn’t have imagined.
I’ve been meaning to split this off into a new post for a while now. Adrian Crenshaw (irongeek.com) built a great z2 linux distro, specifically with the intent of pen-testing. You can grab it here. It’s not only a very cool distribution, (based on a modified rootnexus zipit distro), it’s a very cool reminder of the great things we accomplish building off each other’s work and sharing information. My only suggestion for his next release is to counter his assumption that metasploit won’t be running at a useful speed on the z2. 🙂
Reccomended to me on the comments of a previous thread, I picked up the leapfrog crammer for 10$ at big lots. I’ve seen these all over the discount stores (along with didj’s, which I have one of Claude’s cartridges for and will be porting software sometime soon). For 10$ ogg vorbis support and a touch screen (kind of ..) is a heck of a deal. More info after the jump.
Yeah, more technically it’s a 20-watt x264 player. But it’s an 800mhz CELERON (all caps!) pumping 1080p into a broadcom decoder. More info after the jump
To follow up on my earlier articles, the IM-ME has been gaining some traction in the hacking community. There’s been a couple of driver releases in various forms, as well as a lot of information and protocol specs. Scott Albertine sent me a great gpl implementation in C, so we’ve made a sourceforge page for everyone to download the driver.
Although I’ve been spending my time on other hacking projects besides the Z2 lately, that does not mean there’s nothing exciting happening in the Z2 community. Our friend SoundGuy has finished putting together his Z2 root image, and it is slick! After working out some of the kinks with help from our comments (they are practically forums now…) threads, SoundGuy posted up a link to his newest “For the Average User” userland image. Terrific work! He’s really got a good eye for usability. More info after the break.
