Today’s link: visually stunning desktop backgrounds from Tazl. I’ve been using his desktops for years, but today I discovered that he’s put a website together with many of them on it, you can check it out here: tazl-desktops.com. Today I’m grooving on the industrial wasteland pics, who knew rust came in such varied colors 😉

I spent the weekend working on my new media box, which will sit in the living room attached to the home theater system. It’s a Shuttle mini-itx system (SN45g) with a radeon 7500 AIW, lots of HD space and fast ram in it. Check out how cramped everything is once you get all the components in.

I’ll post a shot of the back of the home theater system later once I have this thing partly wired in. Its addition has significantly complicated the wiring situation.

This is going to look really small as a thumbnail, but check out this composite shot I put together from a recent bike ride. Once again evidence of why I love Maine so much 😉

This is taken at Winslow Park, which is about 6-7 miles from my house, a nice bike ride through the woods to get there too. You can swim, camp, or launch your kayak or boat off of their boatramp. The image is fairly large when you pull up the full version, be warned that it’s around 400-500k.

…Lives on. God, how many hours did I spend playing this game on my trusty commodore 64? Now you too can experience the joy that is Fargoal all over again.

It’s pretty cool how many of the old classics end up being remade with modern tools these days. In truth Fargoal is way far of the ‘too simple’ side by today’s standards, and you’d be better off playing Tales of Middle Earth or some other rogue-like if you enjoy games of this nature, but still, a walk down nostalgia lane is worth a 2 second download. At least it was for me.

Why? Because I would love to buy the entire collection of these indescribably cool miniaturized versions of the original TSR Advanced Dungeons and Dragons manuals. They’re about $10 a pop and produced by an italian company under license from Wizards of the Coast. Very cool. Why? Well, they’re mini of course! I could fit the whole library in a corner of one of my shelves.

This site will probably be offline on the 6th of July. A hacking group has issued a global challenge to all hackers to take down as many webservers internationally as they can on Sunday July 6th. I’m pretty good about keeping my box up to date and I watch the security postings but rather than deal with a gazillion hackers poking on my bandwidth on the 6th trying to crack my server, I’m just going to shut it down. Go fuck yourselves you bandwidth sapping twerps, I have better things to do with my pipes 😉

Want to rock your taste bud’s world? Do you like fish? This is probably a little late for today’s barbecue, but trust me, you want to cook this for yourself.

Go buy a nice fresh (FRESH, not previously frozen) halibut steak, say 1.5 pounds or so – make sure it is an inch or so thick, no skinny steaks. Take about 6 tablespoons of Soy sauce, 1/2 tablespoon of sesame oil, 1 tablespoon of minced fresh ginger, a pinch of garlic powder, and pour it all in a glass baking dish. Stir it up. Plop your halibut steak in there and let it marinate for maybe 2 hours tops, flipping the steak every half hour or so. Go preheat your grill, get it nice and hot. Plop that steak on there after it’s marinated and let it cook for about 8-9 minutes on one side, then flip it and give it about 6-8 minutes on the other side. You can tell it’s done when the meat is starting to separate from the bone and flaking. Do not overcook it, if so you will be bummed that you turned your $15 steak into dried out shoe leather. Serve with some sauteed mushrooms and zuchinni, ta da! Best meal you will eat this summer.

Well, it was for me anyway. And I invented that for myself last night, damned tasty.

Today is a very bad day for Microsoft. If you haven’t been following the news, a group of Austrian hackers worked out a buffer overflow (or under run, not sure yet but the particulars don’t really matter) that allows anyone to run unsigned code on their xbox. This means that shortly the xbox will be ‘owned’ in the same way that the Sega Dreamcast was – anyone will be able to run cracked games, linux, BSD, whatever they want, on their xbox, without having to install a mod chip or make other hardware modifications to their system.

Can you guess my reaction to this? I’m cackling gleefully! Firstly because I love to see MS take one on the chin, secondly because I had been considering dropping ~$100 on parts to mod my xbox so I could get it to play media files of all flavors (.ogg, DivX and so on) and stream music across my lan to the stereo system. Now I don’t have to pay for the right to install whatever software I want on my machine.

It will be interesting to see what steps microsoft will take. Certainly they’ll be trying to sue the hell out of the Austrians for releasing the hack to the public, that’s a given. But what will they do to try and save the xbox? If anyone can run cracked games the third party software developers will start abandoning the platform like crazy, just like the did on the Dreamcast. MS can presumably release a hardware update to the platform to fix the exploit, but that won’t help with the 6-9 million xboxes already sold, and at this stage in the platform’s life that’s probably more than half the xboxes that will be sold during the product’s lifespan. They can try and use Xbox live access to control who’s running the hack or to try and ‘fix’ hacked boxes, but that reminds me of the code war the sattelite TV companies have been waging with hackers for a decade – you can stop some of hacked hardware some of the time, but not all of it.

Interesting, interesting times for the xbox. Glad I grabbed an early model before any hardware updates are fashioned. If you had been considering picking up an xbox, now might be the time to do it. Of course it’s also possible MS’s reaction will be a slow ‘fuck! we’re fucked! Time to cut our losses and bail,’ which would lead to $100 xboxes by next spring, but I really doubt this is the route they’ll go, they have too much money tied up in the success of the xbox (literally billions) to cut and run, not to mention the loss in credibility they’d suffer.

It will also be really interesting to see what happens with the software developers – EA in particular has been pissed at MS for a while now, it’s not beyond the pale to imagine them saying ‘no more software for xbox’ – if that happens the cascade effect will be brutal, most developers will follow suit.

I’ll post followups as they occur, and I guarantee I’ll have my xbox booting linux within the next month or two.

Oh, if you’re interested in a summary of all this, check out zdnet’s article on the subject.

A student working for us this summer had his xbox die on him while he was home in CA visiting his folks. He opened it up to try and discover what the problem was and found this:

Under the power supply. Too damned funny! His guess is the little bugger crawled in because of the warmth and then electrocuted himself against the power supply. After he scraped it out and took a metal brush to the board the xbox returned to normal. Too funny, he’s lucky it still worked though.

The folks at lockergnome have pulled together an incredibly useful collection of categorized rss links for a ton of the categories of stuff amazon sells. Want to keep an eye on the paperback bestsellers list, or know when a particular computer game is in stock? Just subscribe to the appropriate RSS feed. Kudos to lockergnome for building such a useful index of these things.