On windows? If so, check out this virtual hypnotism software. Oh what I would have given for software like this during my high school years.
Category: Techno Geek
Code just wants to be free
Another exhibit in the ‘why DRM, closed source, and copyright are bad.’ Check out this extensive list of translation hacks for foreign language videogames that were never released in the US – http://romhacking.deadbeat-inc.com/ (click on the translations link on the left). I know most folks won’t think of it in these terms, but this is folks working on their own time to make art from other cultures accessible to a broader audience, in the same way that other folks are fan-subbing movies, but with a much greater degree of technical difficulty. They’re figuring out how to bypass the copy protections and encryption built into the cartridges these games were published on, then they’re puzzling out the data structures that are used to store the game content so that they can then write back to those data structures with the translated text. It’s really amazing, not only in terms of this actually being done, but in terms of the scale of these efforts – literally dozens and dozens of games are being brought into other languages (chiefly english) this way.
M.A.M.E. is often held up as a poster child for efforts of this nature – if not for the efforts of these developers the vast majority of the games emulated by mame would have functionally (if not actually) have disappeared by now, and certainly they would all have vastly reduced audiences limiting folks’ ability to play them. These translation efforts are equally valuable in this regard, both in terms of broadening the exposure of a whole class of games and in terms of preserving them for future use.
Something needs to give in the current climate of copyright restrictions – all of these efforts would be technically illegal under the terms of the DMCA because of the restrictions on cracking encryption and other copy protection mechanisms built into the cartridges. Yet generally speaking these efforts harm no one and help everyone. I concede the copyright holders’ need to protect their assets, and they do occasionally produce new games based on these older titles, but these are the exception, not the norm, and is a drop in the bucket compared to the volume of games being released to new audiences due to these efforts.
Bottom line to me is as the subject says – code just wants to be free. It’s much better for all involved. I’m concerned about the next generation of consoles and these efforts, because things like M.A.M.E. have woken the publishers up to demand for this older game content, and xbox live on the 360 has proven that it at least seems financially workable, meaning the copyright holders are likely to start getting more restrictive and assertive when it comes to their older, languishing intellectual property. It bodes ill for a variety of activities like these translation and emulation efforts, yet again I assert that it’s in almost everyone’s interests to see that these kinds of projects are encouraged, not discouraged.
Franklin’s got nothing on this kite
Check out this incredibly cool scheme for power generation – an air rotor. Imagine a helium balloon the size of a large pickup truck and shaped something like a ridged watermelon, tethered in your backyard. The wind causes the balloon to rotate, which generates power that’s brought down to the ground via the tether. Aside from your neighbors maybe not digging the giant balloon in your yard, this seems like the coolest power generation scheme ever. Couple this with an air car and you’re living in that jetson’s future you always dreamed of.
Webcam finally live
Believe it or not I’ve been trying to get a webcam working with this site for its entire existence, more than 6 years now. I actually had one running briefly back when I was running this site using windows and IIS, but that experiment didn’t last long (the OS I mean), and neither did the webcam. The problem has been getting appropriate drivers for the webcam working – back in the days of serial cams, no one, and I mean no one, outside of uber uber geeks was working on that stuff, and of course the camera manufacturers paid no attention to producing drivers for Linux. These days lots more folks are producing drivers but it’s still an issue of needing pretty good linux chops and the right camera to get things going. Needless to say, as you can see from the link in the column to the right, I’ve finally managed it. Kudos go out to the following folks:
Christian Magnusson, for his almost working set of drivers for the USB Quickcam Messenger I have.
hugelmopf and the other contributors to the ubuntuforums.org thread that helped me tweak Christian’s script such that it would work on my ubuntu-based box.
Erik Bosrup, and Kathleen More for their javascript, which I used to get the cam pics onto my site.
The webcam pic will update every 3 minutes, though depending on how you’ve set your browser’s cache you may need to force-reload the page to get a new picture to show. If you catch me doing something embarrassing or amusing, send the picture along and I’ll put it in my image gallery.
Excellent windows sftp/ssh client
Bitvise Tunnelier is a free for personal use ssh/sftp client with a great interface. If you’re on windows and want a gui for your file transfers, this is definitely worth a look. It’s displaced putty on my pc as my client of choice.
Retail mame cabinet a bust…
…so now I want to build my own. Check out this excellent and well-reviewed set of instructions for building a mame cabinet. Not to expensive – leaving out the cpu and monitor my guess is this cost well under $300. This is going to be my spring project, though I will probably go with an lcd monitor and a small form factor pc to power it.
Manage bookmarks across multiple machines
The scenario – like me, you have multiple computers running multiple operating systems, and your bookmark collection is scattered across them. You’re looking for a better way to manage this. Check out foxcloud for one approach to this problem. It’s a firefox extension that can be configured to either store your bookmarks on the foxcloud servers, then synch to any browser that has the extension installed, or if you’re running your own server you can configure it to use ftp or DAV to store your bookmarks on your own server. This is a pretty slick solution and since you can run it on your own machine you can presumably get better performance than you’ll see with a shared server solution like del.icio.us (though now that they’re owned by yahoo this will probably improve) or storing them on the foxcloud server. It’s free and runs across all platforms firefox runs on. The only downside to it is it doesn’t support sftp.
Interesting approach to backup
What if you could get those tape drives off your network? Anyone who’s had to work with them knows how much of a pain in the rear end they are, and how tedious the process of managing the tape library is. An Indian company has come out with a really novel solution to backups called StoreGrid, which stores backup files on the unused disk capacity on your network. They’ve correctly observed that most computer users use only a fraction of their available drive space in the business environment and take advantage of that. It can be configured as a p2p application or in the traditional client-server backup model, and it’s cross platform -Linux, Mac and Windows are all supported. There’s even a free windows version you can check out that’s feature limited but still very useful.
They’re targeting this at the home and small business market and pricing it accordingly – $20 a seat. I think it’s brilliant. Not only is that pricing model lower than what you would pay for equivalent products, it removes a piece of the skilled labor required to manage your backup system and relieves a headache for support staff and small business owners. If I can get this running on my Linux box it’s going to become my new backup system, and this is well worth a look for folks who are running small networks in their homes. I’m willing to bet a large sum of money that none of you have an effective backup strategy on your home network, if you have one at all.
Excellent mac note taking app
So you’ve been reading me wax enthusiastic about wikis for the past couple of years, maybe you’ve played around with one, and you just don’t buy it as an organizational tool. Perhaps you’ll find TopXNotes more to your liking – it’s a traditional shareware ($20) macosx app. While it doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, it’s very well thought out, has a tiny footprint, a great gui, and a great templating system. Worth a look if you’re on a Mac and looking for something more sophisticated than stickies.
Another step towards the hydrogen economy
Danish researchers have found a way to store hydrogen as ammonia bound up in a tablet of sea salt – apply the catalyst and the hydrogen is released, apply more ammonia and the tablet is recharged. This is pretty slick stuff. You can read up about it on dtu.dk, a Danish technical university’s website.
[via digg]
Dave's Place/Metamusing 