Gallery: ViewSonic 10-inch dual boot ViewPad preview

Continue reading ViewSonic 10-inch dual boot ViewPad preview

ViewSonic 10-inch dual boot ViewPad preview originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Don’t steal. It’s a lesson that children are taught from the youngest age and a core principle in every society. The PSGroove sets out to follow this mantra in several ways. It is an open source implementation of the PSJailbreak hardware we covered a couple of weeks back. It’s difficult to find a definitive source of information on that hardware but many have speculated that the original device contains stolen code. Whether that’s true or not is moot as the PSGroove doesn’t include the backup manager program alleged to violate copyright.

The device is also aimed at running homebrew, and doesn’t natively allow one to play backups. It runs on a variety of AVR hardware, including the Teensy boards. If you have one of them, it’s just a matter of compiling the code and unlocking the potential of your PlayStation 3.

[Thanks Mark via PS3news]

Continue reading Commodore USA to relaunch Amiga brand with series of AROS desktops

Commodore USA to relaunch Amiga brand with series of AROS desktops originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

New York's water is some of the most delicious in the land, and it's filled with teeny-tiny shrimp.

They're called copepods. This is one a guy took photos of under a microscope after H&E staining the sample. They're 1-2 mm long, transparent, have two sets of antenna, and feast on mosquito larvae. What are they doing in the water supply? Well, New York's water is of such high quality that it isn't required by the EPA to mechanically filter its H2O, which means you get to gulp down these cute little guys with every glassful. Bottoms up!

Look what I found in my tap water! [Reddit via Gizmodo]

RELATED: NYC Water [Ourkosher.org]

Homebrew Cray-1A emulates the iconic supercomputer, to no useful purpose originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

A Hawaii man who sued a company over his crippling addiction to the computer game Lineage II has gone where few litigants have managed to go, defeating the end-user agreement that said he had no right to bring the case to begin with.…

Need to escape from a stalker or clean up your online identity before a potential or current employer finds out that you have a personality? Here's instructions on how to delete yourself from the internet, everything from erasing your profile from Facebook to "unGoogling" yourself.

How to Delete Yourself from the Internet [WikiHow]

Acton's version of Minas Tirith is one of his biggest and most detailed matchstick models yet, as he has constructed his rendition of the tremendously ancient city that Tolkien says "appears hewn from the rock of Mount Mindolluin" in the White Mountains. Tolkien's fortress city is said to tower 700 feet above the Pelennor Fields in Middle Earth's land of Gondor. Acton's matchstick version of the seven-level city was started in 2007 and took nearly three years when completed in February 2010 [GW's note: woops]. The Minas Tirith model contains hundreds of city buildings and is topped with the Citadel, the Tree of Gondor, and the White Tower of Ecthelion.

The FDA says the law that requires restaurant chains with more than 20 locations to post calorie counts also applies to other types of businesses, reports the Wall Street Journal. Specifically, movie theaters, airplanes, trains, food courts in grocery stores, and convenience stores are all considered chains and will soon have to start following the law. The agency hasn't made up its mind yet whether things like salad bars in grocery stores will have to fall in line. The FDA will announce official guidelines in December.

"Coming Soon: Theaters, Airplanes to Post Calories " [Wall Street Journal (subscription required)]

Moar graphs n charts dis wai!

Source: XKCD

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The larger banks were on-hand looking to swoon the upcoming Financial grads. Several representatives from a few big name manufacturing corporations were there to interview the Chemistry majors and a few IT firms were on the lookout for the soon-to-be CS grads, like Greg, to add to their ranks. However, amid the ocean of pamphlets and  suits there was one aerospace corporation with one particular position that caught Greg’s attention. The position that he applied and was ultimately hired for could be summed up in one sentence:

“You’ll be testing laser tag games for the military.”

A Dream Come True!...kind of

Actually, Greg’s official title was “QA Analyst for Battlefield Training Simulation Systems” but the idea of the system being a great big laser tag game really wasn’t all that far off the mark.

The way the existing setup worked was that sensors on a soldier’s body vest would detect a “hit” during the simulation, and would then set off an annoying alarm that could only be turned off with a special key. Once deactivated, the solder was ‘dead’ for the rest of the training scenario. It all worked, but one big problem with the whole setup was that, to the displeasure of many, a few enterprising soldiers managed to get their hands on and started selling tester keys (also known as “God Keys”) that allowed soldiers to resurrect themselves and get back into the battle.

After a number of years of trying to prevent soldiers from exploiting the system and a host of other technical headaches, the military was finally able to replace their system with something a little newer.

New features like the addition of GPS tracking units, RF data modules reporting hits and their locations and a slew of backend upgrades meant that military trainers could execute more extensive and complex training scenarios and, over time, recoup the costs because the new system was designed to rely on “off the shelf” 3rd party solutions, but first, these solutions would need to be vetted by QA guys like Greg.

Getting Stoned

Like any new hire, Greg was completely pumped and ready to contribute and shake things up his first week, but as time went by, Greg’s excitement dwindled when he found that doing QA analysis didn’t really involve shooting co-workers with laser guns, but instead was a lot of tedious, hard work with project managers and piled on bureaucracy for good measure.

In one particular situation they received a firmware update for one of the GPS systems being used in the Player Unit modules.

While trying to figure out why the latest hardware revision was failing immediately after the first test he noticed that the GPS receiver would send out a burst of garbage every few seconds.

Puzzled by this he checked and re-checked the connections and tried one of the spare units only to find the same result. Everything seemed like it should fine and the supplier swore there was nothing wrong with their system. Not able to let something like this go, Greg spent many late-night hours pouring through raw dumps of the results and along the way, he began to notice a pattern of the same Hex data repeating in the noise. As he painstakingly translated the hexadecimal into ASCII, he was genuinely surprised upon being greeted with a curious snippet of text.

Your PC is now Stoned!

After a quick search on the message, it all made sense. Somehow, the firmware upgrade for the GPS system had become infected with a disk boot sector virus, which ran perfectly fine on the embedded processor. Since this virus couldn't write itself to a disk, as there were no floppy drives on the GPS card, it instead sent itself out through the RS-232 port once every 5 seconds in hopes of infecting another computer.

Greg wrote up his analysis and forwarded it off to the vendor, who quickly (and quietly) issued another update to their firmware, identical to the last except without the virus.

Upon loading of the updated firmware, Greg noticed the difference immediately and was pleased to see that the vendor's "fix" resolved the "data issue" that he'd reported, however, there was a small catch to this tiny update. You see, preliminary testing for military equipment is a long and detailed process that makes the most draconian corporate processes look positively streamlined.  Also, since the magic keyword "virus" had been uttered, QA testing couldn't just pick up where it left off, and couldn't just be for the GPS module.  In fact, Greg had to start over at step 1 with added "anti-virus" steps add in for good measure just to be sure.

This is a trailer image for a new video game called Resplendent Annihilation. This is one of several game concepts I am considering for development.

This drawing illustrates a new method I am exploring for drawing abstract sculptures.

YWCA silver tea at governor's mansion my great-aunt? Ethel Spohn, center, next to the first lady.

My great-grandfather, William Spohn, 2nd from right at a law fraternity banquet welcoming some new members.

'who is the best among us'.

'shot at dream'

'frozen harmless'.

'please sing it to me' and 'secret in my mind'.

'composition on a mission'.

Melodius and the Soulforge: Act 1 Cover Art. The album is scheduled to be released 1/5/2010.

Shape people, first attempt to title and number my drawings where I add a person into a random-ish shape.

Scroll Illustration

Melodius Act 1, choir scene interior. "The song by the princess".

Melodius act 1, choir scene exterior. "The guest choir appearance of the princess". Consider whitby abbey-type for modern stype, scale compare.

Melodius act 1, caravan scene

Song cover art for my new song 'The Black Door' on the Melodius and the Soulforge soundtrack.

This black ink drawing depicts an abstracted dense forest with smoke or clouds, and a highly rendered waterfall.