Tag: General Hardware

I Like This Judge

Some poor schmuck is being sent through the legal wringer because it made a side business of modifying Xbox 360 systems. Well the judge in the case isn’t too happy with the government agents who are bring the case out and went on a 30 minute rant against the actions of the government in this case. Here’s my favorite part:

Among the judge’s host of complaints against the government was his alarm that prosecutors would put on two witnesses who may have broken the law.

One is Entertainment Software Association investigator Tony Rosario, who secretly video-recorded defendant Matthew Crippen allegedly performing the Xbox mod in Crippen’s Los Angeles suburban house. The defense argues that making the recording violates California privacy law. The other witness is Microsoft security employee Ken McGrail, who analyzed the two consoles Crippen allegedly altered. McGrail admitted that he himself had modded Xboxes in college.

“Maybe two of the four government witnesses committed crimes,” the judge said from the bench. “I think it is relevant and the jury is going to hear about it –- both crimes.”

The government had fought to keep the witness conduct a secret from the jury.

So the actions of two witnesses may have been criminal and the government wanted to conceal that from the jury. Are they any people remaining who question my distaste of the government?

What I find most interesting is the fact this case exists at all. I understand the actions of the man being prosecuted were in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act but frankly that piece of legislation itself is unlawful. If I purchase a piece of hardware and want to pay somebody to modify it that’s my business, not the governments. My Xbox 360 is mine, I own it. Microsoft succeeded all rights to it upon my legal purchase of the device.

This is where many people will point out the license agreement that appears on the screen when you first power on the Xbox. Guess what? I never agreed to that before purchase and have no recourse should I disagree with the license. Would it be OK if I tossed in a license agreement to a car I sold that only became visible after somebody had purchased the car? “Oh hey I see you’re starting this car for the first time, just an FYI but doing so you agree to give me all the money in your bank account. K THANX BAI!”

Rhino Review

Thanks to The Firearm Blog I found a link to review of the new Chiappa Rhino revolver. For those of you who haven’t heard of it the Rhino is a new revolver with a rare feature, it fires from the bottom cylinder instead of the top one. It’s an interesting design and did garner a favorable review from American Rifleman. Of course come to think about it I don’t think I’ve seen an unfavorable review in American Rifleman so your mileage may vary.

I really want to try one of these things out with a full .357 magnum load. It would be interesting to see how much lowering the barrel on a revolver reduces the muzzle climb.

USB is Evil

Most people realize that Firewire has much better sustained read and write speeds when compared to USB but I’ve never gone so far as to say USB is the Devil. Then again I’m not an Evangelical Christian in Brazil:

The evangelical cult “Paz do Senhor Amado” (“Peace of the beloved Lord”) in the interior of Brazil forbids its followers to use any USB technology by contending that it uses a symbol that shows sympathy for the devil.

According to its founder, the “Apostle” Welder Saldanha says that this is just another symbol of Satan, which is always present in all Christian homes.

“The symbol of that name (a name which he doesn’t even like to pronounce) is a trident, which is used to torture souls that go to hell. Use only a symbol of those shows that all users of that vile technology are actually worshipers of Satan” – explains the” Apostle”.

I actually lack any smart ass remark that could add to the hilarity of that statement.

How Not to Do Something

A lot of people complain about the grip of Glock pistols. Because the grip is an unmodifiable part of the gun the only way to change it is through destruction of the grip. Some people can do a half way decent job of modifying Glock grips while others do not. Presented in this link is an example of how not to modify your Glock’s grip.

Getting a Esduino Communicating with Mac OS X

Just a word of warning everybody, we are going down super duper mega geek territory here. If you’re not sure what a Esduino is you’ll not give two shits about this post. This is mostly a guide for myself to serve as a reminder of how to get this thing running again should I forget. Since the information has potential to be useful to others out there I figured I post it up on a public page.

I’m not going to waste time explaining what an Esduino is beyond it being a Arduino board that uses a 9S12 microcontroller as its core. If you don’t know what it is chances are this guide is useless to you.

The Esduino by Technologicalarts comes with a FT232R USB to serial port converter built in. There are no built in drivers for this chip in Mac OS X thus you need to install them. The drivers can be found here (for Windows, Mac, and Linux). The installation guides can be found here. Summed up all you need to down is download the appropriated driver (I used the virtual COM port driver instead of the D2XX driver as I’m used to working with virtual COM ports) and install it.

Once the driver is installed you can plug your Esduino into one of your USB ports. You’ll notice nothing happened, that’s normal. In truth something did happen though, two new files were created in your /dev directory (if you’re unfamiliar with the UNIX underpinnings of OS X just ignore this part, it’s really irrelevant). The two new files will be called /dev/cu.usbserial-xxxxxxxx and /dev/tty.usbserial-xxxxxxxx with the xxxxxxxx being the serial number of the device you plugged in. The Esduino will also appear in the System Profiler under USB. I’ll make a quick note that those two files in your /dev directory will only appear when you plug the Esduino in, if you don’t see them you’re device probably isn’t plugged in.

Now your computer is communicating with the Esduino board, what’s next? Well you need to interact with it. All Esduino boards come pre-loaded with an application. This application can be interacted with through the virtual COM port. First before you begin flip the switch on the microcontroller into the run position. In order to communicate with the virtual COM port I found a good program called CoolTerm. Open CoolTerm and open the options dialog (click on the toolbar button labeled Options). Under the Serial Port Options group select usbserial-xxxxxxxx from the port combo box and then click the OK button. Now that you’re back to the main window click the Connect button on the tool bar and press the enter key. A text menu should appear and you’re up and running.

Yes this is the kind of thing I do for fun. See how messed up I am?

Coliseum Gun Show

Well there was a gun show at the Coliseum at the State Fair Grounds in St. Paul this weekend. Due to events I got roped into I was only able to make it for the last couple hours on Sunday. Needless to say some people were already packing up so I didn’t get a chance to see a heck of a lot of things.

I did get to hold and mess with a FN SCAR though. After holding it, playing with the controls, and getting a general feel of the gun I question what makes it worth $2,700.00 (price tag the seller had on it). The gun just screams pointless retrofit of the AR-15 platform. My main complain is the height at which the optics are mounted. There is an entire assembly above the SCAR’s bolt that appears to be solely for the ambidextrous charging handle. The mounted iron sights also set high above the top rail which made it very difficult for me to get a good cheek weld and see through the sights (my head was sitting about a inch too low when properly welded to the stock). All this weight above the bolt also made the gun feel pretty top heavy to me.

Needless to say I wasn’t impressed. When I say I wasn’t impressed I don’t mean I wasn’t impressed for the value dollar-wise to what you get. I wasn’t impressed period. Even if the SCAR was only $800.00 I’d chose a traditional AR-15 over it just for the fact that I don’t like the feel of the SCAR at all. Yes it has hacked together ambidextrous controls but they feel exactly like that, hacked together.

I guess I’ll never manage to be an elite super cool mall ninja operator. Hell I still think the M-14 and AK-47 are pretty awesome guns.

There isn’t much I can comment on in regards to the rest of the gun show simply due to the fact I wasn’t able to make it there until a couple of hours before closing. I’m sure there was some cool stuff there that was all bought up before my arrival.

NOOKcolor

I guess I didn’t mention this day of release but Barnes and Nobel have released the newest version of their Nook (Nook, nook, NOOK, I’m not sure what the fuck the proper capitalization is for this product) e-reader, the NOOKcolor (capitalized as it appears on their site).

It should be obvious why I didn’t get all excited and post this thing day of release, it’s a yawner. Basically it’s an Android tablet. Yup, that’s really it. It has absolutely no e-ink display instead opting for a single touchscreen LCD. So it’s an lighter, smaller, and cheaper iPad running Android (you can’t actually access any of the sweet Android goodness at this point from my understanding).

Frankly this thing is a huge let down. Although I assumed the NoOkCoLoR (now I’m just going to fuck with the name) would simply be an e-reader with an LCD screen I was secretly hoping it would jump ahead of the Kindle by using a color e-ink display. Apparently Barnes and Nobel decided to take the low road instead and just simply make a tablet which there are only about a million of coming out at the moment.

Android Voice Commands

I think I’ve found a killer feature in the Android operating system, voice commands. First let me clarify that Android is the first operating system I’ve ever used that has voice recognition that actually works. I’d say the voice recognition software on Android is accurate with what I say roughly 90% of the time. Yes I realize 10% rate of failure is pretty big but honestly for voice recognition it’s pretty friggin’ phenomenal.

Voice commands are activated on the Evo 4G by holding down the search button. When held down a little dialog box will appear asking you to speak your command and the phone will act from there. My two favorite commands are “direction to” and “send text.” If you say, “direction to 1234 South North Street Podunk Minnesota” the phone will open Google Maps and plot directions from your current location to 1234 South North Street Podunk, MN.

The “send text” command works in the same fashion. When you say, “send text to Fictional Person I’ll be there in five minutes period” the phone will display a text message to Fiction Person that says, “I’ll be there in five minutes.” All you have to do after that is tap the send button and away it goes.

That’s one thing you have to realize, punctuation must be spoken. The speech recognition can’t predict when you want to add a period or question mark so you have to speak them. It’s kind of a pain in you want the work period written out but it works correctly nine times out of ten.

I’m simply blown away by the voice command feature and how well it works.