The Boschmans Account

Playing Mass Effect now

Woooo. It’ certainly captivating, making me loose a lot of sleeping hours.

A nice engaging storyline. Lots and lots of side quests, which let you beef up your armour, weapons and technique so the main quest runs easier.Â No rush except if you want to. Save when you want, almost, except for in combat (logical).

I do have a blue light effect which bothers me from time to time, but that’s the only big complaint I have.

That and the time spent of course. I feel guilty spending all those hours enjoying myself with this game 🙂

Tags Gaming, xbox

Gaming

Crackdown for the XBOX 360

Post author By alex
Post date March 16, 2008
No Comments on Crackdown for the XBOX 360

I’ve just finished Crackdown on the xbox 360, and I’ve been stunned by it.

The sheer joy of running faster than cars, jumping higher than small city buildings, creating extreme explosions and generally wreaking havoc on the gangs using a whole arsenal of weaponry while keeping a tongue-in-cheek approach is something worth treasuring this game for.

And this comes from somebody who does not like the Grand Theft Auto series ! Obviously, there are a lot of similarities to GTA, but for me the best thing about it was the superman feeling you get while playing. The sense of being damn near invulnerable or always getting closer to that was a real push to finish the game. The second best thing : the humor of the game, and the over-the-top melodramatic voice that accompanies you throughout the game.

Rating : recommended, even for dads !

Tags Gaming, xbox

Apple

If Cydia installer jumps back to Springboard – fix

Post author By alex
Post date March 15, 2008
No Comments on If Cydia installer jumps back to Springboard – fix

I recently updated the Cydia package installer, and something went wrong. It crashed back to Springboard while updating itself, and refused to start up again.

All is not lost however. Remember that Cydia is actually a graphical front-end to the iphone port of apt-get, so you can still install applications via the command line. So drop down into Terminal and issue the following command :

<quote>apt-get install cydia</quote>

If you receive a permission denied, you are working as user ‘mobile’ and you need to be user ‘root’ to do this. So before you type in the above command, type ‘su root’ and the root password and then the apt-get command.

Of course, if the problem is the install package itself, this will not solve it. I tried the above a few hours later, and there was already a new release waiting to be downloaded, and this fixed the problem.

Tags cydia, hacking, iphone

Blog News

installer.app 'main script execution failure' & moving your Applications

Post author By alex
Post date March 4, 2008
No Comments on installer.app 'main script execution failure' & moving your Applications

Firmware 1.1.4

If you have moved your Applications to your mobile directory (/private/var/mobile/) you might have problems with your installer.app permissions.

Howto move your applications from your small root partition :

cp -r /Applications /private/var/mobile
mv /Applications /Applications.old
ln -s /private/var/mobile/Applications /Applications

CD into your now-moved Applications folder and do the following :

chmod +s Installer.app/Installer
chown -R root:wheel Installer.app

This worked for me. YMMV, of course.

Tags hacking, iphone

Apple

Firmware 1.1.4 and Ziphone

Post author By alex
Post date March 3, 2008
No Comments on Firmware 1.1.4 and Ziphone

I don’t know if Apple is giving up, or if the hackers are getting better and better, but this is following the same hacking curve as that of the psp : the first few firmwares were really hard to hack, and then it got easier, and after it there was nothing to it (at least, at the time I stopped following the psp scene firmware hacks often occurred the same day or week.

Firmware 1.1.4 for the iPhone is available, and the hacks are available as well.

Upgrading is easy : for best results, restore to a clean 1.1.4 and then launch ziphone (I did not try independence). One click is enough to jailbreak, activate and unlock your phone, including Youtube ! So far, I have not found any bugs or workarounds that are needed.

Tags hacking, iphone

Blog News

Messing about with the options theme

Post author By alex
Post date February 27, 2008
No Comments on Messing about with the options theme

Oooooh. This looks so cool, with so many bells and whistles, I just have to play around with this.

Please close your eyes, we’ll be back to normal soon enough. Perhaps.

Update : back to my old theme, for now. I just love 3-columns themes.

Tags wordpress

Blog News

Upgrading WordPress to 2.3.3

Post author By alex
Post date February 27, 2008
No Comments on Upgrading WordPress to 2.3.3

We live in a fast-changing world. For the past few weeks, I had neglected to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, and this suddenly came back to bite me in the behind.

I was wondering why suddenly, after all these years when I no longer require commenters to sign up first as a user, I suddenly had 3 new users. What tipped me off was the third one, who named himself ‘Free P…rn’. Finally, I did what I should have done in the first place : I really read why the upgrade to 2.3.3 was necessary. In short, “a user can change blog posts of other users via an xml-rpc attack”. Ouch. So that was why I had 3 new users so suddenly.

So I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, deleted those 3 users, and am going to do some spot checks on my posts and comments to see if any have changed.

That’ll teach me to be complacent in this always-online, web-based world. Nowadays every spam-wannabe-king has a script that scours the internet for potential vulnerabilities and you just can’t upgrade whenever you feel like it.

Tags spam

TechScience Future

Selfcleaning clothes

This is amazing ! Researchers in Australia (woot!) have discovered a way to coat wool (and seemingly other keratin-based materials) with titanium dioxide crystals, in a way that, using sunlight, organic dirt is ‘burned’ and removed. This is dissimilar to other methods that repell water, oil or dirt in that the dirt is actually consumed by the reaction between the crystals and sunlight.

True, you need several hours of sunlight for the material to clean itself, so it is not instant, but still, this would be great : hang your clothes out in the sunshine, and they’ll clean themselves.Â Apparently it is harmless, though I would need to have proof of that before wearing it. And I’m wondering if you could coat your hair with it; self-cleaning hair, anyone ?

On a side note, a way to repel oil on a glassy surface like my iPhone touch screen would certainly help in keeping it smudge free !

Tags science

Apple

Youtube Activation on iPhone Firmware 1.1.3

Post author By alex
Post date February 25, 2008
4 Comments on Youtube Activation on iPhone Firmware 1.1.3

I’m struggling to activate Youtube on my iPhone, now running on firmware 1.1.3. When using firmware 1.1.3 this used to run just fine, but ever since I upgraded, it seems I no longer can use it.

I wasn’t exactly using it a lot, but it rankles me to have an application that is not working. So I’m looking for a fix.

So far, there seem to be some certificates that you can install from i.unlock.no. Just add this source link to your installer.app sources, and refresh. You can now see a folder unlock tools. However, the “Youtube activation” fix in there does not seem to help.

I’ll just need to continue looking, I’ll let you know when I find it.

[Update] It does work, with some extra mumbo jumbo. What worked for me was the following procedure. I don’t know if this you only part of these operations did the trick, or you need to do all of them. YMMV.

First of all, you need to go into settings, general and disable ‘Auto-Lock’ (this seems to be required !)
Connect it to iTunes via it’s cradle
Install the Youtube Activation fix found under unlock tools
If it wants to sync, let it sync with iTunes
After that, still cradled, reboot the iPhone

Afterwards, out of the cradle and on wireless, I tried Youtube and it worked.

[Update] This link has a guide for firmware 1.1.4

Tags iphone

Apple

iPhone installer.app ?

Seems like everybody is waiting for the SDK to come along… rumors are wild, and people are believing everything they read. Only to find out it’s a fake all along.

Meanwhile, the well of free iphone programs called installer.app has been dry for the last 3 days, which is starting to bother me.

Since I had the iphone, I’ve been a compulsive installer checker, it’s like smoking a cigaret first thing in the morning. I wake up to the alarm sound of my iPhone, turn off airplane mode, and the very first thing I do is update the sources on installer.app to see what’s new.

Then I get out of bed.

Let’s hope that we get a message out of Apple, either confirming or denying the SDK coming this month. Either way, things will start up again…

Tags iphone