Nelson Wong Life Blog

PS3 firmware 2.30 is out

it’s April 15th which means one thing: taxes PS3 firmware 2.30 is due. Right on cue, Sony made good on the new PlayStation Store and DTS-HD Master Audio sound reproduction sure to make audiophile-types lean in for a listen. The Store is acting a bit sluggish at the moment, something that’s likely to get sorted once the rolling update is completed. Nevertheless, users are claiming easier navigation and richer experience. So whatcha looking at — get out of here kid, there’s on-line updating to be done.

Lawsuit forces Microsoft to stay mum about Xbox Live status

It looks like we won’t be seeing another barrage of Xbox Live status updates like we saw in the past few weeks anytime soon, at least as long as that little lawsuit is going on down in Texas. That unfortunate word comes from none other than Major Nelson, who said in his podcast that Microsoft can no longer update gamers on the situation due to “legal issues.” Those constraints apparently even extend as far as the Major’s Twitter page, leaving gamers in the dark in the event of yet another Xbox Live outage. In case you missed it, the lawsuit in Texas was filed after the outage in December by three disgruntled gamers, who claim that Microsoft knew activity would be at a peak during that time of year but “failed to provide adequate access and service to Xbox Live and its subscribers.” No word on any progress in that suit just yet, but we’re guessing that Microsoft and Xbox users alike are hoping it gets wrapped up as soon as possible.

Holiday Season Return Policies

We know. You asked Santa for the greatest gift of all time, but he got you a Zune instead. No problem, because you can return it, just don’t miss those deadlines.

In today’s Frankenfight, we stack the return policies of major retailers including Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Circuit City and Amazon in one huge pile for you to learn, live and love. While no major reviewers are chiming in with their opinions, hopefully our research will save you at least half a headache (because there is nothing we can do about your kid who is still crying about not getting a Wii).

Is one return policy inherently better than the rest? Sure, Wal-Mart…especially if you happen to “lose” your receipt. But the real lesson here is, don’t open electronics that you plan on returning. Because it will probably cost you.

Use Your iPhone Connect to the Internet

It’s great that your iPhone has a data plan and a killer mobile browser, but when you’re sitting at the airport waiting to catch a plane with your laptop right next to you, wouldn’t it be nice to use your full-on desktop browser? Out of the box your iPhone won’t allow you to tether your EDGE data connection to another computer wirelessly, but with a little ingenuity on your part you’ll be browsing the net on your laptop through your iPhone’s data service in no time.

NOTE: You’re probably asking yourself: “Isn’t the EDGE data network that the iPhone uses SLOW?” Well, yes it is. But if you’re at all like me, sometimes a slow full-screen browsing session is better than slow browsing on the small screen.

I’ve only tested this method on my MacBook Pro, but since SSH is platform independent, this should be a workable solution on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

What You’ll Need

For this guide, you’ll need:

• A computer with Wi-Fi capable of creating an ad-hoc computer-to-computer connection (yours is)
• A jailbroken iPhone (If you don’t know how to jailbreak your iPhone, the easiest way is to make sure you’re running 1.1.1 firmware and then start here.
• The OpenSSH iPhone application (I’ll show you how to get this below)
• An SSH client on the computer you’re using. If you’re on a Mac or *nix machine, you should be fine. Windows users should check out how to install OpenSHH with Cygwin.

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Microsoft begins new round of Xbox Live bans

Heads up, Xbox 360 tinkerers — it appears that Microsoft is bringing out the ban hammer once again. According to a thread on an Xbox-Scene forum, users are having their Live wrists slapped left, right, and center due to “bad discs” (i.e., non 1:1 copies of games). Initially, the problem seemed to be modified DVD firmware, but it now appears the cause is due to game data that isn’t properly copied, or has been “touched” in some manner. Keep in mind, these are console bans, as opposed to Live account bans, which is a minor amount of good news. The forums are abuzz with profane indictments of Microsoft and calls for heads on platters (okay, it’s not that bad) — but mostly everyone is just waiting to see where the next hit will come from. You’ve been warned, folks.

We don’t have a lot of information yet, but it looks like Microsoft started a new wave of bans against modified DVD firmwares or DVD+/-R DL discs. You can’t Bitset DVD-R discs to a DVD-ROM booktype!

Several users on the Xbox Scene forums and on IRC report their Xbox 360 has been banned from LIVE today. We get reports of both Toshiba-Samsung and Hitachi-LG drives banned with all types of different firmwares (with both Xtreme and iXtreme).

No reports of banned BenQ drives yet (but few of these drives have been flashed yet).
We don’t know yet if Microsoft is detecting the modified firmware or the discs (maybe only with a specific game(s)?).

If you have the ‘Z Code’ 8015-190D it means you are banned.

If your console is banned or if you have been playing on LIVE today with modified FW without getting banned, report you findings in this thread.

So until we have more info we HIGHLY suggest you don’t log in to Xbox LIVE and don’t play any games from DVD+/-R DL (even offline, just incase MS flags something) if you have a flashed DVD drive.

AFP Hack Gives Read/Write Access to iPhone, iPod Touch

An iPhone hacker, known as Core, has managed to finalize an AppleTalk Filing Protocol hack that enables full read/write access to either an iPhone, or iPod touch, via Finder. Unfortunately, the work has just been completed, and as yet, it is not available via Installer.app. If you fancy trying it manually, you can find the complete instructions after the jump, courtesy of the great guys at TUAW.

To install by hand, use sftp to copy the tar file into /opt/iphone. Extract the archive on your iPhone or touch–the tar archive program is part of the BSD program; use tar xvf name-of-archive.tar–and run /opt/iphone/afp/startserver.sh &. The ampersand lets the program run in the background. (You will need to restart it after reboots.)
Once installed and running, go to Finder. Choose Go > Connect To Server, and enter the afp address for your iPhone, in my case afp://192.168.0.111. Just use the afp:// prefix with the local IP address of your iPhone. Enter your user id (root) and password (alpine) and your iPhone or iPod appears in the sources list for your Finder windows… To add new applications, just drop them into the Applications folder. To back-up your personal data, just copy /var/root/Library

To get cracking, hit the link to download the necessary file. Be sure to opt for the newer package, named afpd.with.registered.users.tgz. If you are not willing to get messing all up inside your iPhone or touch, wait a little while longer, as this awesomeness is bound to appear in Installer.app in the not too distant future. If you do give it a try, be sure to let us know how you get on.

How to enable Time Machine on unsupported volumes

Although we’ve been mostly happy with Leopard, one of the features we were most looking forward to was the ability to set Time Machine to use a NAS volume like Airport Disk, thus making laptop backups wireless and sexy (well, sort of sexy) instead of wired and cumbersome. Sadly, Apple cut the feature at the last minute, but as with all things OS X, nirvana is usually just a defaults write command away, and Volker Weber has got it sorted for us. Just pop open a terminal window and enter:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

and you should be able to select NAS volumes in the Time Machine prefs. Of course, you should only re-enable this for giggles — we don’t know why Apple turned it off to begin with, and it could very well be full of bugs and hose your data. Considering some of the other glitches that have cropped up in Time Machine, we’d actually recommend staying well away from this one, but if you’re desperate, by all means — go for it and let us know how it works in comments!

Google and HTC’s “Dream” phone prototype semi-revealed

a Google-sponsored phone OS in the way of Android is pretty great news for mobile phone land, but what if your really had your heart set on some Google hardware this Monday morning? Well take heart, because Forbes has the skinny on an HTC device labeled “Dream,” (most likely not pictured above) which could very well be oft-rumored hardware of legend, and could also be hitting the market as early as next year. Apparently the phone is one of roughly five prototypes that Google had built to demonstrate the Open Handset Alliance software to potential members, and HTC’s Peter Chou says in the two years it’s been working on OHA designs, “this is the best one we’ve seen.” The device itself, which measures about 3 x 5-inches, sports a touchscreen, navigational controls at the base, and a full swivel out keyboard. When swiveled the screen goes from portrait to landscape mode, but unfortunately that’s the limit of info on the actual hardware. The software apparently has “time-sensitive” touch controls that expands your area control the longer you touch. Icons for your most important apps — which are apparently email, text documents, and YouTube — are lined up across the top of the screen. There’s also some fancy stuff under the hood to keep an ongoing browser session open to speed launch times, and the browser downloads large files in stages to speed delivery. HTC is considering a commercial version of the phone, which we could be seeing as soon as the second half of 2008.

Microsoft says goodbye to the social

AdAge has a piece profiling the “180″ Microsoft made in marketing the Zune; many have already seen this year’s far less, shall we say, esoteric ads, but few (including us) realized the new hardware’s marketing onslaught was the result of Microsoft’s doubling — even quadrupling — its Zune ad budget, switching advertising firms (which resulted in those trippy Flash sites), and, oh yeah, killing off “the social”. Sorry obsessive Zune guy, we hate to be the bearers of bad news but the truth can be hidden no longer. “You make it you” is officially confirmed as the new brand tagline and the ever-so-slightly-less-grammatically-correct “Welcome to the social” is deader than a WiFi-shared song after three plays. So now that we don’t have to worry about the ever-lingering peer pressure to get social, does that mean we can loosen up a little and start to proudly love our still-virginal Zunes just as they are?

is real? Asus Apple Tablet PC

Crave hangs with people in high places — that’s how we get exclusives and free food. A few weeks ago we were having a civilised dinner with our friends at Asus and angling for cool stories when we were told in a very hushed manner: “Asus is helping Apple build a Tablet PC.”

We’re tempted to ignore all Apple rumours because there’s just so many of them, but this rings true because Asus is Apple’s contract manufacturer. It’s one of the companies responsible for building the iBooks, PowerBooks and MacBooks of this world, so when their guys tell us they’re building an Apple Tablet, we believe them.

We checked back with our source at Asus on a different day and they confirmed that the Apple Tablet will not be based on existing Asus designs such as the R1. It will come from a completely new blueprint, possibly based on the patent Apple filed back in May 2005. We’re guessing it’ll be based on Intel Core architecture, a tweaked version of Leopard, and have all the multi-touch, CoverFlow goodness we’ve seen in the iPhone and iPod touch.

All this begs the question: Can Apple turn the Tablet PC into a success when previous attempts have failed? The short answer is ‘yes’. Any company that can make a mobile phone with no buttons, no picture messaging, slow Web access and no video capture into the most desirable phone on the planet can easily make tablets popular.

Sadly, we’ve no word on when we can expect the Apple Tablet PC, nor what the final specs will be, but you can bet your bottom dollar it’s being built as you read this. Mac fanboys rejoice.