Nelson Wong Life Blog

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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.

This Is What Lamps Look Like In Hell

Chances are that if you have $45,000 lying around to blow on a lamp, you probably did something shady to get it. So a Fall of the Dammed lamp depicting a Dante-esque decent into hell should be right up your alley. Thanks to a sophisticated laser sculpting process, owners can now enjoy an extremely expensive reminder that when the apocalypse hits, Satan will be there to kick their ass.

Product page

Aion’s Space Angel Battle Trailer

Atiz rolls out “first consumer book ripper,” the BookSnap

We’ve certainly seen plenty of book scanners before, but upstart Atiz has now rolled out what it claims to be the very first “consumer book ripper,” although with a price of $1,595, that title is certainly ripe for a challenge. Still, it looks like the system should get the paper-to-PDF conversion job done quite nicely, with a promised scanning rate of 500 pages per hour (although that partly depends on how fast you can flip the pages — no robot arm here, unfortunately). The “ripping” itself is done by a pair of digital cameras (not included), and it seems that only a select number of Canon cameras are compatible with the device (at least officially). Atiz also apparently offers a DIY model, but those looking for a more polished solution can order the ready-made BookSnap directly from the company right now.

Dell’s 30-inch 3008WFP display to rock DisplayPort

Samsung’s already claimed the title of first announced display to sport a DisplayPort connector, but it looks like Dell’s about to enter the game with an upcoming 30-inch panel, the 3008WFP. The update to the much-loved 3007WFP will apparently feature the same 2560 x 1600 resolution, but input options are vastly improved: in addition to that DisplayPort, you’re getting HDMI, VGA, component video, two DVI, S-Video, and composite. No word on any other improvements, but with that many inputs, we’re pretty certain you can find something to plug into this thing and be happy. Now if only Dell would hurry up and ship that sweet-looking 30-inch DisplayPort concept we saw a while back, we’d be all set.

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.

Tracking fingers with the Wii Remote

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!