Bushing has just released the BootMii beta 1!

What is that? It is a software that will be installed on the Wii boot2 (or as an additional IOS, if you want), enabling you to commit advanced modifications on your Wii, independently from the firmware version.

Moreover, it has been released as "HackMii installer"; you can choose to install:

• The Homebrew Channel
• DVDx
• The BootMii beta 1 (for now, i suggest to not install this, if you are not keen on this kind of stuff)

Now let's talk about the most interesting stuff - how to install the Homebrew Channel on your 4.0 firmware

First, you need the bannerbomb exploit, then, you have to download the HackMii installer.

Extract the aad1f_v102.zip file from bannerbomb on your SD card, then extract installer_beta1.elf from the Hackmii installer, renaming it in boot.dol, and placing in the root .

Then, follow the direction on how to run bannerbomb, and, when the installation menu will appear, select the Homebrew Channel.

Then, you might be interested to know how to run backups from USB or SD. (Probably it won't be possible to do it on 4.0+ firmwares, as the CIOS installation will fail)

Notes for who is willing to tryout the BootMii:

• It has 3 functions: direct loading of the Homebrew Channel, ROM backup, ARM and PPC code loading.
• For now, is not possible to uninstall the bootmii.
• They have tested it only on 10 console - they feel it is safe, but there can be some problems.
• Since bootmii is loaded before the main OS, is not possible to use the Wiimote, only GameCube controllers and front Wii buttons are supported.
• For now, the IOS version is kinda useless
• On newest Wii, the installation can be troublesome
• If you do the ROM backup, you might be notice that your Wii has a lot of damaged sectors, this is normal: it looks like Nintendo used cheap components - it can have up to 80 damaged sectors...

Owning a Windows Mobile mobile, is like a torture. As an owner of a Samsung i600 (Known in the USA as AT&T Blackjack - Windows Mobile Standard 6.0 - no touchscreen) and of a Sharp WS003 (Windows Mobile Professional 5.0 - with touchscreen), i can easily affirm that both standard and professional devices are NOT optimized for real-life usage. Very long loading times, useless on-screen-keyboard (unless you have the precision of a neurological surgeon), and "broken" software (I mean: it is not polished and refined). This is mainly because Microsoft gives to manufacturers a "raw" operating system, and they have to add, polish and refine functionalities at their own expenses. Photo management? You do it by yourself. MMS? Do it. Wi-fi and Bluetooth stack? We give you a basic one, if you want you can enhance it by yourself. Accelerometer, GPS and so on? They will be invisible to the default system, you have to write your own drivers. 

So, many manufacturers, has sold Microsoft "plain" operating system, like my old MiTAC Mio 8390, an awful mobile with a lot of bugs; while others, like Samsung, has splurged on third-party licences, to make look Windows Mobile more refined.

Nowadays, with the iPhone, Android and the very promising Palm Pre, the smartphone compatition is becoming very interesting, so Microsoft has finally decided to innovate his Windows Mobile, virtually unchanged since 1999. 

On the Mary Jo Foley's blog, there are the supposedly leaked specs of the new Windows Mobile 7 platform, codenamed "Pink phone". Those are the minimum requirements that every device must have, codenamed "Windows Mobile 7 chassis 1":

Core requirements:
Processor: ARM v6+, L2 Cache, VFP, Open GL ES 2.0 graphics HW (QCOM 8k, Nvidia AP15/16* and TI 3430 all meet spec)
Memory: 256MB+ DRAM, 1G+ Flash (at least 512MB fast flash – 5MB/s unbuffered read @4K block size)
Display:  WVGA (800×480) or FWVGA (854×480) 3.5” or greater diagonal
Touch: Multi-touch required
Battery: Sufficient to meet Days of Use LTK requirements.
Controls: Start, Back, Send and End are required (soft controls allowed as long as they are always present).

Peripherals:
Camera: 3MP+, flash optional, 2nd camera optional (VGA resolution sufficient)
GPS: aGPS required
Sensors required: Light Sensor, Compass (3 axis, 5 degrees, 100 Hz sample rate), Accelerometer (3 axis, 2mg resolution, 100 Hz sample rate)
USB: High speed required, 20 MB/s transfer rate.
BlueTooth: BT2.1 required, must run MSFT BT stack, CSR BlueCore6 or later recommended.
Wi-Fi: 802.11B/G required, must run MSFT Native Wi-Fi stack, Atheros 6002 or Broadcomm 4325 recommended.
Connectors: Micro USB and 3.5mm Audio required.

Options:
FM tuner:  If tuner HW is present it will be detected and supported by the Media application.
Haptics
SD Card (Micro SD recommended)
DPAD, qwerty or 12/20 key keyboards all optional

The new Wii exploit known as "bannerbomb" has just been released, and is ready from download from the official website!

This hack is compatible with almost every Wii out there, and using it is plainly straightforward, you just have to download the aad1f_v102.zip file, and extract it on an SD card. (The ZIP file contains a folder named PRIVATE, don't rename it or move the content in another position)

After this, you have to add an homebrew executable, named boot.elf or boot.bin, placed in the SD card root.

Then, go to the Wii settings, Data Management, Channels and then SD (top left). After doing this, insert the card.

Now, it should happen one of this 3 possibilities:

1. You are asked to "Load /boot.dol", select Yes, and the desired homebrew will be loaded
2. Otherwise, it can appear a dialog - complete the survey
3. Or, it can freeze. In this case, there are two reasons. One reason is that maybe you selected a wrong section; maybe you are in the SD menu (from the main menu), or in the saved games menu. Otherwise, as noticed by bushing, your Wii is one of those "strange" Wiis, so try to download another version, like aad20_v102.zip, aad22_v102.zip, aad1e_v102.zip or aad26_v102.zip

What homebrew we have to install?

Obviously the homebrew channel! Download it from the official website, choosing ".DOL (For usage with Twilight Hack & other booting methods)"

For extract the file, you might need 7-Zip (free) or Winrar (shareware)

Please note: if your firmware is the 4.0 version, you have to wait bootmii for installing the homebrew channel. There is another hard way to install it, by downgrading the firmware, but is risky and I don't recommend it as it can render your Wii useless

Have fun!

For any problems, drop a line on the forum (signup not required)

After installed the homebrew channel, you might be interested to know how to run backups from USB or SD card

According to Microsoft, from next week, they will release gradually 10 "fake updates" on Windows Update, to check about problems, and testing distribution in large scale

So, don't worry if you see all of this updates coming out so quickly… those are not real fixes

Look at this interesting comparison between various Disney animation movies:

That's impressing, the dancing scenes are practically identical between the movies. This is because of the usage of the Rotoscope to create  realistic animation. If nowadays, for making realistic movements in 3d animations, are used real actors that are wearing hundreds of sensors, at that age, the actors were filmed, and then every frame would be drawn by hand. Disney's Snow White is one of the first movies to use this technique.

Another example of rotoscoping is A-ha's Take on Me music video:

Video of the PSP 5.03 hack

Is about to be released the definitive hack for the PSP-2000 and PSP-3000 series

Just a few weeks ago, it has been found another bug in the TIFF library that allowed to unsigned code to be run.

If you have a PSP-1000 or a PSP-2000 series you can try it, with any firmware version (even unmodified ones), up to 5.03.

Downlod the file from qj.net, and, if you have a PSP-1000, copy phat.tiff in the photo folder; if you have a PSP-2000, copy slim.tiff. (don't copy both). Then, copy h.bin in the memory stick root, and go to open the image from the XMB

Until now, it was just a "proof of concept"... but the Team Typhoon is about to release an HEN (Homebrew ENabler) for ANY PSP version, PSP-3000 included. In their video, they are showing that is possible to edit the MAC address of the PSP, a permanent edit that requires kernel access.

Here is the video!

Finallly they did it!!! On the engineering Windows 7 blog, has been announced that the autorun for USB drives will be disabiled!!!

In fact, recently, USB drives viruses, has got an huge boost in diffusion:

In year 2001, Microsoft was provident, by disabling the direct autorun of executibles on usb drives, like is on CD. Unfortunately, too many hackers (and script kiddies) exploited the removabile drive autoplay menu by making a program named "Open folder to view files", with a folder icon. Like this:

Clicking on the first choice, we will be infected by the virus; only the second icon is the right one

For this reason, public computers are literally infested with dozens of such viruses, making mandatory the manual disable of the autorun, as instructed on the Microsoft website.

But finally, they disabled such exploit! The removable drive autoplay menu has been modified to only show programs that are already present on the host computer

Awesome!

From many months, most of the Internet is flooded with advertising from "TV Live Player". I am curious: it will be really possible to see TV in streaming for free with this software? I googled, but I only managed to find fake reviews on fake blogs, created just to make money on referral schemes  (This means: the blog author takes some cents for every visitor that will download the software)

Why nobody in the Internet has ever wrote a positive and true review on the well known Live Player?

So, I downloaded it and installed in Virtual PC... here are the available channels:

What a scam! The channels are unknown free channels! 

Why, if this software is free, their creators are paying thousands of dollars in advertising??? 

Easy: Favorit is bundled with the application! Favorit is an ad-ware that constantly resides in memory with a random name (to avoid identification, like some virus do), and will open an advertising pop-under when you do a search on Google. When you uninstall the useless Live Player, Favorit will not be uninstalled, this is their main idea!

But, some fake reviews said: Moreover, the streaming works perfectly because it has been tested against spyware and viruses.

No spyware? A software that displays contextual ads on search, it is a spyware! Maybe they are referring to "someone else's" spyware? 

To remove Favorit, you must remove it manually from the uninstall application menu:

So, if you are in the USA, the best way to watch TV on the Internet, is still hulu.com

Quietly, and only discovered by techcrunch, another piece of Internet history is vanishing...

Bought in 1999 for $2.87 billions by Yahoo, during the dot-com bubble, it was one of the first free web hosting websites in the Internet history.

Those websites were popular in the nineties. No PHP, ASP, scripts; just 15mb of space, and most of pages were created with Microsoft Frontpage... kinda nostalgic!

Gradually, they constantly tied to monetize, forcing advertising into the users' web-pages; in 1997 it was the 5th most popular website in the world, now is just ranked 150th (source) From the alexa data, we can also see that their ranking is drastically fallen this year:

That slash in popularity was inevitable: with the same 1994 offer, no PHP, no ASP (they was not yet invented - PHP is from 1995; ASP is from 1998 ), just 15 mb of space, that at that age, it should have seemed a lot of space, and pages flooded by forced advertisements... who will open a new account?

However, according to stimator.com, geocities is worth $231 mililions... not bad, right?

On the wayback machine you can see how it appeared in the 1996

On the official "engineering windows 7" blog, there is a really interesting post.

That post is about the handwriting recognition. Widely available from many years, it was not accurate nor user friendly enough to be really useful.

With Windows 7, they want to get radical change to the common idea of handwriting recognition! A video is better than 100 words:

Really impressing, it isn't true?

This technlogy also works for asian languages!

And you can also write complicated math equations! 

They also revamped the UI, making it more "finger friendly", and with "multi-touch" support. Also, the on-screen keyboard, is not as useless as the XP or Vista OSK and has been refined in the looking and in functionalities! It has an adaptive dictionary that will learn from the user documents.

So promising, right? I wanna buy a tablet pc!