[Manuel] has been playing around with [Johnny Lee]’s Wiimote head tracking code. He’s posted a preliminary port outlining the code in the Processing environment. It relies on darwiinremoteOSC so you won’t see this outside of OSX, but it should help you out if you’re trying to do this is in Processing on another platform.
[via Create Digital Motion]
[photo: nicolasnova]
[Cory Wright] shares a tip on how to reboot a system with a failed hard drive remotely. The magic SysRq key is a linux kernel feature that lets you perform a number of interesting operations. If you’re working on a remote system where the disk has failed, you won’t have access to the reboot or shutdown commands. You can issue keystrokes to the magic SysRq device in /proc though, so you can send a hard reboot directly to the kernel with no disk access required.
The Wikipedia entry includes a handy tip on how to properly restart a otherwise frozen machine. It should save you from having to fsck the next time around.
[photo: Joshua Davis]
We generally try to limit the number of extensions we install for security, performance, and because we use a lot of different systems. That’s not to say there aren’t a lot of interesting addons out there and Mozilla has recently announced the winners of their Extend Firefox 3 Contest. Lifehacker has a full rundown of each of the winners. Nothing really stands out in our eyes (although we might try Last.fm’s toolbar).
The three extensions we always end up installing are Firebug, Greasemonkey, and Flashblock. What are yours?
Torrentfreak offers up a few reasons why you should get a seedbox if you’re a bittorrent user who likes to share a lot of files. A seedbox is a dedicated private server used exclusively for torrent transfers. [sharky] discusses a few pros and makes a few claims that we think might be a little overblown. Although the seedbox will speed up your downloads and allow you to bypass ISP limits on your bandwith, we’re a little leery of the claims that the seedbox is completely safe and secure, or that it’ll protect you from getting sued by the RIAA or MPAA. As pointed out in the comments, paying for a dedicated hosting service and paying for cable is no different. Of course, the seedbox also costs money, so you’ll have to weigh whether you’d rather have speed or risk getting throttled by your ISP. Torrentfreak does list a few hosting solutions that may be reasonably priced.
[photo: nrkbeta]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZTJbsUcdeU&hl=en&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]
In honor of Firefox 3.0 download day, Waxy.org has posted the full Code Rush documentary. It spans March ’98 to April ’99, as the Mozilla team publishes the first source code and then the eventual AOL acquisition of Netscape. Embedded above is a short clip of [Jamie Zawinski] pushing the code live at 10AM on March 31, 1998. The hour documentary is well worth watching.
If you’re unsure about moving from FF2 to 3, MultiFireFox still works perfectly fine with the new release.
The Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000 is one of the handful of PDAs that Sharp has released preloaded with Linux. With it’s full qwerty keyboard it’s pretty easy to use any program intended for a full size Linux box. Reader [Sonicvanajr] decided to make a video of his new toy doing a few tricks. Namely, running Aircrack-ng (key to WEP cracking) and MDK2. He compiled both using the OpenEmbedded tools. If you are looking for one of these tiny Linux boxes you might wan to try for the older 5500 model which was sold in the states. The OpenZaurus project is the distro of choice even though it does have a surprisingly steep learning curve for being on a fixed hardware platform.
The folks from See-Security have gotten the Metasploit Framework running on a Linksys WRTSL54GS. They were inspired after seeing the Hacker Pimps pen-testing firmware, which we’ve covered before. The Metasploit Framework is used to develop and execute exploit code against target machines. The See-Security team ran into trouble getting Metasploit running due to RAM limitations. This particular model of router has a USB port so they were able to create swap space on a flash drive. The web interface worked as well once they set the bind address to the gateway IP. They’ve got all the steps you need to do this starting with OpenWRT.
[thanks muts and stillbourne]
