We have run many EeePC hacks before. Like most people, what we really want is a Mac netbook. The folks over at Wired have written up some nice instructions to help you run OSX on your EeePC. The process is a little involved, so don’t expect to just pop in a disk and be home free. There are a few setbacks though. No flash support, hardware F-keys don’t work (volume, brightness, etc), and ethernet doesn’t work. WiFi works but only with a third party driver/app.
[via Gizmodo]
UPDATE: His personal site has been updated.
It was with great sadness that we learned of [Mark Hoekstra]’s death this morning. Earlier this week, the 34 year old hacker suffered a heart attack while riding his bicycle and was admitted to the hospital in a coma. [Markie] has been a Hack a Day commenter for much of our existence and a project contributor for nearly as long. It started simply with things like his bright green Hack a Day iPod sock and a hand crank iPod charger. He did an excellent job documenting his projects; many people had built IR cameras, but none were nearly as thorough as him. He also enjoyed sharing his love for obsolete hardware with the community. He built a wireless eMate, turned two Mac SE/30’s into audio viualizers, and wired shutter glasses to an old SGI.
It was always a treat to hear about [Mark]’s latest project and he’ll be missed greatly.
[photo: Bram Belloni]
We spotted an interesting app in Gizmodo’s iPhone roundup for the week. iNap is designed for commuters that don’t want to miss their train stop. Just pick any location you can find on Google Maps, set the distance for the alert radius and the alarm tone, and it’s ready. It’s a great app and only costs $1.
The app actually reminds us of the first time we heard about Bug Labs. The modular gadget building system was described to us as a way to build unconventional consumer electronics. They specifically talked about one person that built an alarm clock with GPS because he kept falling the asleep on the train. Thanks to convergence we’re seeing a lot of devices expand from their initial intentions, whether it’s an iPhone GPS alarm clock or an N95 being used auto upload your bike ride to Flickr.
With today’s release of Security Update 2008-006 Apple has finally addressed this summer’s DNS bug. In their previous update they fixed BIND, but that only affects people running servers. Now, they’ve updated mDNSResponder. Clients are no longer susceptible to DNS cache poisoning attacks thanks to the inclusion of source port randomization.
The Security Update addresses some other interesting bugs. Time Machine was saving sensitive logs without using the proper permissions, so any user could view them.
[photo: edans]
Apparently, Apple has decided that extending DRM to your Nike accessories will keep hackers at bay. Sick of people cutting the sensors out of their Nike shoes for use on other apparell, they have applied for a patent. Ever noticed the warning that it’s illegal to pull the tag off of a mattress? Did that stop you?
[via Slashdot]
This is unfortunately another story we missed out on while we were trying to keep things from burning down. We told you that [Jonathan Zdziarski] was going to demonstrate iPhone lock code bypassing in a webcast. The real surprise came when he pointed out that the iPhone takes a screenshot every time you use the home button. It does this so it can do the scaling animation. The image files are presumably deleted immediately, but as we’ve seen before it’s nearly impossible to guarantee deletion on a solid state device. There’s currently no way to disable this behavior. So, even privacy conscious people have no way to prevent their iPhone from filling up storage with screenshots of all their text message, email, and browsing activities. Hopefully Apple will address this problem just like they did with the previous secure erase issue. O’Reilly promises to publish the full webcast soon.
[via Gizmodo]
The iphone-dev team seems to still be on top of their game. Only a day after the iPhone 2.1 firmware update was released, they’ve updated both the PwnageTool and QuickPwn to deal with the release. They haven’t begun work on the iPod Touch 2G yet, since no one on the team has one yet.
We tend to agree with Engadget; jailbreaking is becoming less and less important to casual users. Now average users can buy an iPhone in their own country and run apps from the official store. A much different place than we were only a year ago. We know most of our audience are power users though and definitely want out of Apple’s walled garden, but that’s only a small percentage of iPhone users.
