We heard some fear mongering that Apple had released Apple TV firmware 2.3 to break Boxee and XBMC. It certainly was a side effect of the upgrade, but that doesn’t matter now since a new version of ATV USB Creator has been released to work with the new firmware. So, everything is essentially back to normal for the two media center programs.
Working as quick as ever, the iphone-dev team have updated the PwnageTool and QuickPwn to work with the new iPhone 2.2 firmware update. The trouble with the new firmware is that it updates the baseband of the phone, which could potentially undo any progress made towards an iPhone 3G unlock in the future. If you don’t care about that, you can use QuickPwn to jailbreak your phone after the upgrade, so you can run any app you want. If a future unlock is important to you, use the PwnageTool to strip the baseband update out of the firmware update.
[photo: edans]
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The iphone-dev team has officially stated “all that remains is implementation“. They’ve developed all the pieces they need to perform a software unlock for the iPhone 3G, now it’s just a matter of putting them together in user friendly fashion. They’ve managed to run unsigned code on the baseband, developed custom AT tools, and are now showing injection of a background task. They will combine all of these techniques to override the carrier lock baseband code. As usual, they warn against performing any official firmware updates to the phone.
[Matthew] sent in this slick project where he made a Mac pro Ultra Mini. He received a MacBook that had been killed by water. He took it apart, re-soldered some connections and was able to get enough of it working to be a decent multimedia machine for his tv. To make it look nicer, he found an external drive case that looks like a tiny Mac Pro. After a little bit of grinding, cutting, and zip tying he managed to get all the pieces inside the case. We’re always happy to see hardware salvaged, and to see it transformed to a fantastic looking useful machine is a bonus. Good job [Matthew].
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[Aaron Nelson] of Hijinks Inc. wrote up how he installed OSX on his HP TouchSmart IQ507. It looks and works like you would expect, save for a few things. The touchscreen works, but the calibration is so far off it’s useless. The most important things, like ethernet and the memory card reader, work fine. [Nelson]’s biggest frustration is that he has to disable the on board audio every time he logs in, so that the keyboard and mouse will be recognized. He is working on improvements, and would love to hear any suggestions you have.
As you can plainly see, we’re embracing International Caps Lock Day with full gusto. Go ahead, try it out in the comments. Caps lock is the cruise control for cool. Surprisingly, there are quite a few full time haters of the key running campaigns: CAPSoff and anticAPSLOCK actually united to form CAPSoff.org to further development of a caps lock free keyboard.
Once you’re tired of yelling at people online (like that’ll happen), you might attempt to do something useful with the key. In OSX, you can remap the caps lock key in System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Modifier Keys. You can make it an extra Command, Control, Option, or select No Action. If you want to map it to another key entirely, try a program like fKeys. You could map it to Esc to make Vim—THE BEST TEXT EDITOR EVER—easy to use. In Windows, try this handy guide from TechRepublic for remapping your keys.
If ease of use is not your goal, you could always make a random caps locker hardware dongle.
[photo: catcubed]
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Boxee, the social XBMC, is now easy to install on your Apple TV. We first covered Boxee in June when the alpha was released. It’s great to see how much the project has advanced to this point. To install on the Apple TV, you first download a USB “patchstick” creator. The program puts a mac partition on the drive and copies over the necessary files. You reboot the Apple TV with the stick installed and it patches in both Boxee and XBMC. When you restart the the device it will have two new menu items and the rest of the system will be intact. [Dave Mathews] shows the entire process in the video above. He notes that they’re currently not taking advantage of the GPU, so 1080p is a little too much for the system.
