Install Windows 7 On Your Netbook

May 16, 2009 by Eliot 47 Comments

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No one will ever accuse us of being Windows fanboys; we’re certainly fans of netbooks though (or anything cheap enough that we don’t care if we accidentally burn a hole through it). We’ve heard from quite a few friends that Windows 7 is actually an excellent operating system to run on a netbook and is a dream compared to XP. Gizmodo has compiled a guide to getting the release candidate on your lightweight machine. It’s available now and will work for free for a year. The image is 2.36GB which you need to dd onto a USB device. They recommend at least an 8GB drive, but anything smaller than 16GB and you’ll have to use Window’s compact utility to save space. Other than these space considerations, the install appears to be easy. Let us know about your experiences using Windows 7 on your netbook.

Dell Adamo Teardown

April 10, 2009 by Eliot 4 Comments

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TechRepublic and iFixit partnered to teardown Dell’s flagship notebook, the Adamo. The Adamo is positioned to compete directly with Apple’s MacBook Air. The Dell crams a lot of technology into a very thin frame and they use a clever locking system for the backplate to hide any screws. The built in battery has a longer life than the Air and an SSD comes stock. The team points out that the Windows logo is etched on the backside instead of the standard ugly stickers; apparently this took quite a bit of teeth-pulling to get approved. Check out the full photo gallery which includes the fetish packaging and comparison shots to the Air and Dell Mini 9.

Containing Conficker

March 30, 2009 by Eliot 50 Comments

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With all the noise about Conficker turning your computer into liquid hot magma on April 1st, there’s actually some positive news. Researchers from the HoneyNet Project have been following the worm since infections started in late 2008. They recently discovered an easy way to identify infected systems remotely. Conficker attempts to patch the MS08-067 vulnerability during infection. A flaw in the patch causes the machine to respond differently than both an unpatched system and an officially patched system. Using this knowledge, the team developed a proof of concept network scanner in python to find infected machines. You can find it in [Rich Mogull]’s initial post. [Dan Kaminisky] has packaged it as an EXE and has instructions for how to build the SVN version of Nmap, which includes the new signature. Other network scanner vendors are adding the code as well.

In conjunction with this detection code, the team has also released the whitepaper Know Your Enemy: Containing Conficker. It discusses ways to detect, contain, and remove Conficker. They’ve combined this with a tool release that covers Conficker’s dynamic domain generation among other things.

Windows 95 Running On An N95

February 24, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 43 Comments

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We’ve had this same hack submitted by two people, pointing to two different(translated) sources(translated) today. It seems with a recent version of dos box, you can load windows 3.1 or windows 95 on N95 or N85 devices. They’re both in polish, so they may be the same people posting in different places. If you can follow along, there seems to be sufficient information to do this yourself. We don’t know why you would want to, but you could. You can see a video of it in action after the break.

Continue reading “Windows 95 Running On An N95” →

Windows Drivers For PS3 Controllers

January 11, 2009 by Nick Caiello 38 Comments

Recently, a Japanese coder on the DCEmu Forums released Windows drivers for DualShock 3 controllers. While the drivers only support using the controllers over USB and not bluetooth, they do include force feedback and Sixaxis support. Included with the drivers is a configuration tool, and though it appears to be in Japanese there is some explanation of how to use it included in the forum post. We have not tested these personally, but you can try out the drivers for yourself by downloading them from the forum here.

[photo: William Hook]

Tbeta, Cross-platform Multitouch

November 28, 2008 by Eliot 5 Comments

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/2034557]

tbeta is a new tool developed by the NUI Group Community. tbeta acts as an image processing layer to take in image data and output tracking data for multitouch applications. Whether FTIR or DI, scratch built multitouch systems generate IR video streams that need to be processed to find fingertips. tbeta can take this or any arbitrary video stream and run it through a series of filters to generate the touch data. This data is sent as OSC TUIO, a standard protocol for touch events. Along with the camera and input switcher, tbeta also aids in system calibration. I works on Windows, OSX, and Linux. Have a look at the getting started guide for a better idea of how it works.

[via CDM]

INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY

October 22, 2008 by Eliot 46 Comments

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]