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New Orleans: Inside Story
from the word-up dept.
2005.9.2 10.29am | by BigglesZX

To anyone who has been following the terrible events in New Orleans, this will make both interesting and concerning reading. Since Hurricane Katrina hit the area, its effects have been nothing less than catastrophic, but now the winds have receded, the real problem is a human one.

Michael Barnett, a.k.a. The Interdictor, works for DirectNIC, a large domain hosting company operating out of New Orleans. He and his crew have been holed up in their 9th-floor office suite, tasked with keeping the tens of thousands of hosted domains online. The building the houses their data centre and office has its own diesel generators, and as of today their Internet links are still up, and they are still online. His blog, now become the "Survival of New Orleans blog", documents the things he has done and witnessed since the hurricane's impact.

From his office he and his crew broadcasts a webcam feed (URL is a mirror and subject to change) and takes pictures of what he can see below - looting, military and police action, and the progress of the floodwaters. And a read of his blog shows things to be a lot worse than the mainstream media is reporting.

He reports police officers carrying out looting of SUVs, ATMs and guns; emergency supplies being dropped off bridges by the National Guard, destroying most of them in the process; reports of armed civilians surrounding police officers - one police source is quoted as saying,

"The people in the city are shooting at the police. They're upset that they're not getting help quickly enough. The firemen keep calling because they're under fire. He doesn't understand why the people are shooting at the rescuers. Here it is 5 days ago the Mayor said get out of town and nobody went and now they're pissed."

As he puts it,

"In case anyone in national security is reading this, get the word to President Bush that we need the military in here NOW. The Active Duty Armed Forces. Mr. President, we are losing this city. I don't care what you're hearing on the news. The city is being lost. It is the law of the jungle down here. The command and control structure here is barely functioning. I'm not sure it's anyone's fault -- I'm not sure it could be any other way at this point. We need the kind of logistical support and infrastructure only the Active Duty military can provide. The hospitals are in dire straights. The police barely have any capabilities at this point. The National Guard is doing their best, but the situation is not being contained. I'm here to help in anyway I can, but my capabilities are limited and dropping. Please get the military here to maintain order before this city is lost."

The blog's RSS feed is here.
Apparently it's also possible to listen to the National Guard radio channel with Winamp here.

Update: I've been trying a bunch of different feeds and this is the first I've found that works - it's the Louisiana State Police radio channel in Baton Rouge, the one currently being transcribed on #interdictor-scanner (with occasional crosstalk on #interdictor-scanner2) on irc.freenode.net. Other feeds are listed here.

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Researchers Create Radio Controlled Humans
from the my-command-is-your-wish dept. | 2005.8.7 11.45am | by BigglesZX

Reported by Forbes: Debuted at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Los Angeles, researchers have developed a gadget designed to exploit the effects of Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation.

As the story explains, when a weak electrical pulse is delivered to the mastoid behind your ear, your body responds by shifting your balance towards it. If the current is strong enough, it not only throws you off balance, but alters the course of your movement.

Check out the hilarious video that accompanies the story.

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Hotel Hacking
from the bad-karma-hotel dept. | 2005.7.31 5.33pm | by BigglesZX

This Wired article showed up on Slashdot this morning - about Adam Laurie, chief security officer of London security and networking firm ALD. Using a laptop, infrared transmitter and TV tuner, Laurie was able to access premium hotel TV content for free, as well as a raft of other goodies that he shouldn't have been able to look at. Yay.

"Laurie first discovered the vulnerability when he was "mucking about with hotel TVs to get the porn channel without paying for it." He was able to bypass TV billing menus by using his laptop to tune in to the premium content being broadcast from backend systems. He didn't have to pay for the content, because the systems didn't know he was watching it."

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The First Open-Source Beer
from the drrrrrrrrrink dept. | 2005.7.18 12.04pm | by BigglesZX

Back after a week's holiday, I bring happy news of beeeeer.

Wired ran this article earlier today about recent events in the open-source world - a group of students who have produced what they claim is the first open-source beer.

The beer isn't "free" in monetary terms, but the recipe for brewing it has been released under the Creative Commons license. This means that anyone can use the recipe as they please - the only catch is that they must credit the original authors if they make changes to the recipe, and release those changes under a similar license.

This licensing structure has been used in the Open Source Software community for some time, but this is possibly the first time it has been applied to an "analog" object like a beer recipe.

The beer is also fairly unique in that it contains guarana - enough to be equivalent to 35 milligrammes of caffiene. The group hope this will counter the drowsy effects of the 6% alcohol level.

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Building a "Walltop" Electronic Picture Frame
from the let-'em-hang dept. | 2005.6.21 5.05pm | by BigglesZX

An old laptop needn't be a useless lump of junk - it can be turned into a digital picture frame!

This article from GRYNX appeared earlier today on Slashdot, and explains step-by-step how the author turned an old Dell Latitude into an elite picture frame, using the freeware IrfanView package to provide slideshows. The laptop didn't have a hard disk, so the cunning fellow mounted a network share over his wireless network to provide the images.

Total cost? Apparently about �21.

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PC World's 100 Best Products of 2005
from the money-no-object dept. | 2005.6.11 11.47am | by BigglesZX

PC World US has, perhaps a little prematurely, released its definitive list of The 100 Best Products of 2005.

Straight in at the deep end, the Number One product is... Mozilla Firefox. Their glowing synopsis:

Let the browser wars begin anew: This open-source program is streamlined, customizable, and just plain better. No wonder it has attracted millions of users in just a few months. Is it merely a coincidence that Microsoft finally plans to give the aging Internet Explorer the major overhaul it has needed for years?

The list is split into several categories: PCs and Peripherals; Monitors and TVs; Office Software; Digital Photography; Security ; Printing and Publishing; Storage and Backup; Mobile Tools; Web; and Consumer Electronics. You can of course view the whole list of 100 products.

Adorning the Top Ten are gems like Gmail (#2), Skype (#8), and Apple OSX Tiger (#3).

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Systm Episode 2 Released
from the myths-and-legends dept. | 2005.6.11 10.29am | by BigglesZX

Hot on the heels of the first video release from Kevin Rose and Dan Huard comes this second episode of Systm. In this installment, the pair build and configure a cheap "media centre" PC using free software such as KnoppMyth and MythTV. Torrent links below:

Large Format

Small Format

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A Gamers' Manifesto
from the dear-santa dept. | 2005.5.31 11.23am | by BigglesZX

David Wong of Pointlesswasteoftime.com looks at the impending arrival of the next line of games consoles - the PS3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Revolution - and asks, "what do gamers want from this seventh generation of consoles," as he presents "A Gamers' Manifesto".
Twenty very amusing points that really need to be addressed.

"The Sony Playstation 3 is going to cost $465.00.

In the desolate economic climate of post-apocalyptic 2006, I'm thinking that's going to be a lot of money. Now, it's true that at E3 Sony was boasting the Playstation 3 could crank out 1.8 TFLOPS, or 1.8 trillion FLOPS. If that many FLOPS were piled together they would fill the Grand Canyon, assuming each FLOP were the size of a muskrat. So what do gamers want from all that money and FLOP? Just ask them."

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Systm - New Project from TheBroken Crew
from the harmless-fun dept. | 2005.5.24 5.18pm | by BigglesZX

Dan Huard and Kevin Rose, the dynamic duo behind the superb three-part videozine dubbed "TheBroken", have started up a new videozine project called Systm. The first episode was released Monday, and is all about building a "warspying" box, a mobile scanner designed to search for signals from wireless cameras.

With the WMV version clocking in at around 150mb, the video has been released in several versions, for which there are a multitude of torrents.

Large Format
Xvid

Windows Media
Theora
h.264 quicktime 7 (Mac Only)
Small Format
Xvid
Windows Media
Theora
PSP
h.264 quicktime 7 (Mac Only)

If you enjoyed any of the releases from TheBroken, you'll love this. Rose and Huard are now apparently working full time on it, so stay tuned for more videos soon.

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Trimming the MSN Messenger Fat
from the cutting-the-crap dept. | 2005.5.23 3.22pm | by BigglesZX

If you've recently upgraded to the latest version of MSN Messenger, version 7, you may have noticed the huge amount of new bullshit features that have been packed into this most recent release.

Even Patchou, developer of Messenger Plus!, has wussed out and removed the most basic of annoyance-removal features from his product - the tweak that removes the MSN ad banner at the bottom of the main MSNM window. The ad banner wasn't enough, however, and Microsoft have seen fit to add even more bloat that few will use, including even more tabs in the main window; emoticon "packs" (for when your poorly enunciated SMS-speak just isn't enough); and "winks" and "nudges" - at your disposal to "enhance your conversation". Thank you, MS, for not trusting me to be able to convey my meaning on my own, and providing me with these ridiculously childish features to annoy the fuck out of my contacts. Contact not responding? Have they dared to look at another window for a few seconds? No matter, in MSNM 7, you can spam them with sound and light until they are forced to open your window again.

Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of MSNMSGR Ghost, a most excellent little program which modifies the MSN Messenger executable, and allows you remove as much annoying garbage as you wish.

Tick the boxes as you desire, then click the Go button; select the directory in which your MSNM program resides (usually \Program Files\MSN Messenger) and voila. The bullshit is conveniently swept under the rug. Until the next Messenger update of course. Sigh.

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