Matthias Endler

I love gaming on Nintendo Wii. It is a very special feeling that no other video game console can offer. Thanks to wiimote and nunchuck you are directly in touch with the game. But there is even more that can be done with the stylish white wiimote controller. For instance you could play around with it and use it on your PC to play Half-Life 2. In my opinion this is just the beginning. Once we have a working exploit to execute own code on the platform there will be a lot more functions we will see in the near future. Here is the crazy stuff that you can do with your Wii.

Stand-alone emulator

Play older games of all previous Nintendo video consoles (NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, Gameboy…) and those of other manufacturers (Sony Playstation, Sega Dreamcast, M$ Xbox, NeoGeo etc. etc.) on your Nintendo Wii without paying a cent.
Full-fledged PC

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With the Linux-based operating system Wiili you can turn your game box into a barebone PC with wlan, usb 2.0, cardreader, dvd-drive, remote pointing-device, scart and composite output. Imagine a completely new window manager completely controllable with wiimote (or perhaps you can also use two wiimotes?)

NAS-Device

Plug in an external hard-disk and use your Wii as a network storage center. You could either use Wiili for this or any other OS on the market like the small FreeNAS OS based on BSD.

Wireless Access Point and Hardware Firewall

Connect all your wireless devices around to the Wii to surf the net and to send mails by turning Nintendo’s new white cube into an Access Point. Possible functions are DHCP-Server or network monitor. The Wii could also be used as a hardware firewall to pretect your PC from malicious content.

Movie streaming

Nintendo Wii will be able to do everything AppleTV can do - and even more! Once there is an exploit people will run Mac OS X and stream TV shows, movies, radio signals and pictures to their Nintendo Wii. This will be much cheaper than buying Apples product but you won’t have to miss the eye-candy!

DVD Player

Using GeeXboX you can watch all your DVDs, (S)VCDs and DivX movies on your Wii without spending a cent more. You will always be able to run new formats just by making a built-in software update.

As you have seen it is the best time to buy a Wii this year. The possibilities are nearly endless. Thx for reading. Hope this inspires some of you guys to join active research and development. If you liked the article please digg me. Do you have other suggestions? Just drop me a note to appear on the list.

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It is a brilliant idea to create an operating system that is free for everyone to use and to edit. Thousands of hackers around the globe share the dream of open source information technology without monopolism. Everybody who is into computing has heard of Linux and lots of them are using it for daily work. Even inexperienced users try out Linux by testing distributions like Ubuntu, openSuse or Knoppix because they are easy to use and to install. But that’s not the complete truth. This so called “out-of-the-box” experience can instead be very tricky and much to complicated for a normal user.

When you insert the Ubuntu LiveCD you are welcomed by a smart boot menu that lets you try out all the functionalities of a full-fledged Distribution without installing. The window manager has a fresh, clean-looking aqua-style interface. You click on install end almost everything is pre-configured and runs automatically. In most cases Ubuntu auto-detects your hardware and installs the right modules. Hopefully. Sometimes it happens though that your printer is not working or your Wlan device was not recognized. This is mostly the case when you have shiny new hardware that linux hackers didn’t care about yet. This can be a brand new inkjet printer (cups and gimp-print have a long way to go) or the high-end graphics card. Not a problem you might think. Look for a new development driver on Google, do a quick apt-get, set-up your network connection and off you go! BUT explain that to Aunt Tillie sitting in front of her PC thinking that a Wlan card is a trading card her six year old nephew Gregory wants for Christmas. I don’t have to add that she never opened a PC because she simply doesn’t bother what’s in there. You might say that it’s also hard to configure your network a Windows PC. Well maybe it is - but it’s already configured when you buy the PC - and that makes a big difference.

Installing new software packages can be painful for normal users. Have you ever tried to explain to a non-geek why it’s handy to use a terminal for daily work? At best you get an answer like “I’ve used DOS and that was a piece of crap” or maybe he just says “You are still sitting in front of a black text-mode only window entering cryptical commands to configure your system? This is not 1969!”. Many people don’t understand why typing chmod is better than clicking through ten windows opening the “properties” submenu with a right mouse click on a file and finally adjusting the access rights. Why should somebody use ‘dmesg | tail’ to get some system information. The problem is: When somebody refuses to learn those shell-commands they won’t understand 90 percent of the system. They can’t see what went wrong when there is some internal dependency error. Linux will only be easy when you understand what you are doing. Some of the brightest Linux advocates don’t realize that non-techies want a system where they don’t need to know anything about bash, emacs or vi to successfully configure hardware drivers and network sharing (samba…urgh).

Even if you know how to work with a command line you can’t be safe from so-called “dependency hell“. You want to install a new office suite called “OfficeSuite” and download the packages directly from the developers site. But sadly it won’t run because you don’t have those three other packages installed which are all needed by “OfficeSuite”. OK. So you install those packages as well but they depend on three other libraries that you don’t have as well. As a result you end up downloading and installing six packages in order to run “OfficeSuite” - now that’s what I call productivity from the very beginning. The big problem behind this mess is the fact that there are no real standards in the Linux world. There are thousands of different flavors and to some extent this is great and it’s exactly what free software has to look like but guys we urgently need standards to focus developing power. Don’t get me wrong: There must be different package formats (like rpm, deb, tgz…) or various window managers (KDE, Gnome, fluxbox, icewm…) but they all must have a mutual basis to evolve.

As we have seen the biggest problem is usability. Other Unix-alike systems such as Mac OS X show how it can be done. Common guys! We can do better than that!

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I’m away but I’m not gone. The problem is that I presently have a lot to do for my studies and much computer stuff at my sparetime but I can’t calm down for blogging. There are several topics (mostly IT news) I need to comment on. Additionally my site was offline for almost two weeks because of funpic server problems. I don’t want to annoy you with details, let’s just say everything is up and running just fine again. Thanks to all funpic admins to make free webhosting possible. Hope everything will be back to normal soon and I can tell you about all the nice tweaks and hacks I’m working on presently.

powered by performancing firefox

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Sitting in Pullenreuth, Bavaria, Germany at the moment with the alternative newcomers (Johnny Cash and Hans S??llner covers among lots of others) and singing some old songs just for the good old times. Here is a picture of the band consisting of four friends of mine. They are all sitting next to me now eagerly waiting for you to comment and link on my page to get massive traffic. Support the band because they are really (!) good guitar players and interprets of alternative music.

BTW: Excuse my bad english because It’s 1 am presently and I already drank some beer. Cheers!

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Began my studies on 4th of october and don’t have much time to maintain my blog I’m studying Public Administration at BayVFH Hof and I’ve already moved into my tiny flat but I don’t have internet access till now. Hopefully I receive my broadband connection by next week (oh I’m so addicted to that shit Not being able to crawl the web doesn’t mean I can’t touch my computer. Running Linux is possible even without internet (You won’t believe it)!

Maybe I’ll buy a macbook during the next days. Because I’m a student I would get the cheapest for about ‚Ǩ1000 and that would be acceptable. You will see some pictures from Hof soon in my gallery.

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This is work in progress and the article is not yet finished. I’m presently gathering more information to continue writing. If you have any advice or idea feel free to post it.
Microsoft has controlled Information Technology for the last twenty years now and my continue to be the number one for the next couple of years. They had a lot of power and influence in user interface development and general computer usage and dominated home computing from its very beginnings. Have they used their potency to improve operating systems in general or could we be light years away from today’s ‘modern’ workstations?

[A short history from DOS to Vista]

Everything began with a “Quick and Dirty Operating System” called QDOS created by Tim Paterson working for Seattle Computer Products. It was called ‘dirty’ by its author because it had several severe bugs that were hard to fix without changing the whole architecture (but it was a remarkable achievement for just four months of work). At the same time IBM was looking for a tiny OS to ship with their new 386 box for the home user market. Microsoft purchased QDOS (and hired it’s author Tim Paterson) in 1981. IBM wanted their PC to run with CP/M (or ‘DR-DOS’) by Digital Research but somehow the negotiations never came to an end. This was the chance for Microsoft to magically come up to bridge the gap. They licensed MS-DOS to IBM to make one of their biggest deals ever. This was the initial step for world domination, although the operating system was a flop in the beginning. The name was somehow unfitting so they switched from “dirty” to the more neutral word “disk”. The fact that they simply changed the name did not mean that the code would automatically get better at the same time. The company changed the name to QDOS to 86-DOS and from August 1981 on it was officially called MS-DOS. Because of its worldwide access most people stick to the term DOS when referring to Microsofts first OS. The operating system itself was stuck in alpha-stage for several years until it became usable for productive environments (that was around 3.1). At the same time Unix had much more sophisticated command line tools like sh or bash. Compared to those “strong” shells with hundreds of functions (even if you don’t take I/O redirection - piping - out of concern) Microsofts command with its 40-50 features was no real opponent for Unix-based systems. In fact it was a big mess of manpower. The filenames were limited to 8 characters and Unix administrators made a running gag out of it. Until version 7.0 (that was 1995!) this restriction strongly influenced users and programmers behaviour and even today you can find text files like funnyj~1.txt on old machines that may contain “funny jokes about women”.

Another problem for software developers had been that MS-DOS never really gained a foothold in multitasking. While it was one big strength of Unix-based systems the guys at Microsoft struggled with these inabilities and flaws. Imagine a married couple where the woman can do multiple tasks like washing, cooking and cleaning the bedroom at the same time without any problems and on the other side the man has just enough mental capability to hold the daily newspaper. At the early stage of its development MS-DOS was just a little toy for everyone working with computers (ok some of you might say nothing has changed since then but lets move on step by step).

In 1985 a lot changed in information technology. Because Microsoft was focussed primarily on the home and small office market they wanted the PC to be as userfriendly as can be. Nobody should be forced to enter cryptic commands to interact with the computer. Instead everything should be bright and shiny with lots of colors - a graphical user interface! Again they didn’t need to do a lot of research on that field because the guys over at Palo Alto working for Xerox had the idea of a GUI in 1973 and Apple did the rest of the job with Lisa and the Macintosh in the early eighties. Microsoft just had to pick up the idea, make a clone of Mac OS (it was originally called ‘The System’) and sell it together with DOS.
[What's good what's bad and which innovations never achieved greater acceptance]

Here are some examples of bad user interface design.

Metaphors

Modern computers don’t have to simulate a “Desktop Environment” because it dramatically handicaps workflow. Why do I have to move the files I want to delete into a trash bin? It is just another unneeded step when there would be a local Concurrent Versions System (CVS) for all of my files. It would also be easier to backup files this way. You won’t have to rename an older file just because you don’t want to loose it when you create a new version of it. Just leave it on your harddisk until all space is used and then your Computer should know what files you don’t need anymore.
Metaphors may work in a simple environment and they may ease the use of Computers in the beginning but at a certain point they will fail to hide the truth (Word processing and typewriters are not the same event if you are writing text with both of them) and this is where the whole chart house consisting of icons and folders will collapse.

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A new stable release of Slackware (version 11) is finally out for public download. You won’t regret to give it a chance. Maybe you will have to wait a view minutes until the servers suffering fromm massive digg and slashdot effect can be used again. Here is a screenshot I’ve made half an hour ago. Quite funny

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Some people have reported that my rss feed is not working properly. Here is the output of a feed validator that says: XML parsing error: <unknown>:2:0: xml declaration not at start of external entity. What can I do? As a first step I will disable all the plugins to find out whether they add whitespace characters before the XML Declaration. Hopefully I can fix it soon

[UPDATE] Found the issue and fixed it. Everything should work fine again.

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Ever visited a high traffic site and wished it was your own? Ever wanted to get so many clicks that statistics tools can hardly track it? Have you ever wanted to read your name on popurls, digg, slashdot and all the other world shaking, community driven websites read by thousands of minds daily? So here is how it’s done. I’ll give you some advice to bring you on top of today’s agenda for every it-chunky online. You will get your five minutes of fame - just follow my instructions

At first you will have to set up an own website. It is completely sufficient to create a tiny blog with a default template. Just make sure you’ll be able to cope with high traffic. The easiest way is to sign in for a blog account. There are several easy websites that offer free blogs without hassle. Here is a list of good blog software on Wikipedia to get the party started. No matter what blog system you will decide for just make sure that you’ve formatted everything properly to present a clear look. Even a short domain name is totally dispensable (but it’s no disadvantage on the other hand). You can’t do anything wrong if your webspace has unlimited traffic Also look for freespace providers that won’t show popup or inline ads.

The most important thing you need to have before you get linked by the big players mentioned above is - interesting content. It does not matter what cool design you have or how many meta-tags you’ve added to your pages. Nobody cares about a picture of your girlfriend on the right side (ok maybe if she’s really cute) because all they will have at the very beginning is a plain headline and some abstract of your article. Don’t even try to get linked by Google and get a top ranking with some of your keywords because bot-driven search engines are way to slow to keep pace with mashup-entertainment sites. I promise that you won’t need Yahoo! or Ask.com and not even Google to touch the stars (you would need them to stay on top - but that’s another problem). Instead you have to deal with millions of intelligent bots scanning every website you can think about for valuable content - so called human beings. All they are interested in is to find websites with outrageous articles that are notable enough to be linked to.

So how will you know what the users want?
Why don’t we start by taking a look at social bookmarking sites and analyze the headlines and descriptions of some very popular links.
Here is a list of remarkable characteristics that most of the blogs have in common:

• Important articles are written in English to reach more readers
• The headline contains a lot of keywords which tighten the relationship between a general topic (i.e. technology) and the post (like “Review Windows Vista RC1″)
• Depending on the topic the headline can be everything from totally informal (”WII is cooler than PS3, dude - a console clash fight”) to highly formal (”Plain crashes in Chad”) but it always wants to attract people to read the full article.
• The headline can be scanned in less than three seconds. The best ones create a must-read feeling.
• Expressions like “Five easy steps to…” or “The top ten…” and words like “guide”, “howto” and “ultimate” are used frequently.
• They are often formulated as a question (such as “Why can’t we live in peace?”)

Maybe somebody could write a headline generator using Ajax or PHP to help people out with headlines but when you take all those points into consideration you can’t be wrong.

Now let’s move over to the main article. Readers always like to hear stuff they haven’t heard before. There were thousands of articles about “Kick Windows, use Linux” but only a few that did it the other way round. So I’ve  posted “Howto switch from Linux to Windows” and it was a great success. Write one article and write it good. Take your time and it will finally pay off.

If you don’t know what to write let me give you some food for thought.

• Write a review of a newly released (technical) product or new software

When you’ve bought a new fridge or a shiny new cell phone with all those new gizmos in it then write about your new equipment in detail with pictures and links and maybe some handbook with the most relevant features. You can also focus on an old technology that was somehow forgotten by the public (here is an example).

• Howtos are always very popular.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re explaining how to solve a difficult puzzle or how to change the light bulbs of Opel Corsa D or how to clean a dusty window. All that counts is that it is interesting and funny to read and can be done by others without a diploma and years of hard work and - perhaps the most important thing - that it saves time and money when they use your guideline instead of paying others to do it for them.

• Write about new media

No matter what it is: a geek video, an article about Linux commands related to disk management, top ten urban music, a podcast about gardening.

You can also use the list of popular tags at del.icio.us for more inspiration. Generally said there’s a high demand for lists and comparisons, provocation and exaggeration.

So you found a topic? Fine! Let me give you some other hints now that will dramatically increase quality and popularity of your final product.

1. Browse the text once again after writing it and put in links wherever it makes sense. Don’t be shy because they don’t cost you a cent but they can create refreshing interaction with other sites. They may also support your message while serving as a reference. The main idea is: Help your readers wherever you can!
2. Suitable formatting is very important. Try to begin with a new line when it’s appropriate and underline headlines. Make use of lists and enumerations  which help keeping the article clear and concise. Don’t spoil your article with experimental color combinations or gif animations. Stick to one font that’s easy to read.
3. Be as precise as possible and use simple language because readers tend to skip passages when they are hard to read. They won’t decipher the text because they simply don’t have the time - this is the internet, dude!
4. Use pictures and statistics that load fast and get your message across.
5. Sometimes it’s nice to use quotes that support your message. You may only need two sources for fresh aphorisms: “Oscar Wilde” and “The Simpsons“.
6. If you are writing about an upcoming trend then always explain words some readers may not understand.
7. Write from your personal view. Don’t try to be somebody else because your readers are not dumb. It’s better to present your personal thoughts instead of copying somebody elses opinion. There’s enough FUD on the web.
8. Make it easy for people to discuss your story on your site. Allow comments to provide interaction between the author and the reader. Maybe you also have some related articles to offer or you want to introduce some ranking system for your articles.
9. Offer a Trackback URL because people will refer to your article when they write a post on the same topic and that will increase your own popularity.
10. To measure your success use a website statistics tool. Maybe your freespace provider offers one or you want to use Google Analytics, Performancing Metrics or Alexa or whatnot.
11. Be sure to spread your article on a weekday because there will be much higher traffic then.

The ending oul>To get things rollin’ a little self promotion can’t be bad. I will explain why I find it morally acceptable later on. At first you have to create accounts for the following websites (I know there is a big list of others. Pick out five of them but be sure to include my first three):

• digg
• technorati
• del.icio.us
• reddit
• fark
• newsvine

Maybe you can find some interesting forums that match your topic or you have a buch of important email adresses to send them a link when you publish your masterpiece. Just make sure that you have all the needed addresses right on your desk when it’s time to unveil the dragon.

Everything is set up for the final step now. Release your article NOW! Write some emails and make a post in some forums. Use pingoat and “ping the empire” to additionally push your site. As soon as somebody clicks on one of the “social buttons” your site will appear on the selected bookmarking site. You can do this initial step on your own. It’s sometimes considered lame to promote your own site but I think it depends on the content. If you think it’s interesting for the community - digg it! If you are unsure - don’t! There is only one way to the top and it’s via digg and slashdot. Click your digg button and enter all data as exact as you can. Try to create a friendly and interesting proposal for your article. Do the same with the other sites on the list. Now you are well prepared for the flood. Your post will soon appear on other news sites, too. If your article is really good it will eventually be slashdotted. It has to go through a variety of quality checks to reach this final level.  All you can do is sit there and wait and watch your counter fly.

When you are on the frontpage of digg your five minutes of fame have begun. Enjoy riding the web 2.0 wave. You’ll normally get a lot of comments and even more referrers when you did everything right.

Thx for reading and sharing with others.
Tell me about your success. Use the Trackback URL or post a comment. You have another tip to get on top or just a question on this article? Post it!

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2 comments