Sample the Web

The video game team at Mahalo is playing the game right now, check it out: Metal Gear Solid 4 Live Stream - Mahalo:

We’re also writing up our Metal Gear Solid 4 Walkthrough live.

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Creative Commons image courtesy of by Akiraman
The Mahalo Video Game team is preparing for Metal Gear Solid 4. They’re grabbing the game at midnight tonight and will begin playing the game and live streaming it on Mahalo. They’ll also be noting any Metal Gear Solid 4 Cheats and building a full walkthrough of Metal Gear Solid 4. For more information about the game, make sure you watch our Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots category.

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What would Shakespeare do?

To 3G or not to 3G: that is the question.
Whether ’tis nobler after July 11th to suffer
The contracts and entrapments of outrageous carriers,
Or to take arms against locked platforms,
And by jailbreaking end them?

Seriously, though, with a free update to iPhone 2.0 software around the corner for all current iPhone owners and knowing that people have already figured out how to unlock it before its release, we know that the current iPhone will have many of the features of the new iPhone 3G *and* will be jailbroken so you that you can run all those free homebrew applications that you already love to run. The only real difference between the regular iPhone and the iPhone 3G is speed, GPS, and form-factor and battery improvements. We can already fake GPS with the wireless triangulation. The battery improvements are great, but will probably be offset by the increased drain of the faster 3G connection. Also, that connection is going to come with an extra $10 per month cost. Considering how often I’m near WiFi connections, do I really need a 3G iPhone, even though it’s only $199? Do you? Let me know what you think in the comments.

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Mahalo Daily today put together an abridged version of yesterday’s keynote. You can watch the video and find some related reading here: Steve Jobs WWDC Keynote in 60 Seconds - Mahalo.

Or you can watch the video here:

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A good friend of mine has a new, unopened MacBook Air (entry level model) for sale. He’ll take $1600 for it. Any takers? Email me at ck at sampletheweb dot com and I’ll forward your email along to him. Sorry, it sold.

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So if you’ve done all the fun stuff, like install Installer.app on your iPhone, you can now record video on it. The video tends to look and sound like this:

Bad news: the app found here isn’t freeware, so you’ll have to spend some $$$ on it if you want to keep using it. Also, the color quality isn’t that great. Neither is the sound quality (that’s not how my voice normally sounds). Also, it eats through your battery like crazy.

I think what it’s doing (and Eliot pictured above agrees) is basically recording audio while taking a bunch of pictures and then it converts those pictures into video after the fact and syncs it up with the audio (which would explain why the video of Eliot cuts off before he finishes speaking, even though I didn’t stop recording until after he did finish speaking. There weren’t enough pictures to support the rest of the audio, so it just cut it).

Good news, you can post directly to YouTube OR email straight to Flickr or a dozen other places that accept emailed videos to secret email addresses.

ps—Flickr video is pretty cool.

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Mahalo’s Video Game Team is going crazy covering everything Grand Theft Auto IV. Here’s everything they’re finding on the GTAIV missions:
Grand Theft Auto 4 Missions | Grand Theft Auto 4 Bull in a China Shop | Grand Theft Auto 4 Easy Fare | Grand Theft Auto 4 Easy as Can Be | Grand Theft Auto 4 Escuela of the Streets | Grand Theft Auto 4 Jamaican Heat | Grand Theft Auto 4 Michelle Dates | Grand Theft Auto 4 Roman's Sorrow | Grand Theft Auto 4 Three's A Crowd

And here’s everything we have in the Grand Theft Auto IV category (so far!; after the jump):
(more…)

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I missed this feature release, but noticed it today. Thanks to @JoeManna for pointing me to this blog post on the Flickr Blog from April 22nd announcing Share This!:

Our new “Share this” button makes it a whole lot easier to share your photos, video, sets and groups. You can click the button and start typing the screen name of one of your contacts – auto-complete will do the rest. Or, you can enter any email address.

I used the feature to grab the code to embed this:

How meta is that?

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Jason announced this yesterday and posted about it today and Sean Percival also blogged the good news, as did Mashable: Mahalo has begun adding Microformats to our pages!

You can see this in action on some of our travel pages, like Paris Hotels. If you install Operator for Firefox, you’ll see the following on that page:

Now, whenever we include addresses, contact info, etc. on Mahalo, we’re going to work on putting the data in Microformats wherever possible, so that you can take it with you, import it into your address book, or easily open it up in Google Maps. We hope you love this feature!

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Eliot mentioned Fluid to me the other day, and then yesterday, it popped up in my regular feed reading. Fluid is a SSB, or single-site browser:

Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite WebApps as a separate desktop application. Fluid gives any WebApp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, logical separation from your other web browsing activity, and many other goodies.

So far, using Fluid, I’ve created a Mahalo app and a Gmail app. It’s all tweakable too:

Fluid includes Tabbed Browsing, built-in Userscripting (aka Greasemonkey), URL pattern matching for browsing whitelists and blacklists, bookmarks, auto-software updates via the Sparkle Update framework, custom SSB icons, a JavaScript API for showing dock badges, Growl notifications, and Dock Menu Items, and more.

The Mahalo Application is pretty cool, because you can enable a CoverFlow-esque feature to preview all the links on a page. Also, any link that is not internal to Mahalo itself opens in your default browser, so Mahalo is always there, open and running as a reference point. Here’s a screenshot:

I’ve just started tinkering with it; If you’re on a Mac running OS X 10.5, you really should check this out. But enough of these silly words… Here’s a video explaining how Fluid works:

Fluid Thumbnail Plug-in | http://fluidapp.com from Todd Ditchendorf on Vimeo.

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Today’s Mahalo Daily features Super Smash Bros. Brawl in all it’s glory:

Better than that, today’s Mahalo Daily features the debut of Mark Burnham on a Mahalo Daily! Mark and Evan D are our two key video game team members and as you can really see in this video they’re doing a lot of content creation mixed in with the search results and we’re paying them to play video games! HOW COOL IS THAT?!?!

Anyway, these guys work hard and play hard and I’m happy to see them at the forefront in a Mahalo Daily (although I think the episode needed more Evan D and less Conrad Quilty Harper ).

Related reading: Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Super Smash Bros. Brawl Unlockable Characters
Super Smash Bros. Brawl Walkthrough
Super Smash Bros. Brawl Character List
Super Smash Bros. Brawl Sonic
Super Smash Bros. Brawl R.O.B.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl Snake
Super Smash Bros. Brawl Subspace Emissary
Super Smash Bros. Brawl Subspace Emissary Walkthrough
…and of course our entire Super Smash Bros. Brawl Category.

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I want an Axiotron Modbook so badly. It’s my next big purchase, once I manage to save up a decent chunk of money in the bank and then save a bit more to actually purchase the device. It’s my current carrot to lead me to focus on saving more money.

In any case, it’s awesome and Veronica and Mahalo Daily got a full tour of Axiotron, which has dramatically increased my gadget lust for this device. One question though: does the Modbook come with any of these stands that they show all the Axiotron people propping them up on?

Here it is:

ps—I love the laugh track cuts in the middle.

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Jason and Wales on human search and algorithms:

Link: sevenload.com

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Digg this!
In my previous post about this I checked to see if the touch panel I’d ordered worked. It did, so this weekend I actually cracked open my Eee and installed it (that’s it mounted over the screen in the picture above). I’ve uploaded a full Flickr set here.

I must say, having a touchscreen on the Eee is *very* cool. I’ve been doodling in Gimp since I got it installed and it’s great. That being said, I find myself wishing that it functioned more like the wonderfully touchable iPhone screen to which I’ve grown so accustomed. I find myself touching websites, wanting to be able to scroll up and down the page at the flick of a finger. Good news: this actually works when reading comics on my Marvel Digital Unlimited account.

Despite how cool this is, I must stress: don’t do this hack unless you know what you’re doing, consider yourself a patient person, and are used to cracking open machines and soldering. I’ve been tinkering with computers forever, worked professionally in IT for over 5 years, contributed to several O’Reilly hacks books and even wrote PSP Hacks, and this hack is quite a bit trickier than I originally thought it would be. My amateurish soldering skills and large orgre hands resulted in a re-evaluation of where I wanted to connect this touch panel to my computer. I tried connecting to the 5V connection on the underside of the board that other people have detailed in their hacks, but every solder attempt failed / was too sloppy to trust, so I had to undo it. That connection was also the largest of the ones available for the hack, so I knew continuing to attempt to solder to the USB connections under the wifi card would result in failure.

So, instead, I soldered the USB connection to the left-hand USB port on the Eee. This is not the optimal placement for two reasons: 1. It makes that port unusable for anything else. 2. The 5V connection for that port doesn’t fully power off when the machine is shut down, so it will slowly drain the battery, even when in the off position. In any case, I’ve become a pro at disassembling and reassembling the Eee, so I’m just going to wait until the next time a friend of mine who is a 1337 solderer is around, and at that point, I’ll crack the Eee back open and we’ll move the connections. We’ll also add the USB hub, the 16GB flash drive, and the internal SDcard reader that I had prepped for installation, but gave up on.

The panel I ordered causes the screen casing to buldge out slightly at either side. It’s a bit wider than the actual screen, so I had to break off two little black plastic clips on the inside of the screen casing to get it to fit. The ribbon comes out the bottom of the panel, but there is all sorts of stuff at the bottom of the Eee’s screen, so I had to install the touch panel upside down (it can be calibrated upside down, so no problems there). I had to fold the ribbon twice to get it pointed in the right direction. Then I stripped 4 wires at the end and pushed them into the ribbon’s connector and taped them in place with electrical tape. I then ran the wires down the left side of the screen, under the screen and under the motherboard at the right hinge. Why all the way over there? Because there was no room with all the cables on the left hand side. Bad side effect: the cables push the part of the motherboard with the power button on it upwards ever so slightly, and as a result, the button was always pressed when reassembled. I had to pop the machine back open and shave off some of the plastic at the back of the button to make it workable again.

So those wires run under the board to where I installed the controller for the touchpanel (right next to the memory slot). I taped the controller board to the motherboard, soldered the wires from the panel to the control board, and then took the USB cable that came with the control board, stripped it and separated the wires while keeping the clip in tact. I plugged that clip directly into the board (as it was designed to do), taped the shielding wire to dead end, then ran the remaining 4 wires along the underside of the left of the motherboard, and up over to the top in the space just in front of the lefthand USB. Then I soldered them in place.

I plugged it in to test. It worked. I reassembled. It didn’t work. I opened it back up, two of the wires had popped free. Soldered again. Rinse repeat. It worked. I reassembled. It worked…. for about 20 minutes and then it stopped. Disassembled. One of the wires had popped free. Soldered again and did a good job for a change, reassembled, and now everything works like a charm. w00t

I’m using a stylus from a DS Lite as my stylus when I need one. I need to fashion some sort of sleeve for it, so that I can have it *on* the Eee ready to go at all times. If you own an Eee you know that it’s slightly screen-heavy and can sometimes tilt back if you push the screen too far past 90 degrees. Adding a glass touch panel increases the occurrences of this phenomenon and adds some weight to the Eee. I actually think I might add some more weight to the Eee near the front of the keyboard / on either side of the trackpad to serve as a counterbalance for the screen.

In any case, I may write a more detailed explanation of what I’ve done later, but since it’s going to be a different project depending upon which model touch panel you get and how 1337 your hardware hacking skills are, I don’t know if that write up would be very helpful. I’ll try to shoot some video of it in action later.

Supposedly, Asus is going to come out with a 9-inch touchscreen version of the Eee in the future, so if you feel a little too nervous about a hack like this, save yourself a weekend of sweat and soldering and wait for that model to come out and buy it. However, if you like to tinker, go for it. It’s awesome.

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Great new Mahalo Daily: The Steve Jobs 90 Minute Keynote in 60 Seconds.

Check it out:

If you want to know my take on Macworld 2008: The MacBook Air is overpriced and knowing Apple’s history with laptops, it will either bend, warp, or ding easily, or get really friggin’ hot in your lap, OR it will warp over time because of how friggin’ hot it gets.

It’s not a sub-notebook. It’s huge. Just incredibly thin and huge. The 12-inch Powerbook is a far better sub-notebook (and even it is still too big). I’m very happy that I decided to go with the $400 Asus Eee PC, instead of holding out for MacWorld’s rumored sub-notebook. They should take the MacBook Air and make a small format one that is half the size and half the price.

The Apple TV updates are great, especially since they are free for current owners. I may actually start using mine now.

iTunes Rentals? Yawn. iPhone and iPod Touch firmware updates? Yawn.

I like the Time Capsule concept, but I already have an Airport Extreme and I already have a networked drive, so I am not planning on getting one anytime soon.

UPDATE: Here’s the video on YouTube in case you’re on your iPhone and want to see its marvelousness.

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Yesterday, after several weeks of delay, I received the 7-inch touch panel I had ordered for my Asus Eee PC. Much thanks to jkkmobile for discovering that one could install a touch panel in the Eee and for paving the way with his video how-to. Before I get into the nitty-gritty of taking my machine apart and internally installing this touch panel, I wanted to make sure that I could install the drivers and get it working okay externally. This was simple enough, since the kit I had ordered came with a USB cable interface. Here’s a video of what I’ve managed to get up and running so far:

The panel I ordered is made by Xenarc Technologies and although it came with an installation disk for the software / drivers, there are newer versions online, available here. It looks like, if I get fed up with Windows, I can easily switch back to Ubuntu, as there are Debian drivers available (which I may do, b/c Windows is already annoying me; you can see it stall out on me at one point in the video above). There are also OS X drivers, and I installed the software on my Macbook and plugged the panel in as a little external touchpad and it worked fine (though it’s clearly built to be a panel *covering* the display; I wonder how much a 13-inch panel to cover the Macbook’s screen would run?). The software allows you to calibrate the screen however you like, so you can install it upside down, if the cable placement works better there. That’s one of the things I have to determine once I crack my Eee open. I’ll post more with more details as I go through this process (and just as a forewarning: it probably won’t happen quickly, as I’m pretty swamped and I need to go foraging for all the supplies needed first).

If you’re thinking about doing the same sort of thing, here’s some recommended reading:
jkkmobile: How to add touch panel to Asus Eee PC
Xenarc Technologies Driver Download Page
EEE PC Internal Mods Guide
Eee PC Internal Upgrades - ivc wiki
Modding the Asus 701 Eee
Asus Eee PC Hacks
Asus Eee PC Touchscreen

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Doc Searls said something interesting in this post about Twitter and Facebook:

I’m sure there’s something on Facebook that does the same thing. But Facebook is AOL 2.0. It’s heavy and complicated and wants to run my life. So I mostly avoid it. My loss perhaps, but that’s beside the twin points of live vs. static and light vs. heavy.

I often wonder with Facebook: is it a fundamentally different experience for me, a person who started using Facebook in my 30s, than it is for all the people who got a Facebook account while they were in college because it was what they were *supposed* to do (according to the cultural norms established at their school)? Do they find it restrictive the same way that we who explore the open web do? I think (this is just a guess and I’d love to hear some feedback from some people who actually are in this category) that they probably love it and don’t see these characteristics as non-open, but rather as all-in-one-what-I-need. Very AOL 2.0.

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Check it out: Mahalo Daily: CES 2008, Day 2:

The Mahalo Daily crew is at CES 2008 all this week with Engadget helping to cover every nook and cranny of the conference. Check on Engadget and on Mahalo for lots of great gadget news.

Lots of great stuff can be found in our CES 2008 category on Mahalo.

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I should have done this weeks ago. Last night, I tweaked the instructions found here slightly to remove the 70Mhz cap on the front side bus on my Asus Eee PC. Why would you do this? Well, the 900Mhz processor sported by the Eee only runs at about 600Mhz with the FSB set at 70Mhz. Pushing it up to 100Mhz unleashes the full 900Mhz. I’m currently running my FSB at 95Mhz and as a result *everything* is running much much faster on the Eee. It’s palpably snappier. Video playback on high res videos is especially improved. I used to get some noise if I wasn’t running VLC at fullscreen, but now it’s chugging along without a hitch.

So here’s how you do it if you (like me), have installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on your Eee:

1. Download the tar found here and unpack it: http://code.google.com/p/eeepc-linux/
2. Open a Terminal and navigate to the unpacked folder.
3. At the terminal type: cd module
4. Then: make
5. Then: sudo bash and type in your administrative password.
6. Then: mv eee.ko /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/kernel/drivers/acpi Note: depending upon what version of Ubuntu you have installed, you may have to replace 2.6.22-14-generic with a different name. Just navigate to /lib/modules/ and take a peek to verify this is the right title for it.
7. Then: depmod -a
8. Then: pico /etc/modules and add eee to the bottom of the file. To exit, type Ctrl+X and choose yes to save.
9. Download this script found here.
10. Navigate to the folder where you downloaded the script, unpack it, and then: mv fsb.txt /usr/local/bin/fsb
11. Then : cd /usr/local/bin/ and then: chmod 777 fsb
*or*
Navigate to /usr/local/bin, select fsb and type Alt+Enter to open the file’s properties. Click on the Permissions tab and check the Execute box to make the script executable.
12. Reboot.

After you reboot, the new module should load automatically at start up. Now, anytime you want to speed up the FSB, all you have to do is launch a Terminal window and type: fsb

You will be prompted for your administrative password. Type it in and if everything worked nicely, the terminal will respond:
Current speed is 70Mhz.

The key to making this work smoothly is to slowly ramp up the FSB. If you jump straight to 100Mhz, most likely you will get vertical lines across your screen, the Eee will be unusable, and you’ll have to force a reboot.

So, type these bold commands and hit enter after each (the italics indicate what the Terminal will kick back):
fsb 75
Current speed is 75Mhz.
fsb 80
Current speed is 80Mhz.
fsb 85
Current speed is 85Mhz.
fsb 90
Current speed is 90Mhz.
fsb 95
Current speed is 95Mhz.
fsb 100
Current speed is 100Mhz.

You can type this fast and it should ramp up nicely without problem. I tend to only throttle up to 90 / 95 as when I get to 100 the fan starts running continuously and I’ve noticed some slight instability. You could probably script all this, but doing it manually seems to ensure that there is enough time to prevent any error. The fsb script has automated slow, medium, and fast settings that are supposed to automate ramping up. Whenever I’ve used those commands, I’ve had the vertical lines error and been forced to reboot.

In any case, I hope this helps some of you out there, and as always, do at your own risk, your mileage may vary, etc etc.

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Kristin picked me up from work today wearing the boots I bought her for Christmas that she wasn’t supposed to open yet. As a result, I arrived home and ripped open my new white PSP slim Rebel Assault edition (complete with Darth Vader on the back) and composite video attachment to hook it up to the TV.

I know I’m late to the game on this, but this Playstation Portable that I always wanted to be a portable Playstation 2 has *finally* become something very close to that. I can throw the PSP and this cable in my bag, take it with me wherever and plug it in to a nice large TV and play games on the set or watch my UMD movies. I’m watching Sin City right now and it looks pretty HD on the 32-inch set. No artifacts and better than regular DVD. That’s insane.

ps—If anyone is looking on buying a first gen PSP, I’ve got a used one for sale.

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