Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Sheesh, I'm a bloody slowpoke

I told someone like 2-3 weeks ago I was going to post something, and here I am finally posting it... College is making me even more tardy xP

Well, not much of an update right now, but just a list of some plans and what to expect. I'm thinking of changing my sections, I may remove the programming section and just put programming stuff in the main blog or in the blog for the system its related to. I'm thinking of swapping out android and psp for a "mobile" section. I'm also considering adding a card game section(I play way too many of them) and a Minecraft section, because I'm a severe addict. Hehe...

The next post I do will probably be within the next few days on Minecraft, as I found a way to do something that, to my knowledge, hasnt been found before. Hopefully I will have a video with it, but I found a way to make a working arrow detector in SMP, using vanilla components, so no plugins or mods needed.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Melting in the Summer Heat...

Ridiculously hot here in Canada, I'm melting, and thought I'd take this chance to finally update my blog before I'm a lifeless puddle.

Lots of catching up to do. Obviously, the Genesis Competition is over, and some1, the person I worked with on our VSH exploit, got third place with 0xFFFFFFFFailsploit (which I named, so you know XD) so congrats to him. I didn't end up getting anything done on time, though I'm thinking about maybe joining the Neo 2011 Retro competition, I'm not sure I'll have the time.

Programming wise I've been branching out a bit more. I've been looking for ideas for apps on Android, working on designing my OS, and trying to learn some web dev to make scripts and extensions for Chrome. My current extension I'm working on is for Kingdom of Knuffel, a community site a lot like Gaia, if you've seen that, though it is much newer. I'm adding a link to my profile on both to the blog, so people can find me, and maybe join if you aren't on them.

I finally got my desktop working, and have been playing some PC games again, mainly Second Life and Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst, both of which I recommend, I'll add links to the blog for those as well. I also got a new netbook which I have been using as my programming computer, though come September when I have my college classes I'll probably use it for that as well.

Also, I got a twitter, yet another link I'll add to the blog :P

Well that should be good for now... I'll try to update more, and I swear I mean it this time. Minimum once a week I'll be updating on all my projects and things I'm doing, maybe I'll start doing some reviews again. Until next time :)

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Ack, might as well update...

Sheesh I keep doing this, though this time I actually have a good reason.

About a month and a half ago I was put on new medication. Although it's doing it's job, it's got a huge list of side effects. For the first 2-3 weeks I had horrible nausea, stomach aches, head aches. Lots of fun there. Cars were demons in my eyes, they only made it worse.

By now most of that is gone, but I still have some problems. Drowsiness is a huge one, I tend to spend a lot of time laying down or sleeping. The main one though is my ability to think well, I've noticed more complex ideas go right through me lately, I've been working on getting past it though. (It's most likely because of the near endless drowsiness x.X)

The main problem with all this of course is Genesis, there is no way I could finish what I wanted to with my state of mind right now. I MIGHT be able to finish a single thing, which ironically I can't even say the name on here because it has a curse word in it, but I may be able to finish that one, considering it is the furthest along. I doubt it though, with only 5 days and me needing to run around looking for a job and work on cosplay stuff for Anime North coming up in 17 days. I do still plan to work on them and release them eventually, just not for the competition unfortunately. Good luck to those taking part though :)

Outside that, I have gotten a DS lite during the time I've been "missing" and have some games I can review on it. I might try deving for it, if I get my hands on a flashcart for it. My friend also this past weekend got me back into Magic The Gathering, with the New Phyrexia prerelease, so who knows, I might do some posts on that.

On another geeky note, Doctor Who is back with a new season, and WOW, what a season so far. All three episodes have been awesome, especially the first two, talk about starting with a bang. So I don't spoil anything, I'll just say this, The Silence are creepy as hell.

Hopefully I post again soon, so until then, bai! :P

Friday, March 11, 2011

Chrome Tab Bar and Frame not responsive...

Thought I'd put this up, because I was unable to find a fix for this through Google or any other means, though I'm sure it has happened to someone before. Yesterday my Chromium browser started acting strange to say the least. It was getting very, very slow, as well as giving a large amount of "Tab not responding" windows. Eventually, the tab bar and main frame were both unresponsive, taking maybe 30 minutes to respond to clicks(including minimize, maximize and close buttons) and even when responding, they would not behave properly.(closing a tab would not move all tabs back to the left, and the closed tab would become about 10 pixels wide instead of completely disappearing) The wierder thing, though, is that the toolbar(bookmarks, address bar, settings) all still worked, so long as it didn't need to open a tab.

This was very frustrating, as restarts of either the browser or the system did nothing. I tried renaming my "~/.config/chromium" directory to see if that would fix it, and it did, but of course I want all my settings. I started going through all the contents of the config directory until I found the offending files.(not sure which one specifically) The corrupt file causing the problem was in "~/.config/chromium/Default/Local Storage", and once I deleted the directory, the problem was gone.

Hopefully this helps someone, I'm sure there are others who have run into similar problems and not wanted to completely reset all of their history, bookmarks, etc. I'm still not 100% what caused the problem, though I notice now that there are only 3 files in the Local Storage, and there were 10+ when I deleted it. I also had the browser open for days with 10+ tabs, I may have pushed the browser a bit hard. Either way, as I said, hopefully anyone with this problem finds this post :)

Thursday, March 3, 2011

[Game Review] Hex Defense


Okay, finally another Android post. I swear I'll get to posting a list of the major widgets and apps I use... Until then, here's a game review. I saw this one in the featured list of the Android market, and for some reason had an urge to check it. When I saw the good reviews and that there was a free version, I tried it.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

PSP Genesis Competition

About time I stop being lazy and post...

The past while a lot has happened, but the biggest is probably the PSP Genesis Competition. It is a competition for anything made for PSP, so long as it includes a MIPS binary, so games, apps, plugins, HENs, CFWs, etc. Even more impressive than the huge scope is the prize, which the value has grown to over $4000 total already. It will be interesting to see how the competition goes, and what amazing little projects come out of it.

Most people who chat with me enough know I've kinda spoiled two of my three entry ideas for the competition. A game based on a similar idea to Where's Waldo, though it will be called "Where's Nymphie?", and a keyboard dock for 2000/3000 PSPs which will obviously need a plugin.(I plan to make more features so it can still be useful to people without the dock, but the main feature will be the keyboard) The third idea that I have kept pretty well secret so far is the first one I am working on, and will be somewhat of a development tool that even other people in the competition may end up using :P

I can generally guarantee the app and the game, but I'm not 100% sure about finishing the dock in time, since it requires custom hardware and will be the last thing I work on most likely. Sometime within the next month I should be giving my first release of the app, and maybe posting graphics for the game up on my deviantArt.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

VSH Exploit



Finally some "proof" to the exploit, I guess. It still is terribly unstable, and probably not very useful to others at the moment with all the wrapped homebrew, and even ISO homebrew more recently. If anything, it may be useful in the future on newer firmwares, because the crash still occurs in 6.37, and every firmware we've tested it on works. Let it just be a reminder that there is still plenty of hidden exploits in the firmware that Sony hasn't caught yet, for those who are still looking.

This video(made by TiPi :P) shows him setting up the PSP, showing what's on it and the OFW version.(5.50, in this case) He then hides the exploit action, and when the PSP is tilted back, we're in VSHBL, as we like to call it, some1's port of the homebrew loader to VSH. PSP-Filer is run, and all the contents of flash0 are shown, since VSH mode has full access.

Credits obviously go to TiPi, who found the crash, I noticed the exploit in the crash, and some1 helped us get the exploit up and working. Along with us 3, who have spent quite a while getting to this point, many people helped out. m0skit0, wololo, JJS, and Davee, to name a few, all helped us out, and possibly others I am not remembering at the moment.

For those curious, by what I mean with "unstable", although on 1000's the exploit works out of the package, so to speak, on newer PSP's, the only ones it would really matter on, the exploit needs tailoring to get it work, hence it not being very useful to others at the moment. We're working on it :P It's far from unstable in the traditional sense, once the file is fixed, it works 100% of the time.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Needs to be said...

This has been bugging me the last few days, so I'll say it.

THE PSP HAS NOT BEEN CRACKED WIDE OPEN.
NO WE CANNOT SIGN HOMEBREW YET.


The so called "signed" homebrew and HENs that have been released so far are all using a trick that requires the encryption keys, hence the name of the tool, PSPencrypter and NOT PSPsign. The tool encrypts the homebrew, and wraps it with a demo games signed "box", so to speak. This tricks the system into thinking it is signed. People on #pspcommunity have been calling these wrapped homebrew, considering that's exactly what they are. Some have also been using "signed", with the quotes, however I find this will confuse people when signing is possible in the future.

Don't get me wrong though, this is still very useful, but it's not done, and there is still a lot to be done before signing is possible. I have not tested the new 6.37, but most likely this trick has been fixed, if not, it will probably be fixed in the next one, so don't expect these wrapped homebrew to work forever.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

[Game Review] Dungeon Defenders



About time I get something into the Android category. I was going to post this yesterday, though I'm glad I didn't. This morning I awoke to version 2.0, which made some nice improvements.

For those who don't know, Dungeon Defenders is a cross between tower defense and action RPG genres, each class having it's own summonable defences and weapons. The gameplay is very reminiscent of tower defense maps on Starcraft and Warcraft, but with character building, and of course, it's mobile.

Friday, January 14, 2011

[MIPS/C] Tiny little search function

I thought I would share this, since I'm sure someone else might be able to use it. Some1 asked me to write a function to search for a string and return its location, in order to find functions in a PSP VSH exploit. The function is simple enough, it searches for the first letter of your null-terminated string, and once it does, loops through the string to test if the next characters are the same, if not, it goes back and looks for the first character again. It returns 0 if nothing was found.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Catching up

Well there I go again, getting behind on my blog.

Lots has happened in the last week and a half, I won't be making in depth articles on each because I'm sure most people coming here would know them already.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

[Game Review] Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep

A little late, but it's a new year, give me a break :P Speaking of which, Happy New Years to everyone :)

Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep was one of those games I knew I had to get the second I heard of it, being a big fan of the Kingdom Hearts series. One of the foolish things I kind of wished for was for it to be similar to the PS2 games. Oh how glad I am that it isn't anything like them, because I love the way it is.