New Website

For those of you who still check this blog, I made a new website, which I will be updating regularly.

You can see it here: Nymphaea.ca

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.

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 :)

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

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 :)

[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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

[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.

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.

[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.

6.20TN-B is here.

I was too tired to post this last night, but TN released the second version of his HEN last night, 6.20TN-B. This fixes the problems with 04G PSP3000's, a few bugs, and allows downgrading. I will say though, although I've heard of people with 03G's successfully downgrading, I still think it is a very bad idea to try downgrading an unhackable PSP as you risk bricking.

You can get my new All-in-One package [here].

This package includes a trimmed down Patapon 2 demo from Omnija(only 49MB), HBL revision 109 and of course 6.20TN-B. It is set up so that all you need to do is run the exploit, and it will automatically run the HEN for you. Follow the instructions in the readme if you get lost.


On another note, later today I will be posting a review of Kingdom Hearts, and maybe Invizimals tomorrow.

[Game Review] Phantasy Star Portable 2

I will be working on getting some more info on TN HEN up, such as plugin suggestions, soon, but for the next few days I'm going to post reviews of the 3 new games I got on Christmas, Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, Invizimals, and of course today's review, Phantasy Star Portable 2.

[Javascript] Playing with my blog

While adding these sub-blogs, I have been playing with javascript, trying to learn to modify the site a bit more to my liking. One problem I noticed was that some blog posts may be covered by multiple blog topics(PSP and Programming, for instance) and I would need to have the comments in the main blog, not in the sub-blogs. I also wanted a nice menu at the top that would highlight which site you were one, similar to the pages widget, but a link-list doesn't do that. So I wrote my own two little scripts to fix this.

6.20TN-A is UP

And here it is, the moment many have waited for :) 6.20TN-A is up and running. I personally have it on right now, and it works perfectly.

You can download it here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=C03RTLG9
I also added an entry to the PSP download page.

This contains Omnija's trimmed down and prettied up version of the Patapon 2 Demo, a stripped down HBL Rev109, and the HEN. Once installed, running the exploit automatically starts up the HEN, don't be fooled by the PSP going straight back to the XMB, that most likely means it worked.

New layout up :D

Here's the new layout, with posts seperated into different blogs. Or at least, they will be. I didn't feel like sorting through the old posts. Hopefully it is easy to browse, each section has it's own download page, and all commenting is done on the main blog. A link will appear in the top right of a post page on the sub-blogs to redirect you.

Also, I've heard that the GEN team is planning to release Total_Noob's HEN early because they are being harassed. You guys are lucky, if I was them I would of delayed it until midnight tomorrow... Either way, I will be posting a mirror download of the HEN, in the form of an All-in-One package, containing everything needed to use the HEN. Expect that as soon as I get my hands on the HEN and can upload it.

As for future posts, I have a post on the Javascript I used in my new blog layout scheduled for tomorrow, and I will try to get a post on the Android apps and widgets I have been using up on Christmas day if I have time. And believe it or not, I do still plan to release simpleMenu version 3, believe it or not, I'll get that by the New Year. Just less people will need it, I guess.

Got my phone, new layout coming

I finally got my phone, yaaay. Got it on friday and I've been playing with it since. HTC Desire Z, just like I wanted. It ended up becoming free at BestBuy, and still came with a $100 giftcard. Not sure what I'll use it on yet, when thinking more about getting a DSLR, I would rather put it to that than a PSP Go. We'll see how Boxing Day sales go, if I get one or not.

I plan to completely remake my blog, it will be split into "sub-blogs" so people don't have to follow everything I post,(since each will have it's own URL, feed and follow features) though this one will stay with all posts from all of the blogs, plus ones that don't belong in the others. I'll be posting atleast once to each once I do this, so expect a few posts soon.

The sections at first will be Android, Programming and PSP. I'll add photography either when I get a DSLR, or if I play with taking pictures with my phone,(5MP should be good enough for decent shots :P) and maybe a hydroponics one if I go buy the parts to build a garden soon.

Hopefully this new stuff I get done by the end of today or tomorrow.

Updates, Should post alot more soon

Well I have PSPSDK back on my computer, and have been slowly working on simpleMenu 3 again. I am not sure if I will continue on the NyMenu idea, because I am slightly more interested in trying to work with kernel mode once 6.20TN comes out. I do have a few other ideas on things to work with though.

Also, I should be getting my phone(Desire Z) finally sometime this week, so I may start posting things about development with that. I've recently gotten the Android SDK installed and have been going through the documentation's tutorials. It's somewhat confusing the heck out of me, being so used to C and assembly, but I'm sure I'll adjust.

Another thing that will be pushing me to post more is Christmas, 11 days and I'll be getting a few new PSP games, Phantasy Star Portable 2, Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, and Invizimals. The last of those especially has been giving me ideas on homebrew, I'm tempted to try augmented reality, we'll see if I ever do though. I should also be getting a 100$ BestBuy gift card, which comes with the phone, on Christmas, and I'm considering using it and some cash to get a PSP Go, who knows.

Anyways, hopefully within a day or two I'll have more info. I've also been considering buying a DSLR, so who knows, maybe I'll start posting some pictures if I do.