r3dux.org

This made me smile the other day, so I thought I’d share…

Apparently, you can do this on the PC version just by going into the handling.dat file in your GTA4 folder, and editing “wbias” to be around -9 for all the vehicles you want to go crazy. Something about negative wheel friction, I believe =D

On a title-related bent, I hadn’t thought about the Carmageddon games for a long while – they were pretty cool in their day, but you look now and it’s… well, downright ugly. Still, they used to be a lot of fun to play…

Fictional character Kevin Butler is the Sony PS3 spokesperson of sorts – which might lead you to believe that given Sony’s recent sue-a-thon against anyone even daring to mention the hallowed hex digits of the Master Key (Thanks, GeoHot!) – it could, and I’m not an expert, but it could, be a construed as a bad idea for whatever PR firm behind his twitter account (TheKevinButler) to re-tweet said hacked PS3 Master Key.

Which when used correctly will make a PS3 think it’s running legitimate, signed code as opposed to homebrew or warez.

To around 69,000 subscribers.

Hahahaha =D Well played, exiva, well played…

Additional: As seen on unixslave.com:

I’ve got some Windows virtual machines I use for when I need to do MS Office stuff or a brief bit of Win32 programming, and noticed earlier that each time I reboot Windows, ZoneAlarm Free decides to nag me to upgrade, and there’s no option to switch it off. In fact, I’d go as far as to say they’d gone a bit talkie-toaster… I can see why they’d do it, but I’m not going to upgrade to a full, paid security suite for a virtual machine I fire up only if and when I have to (which isn’t that often) – it’s a no-sale. So I did a bit of googling and found the solution.

The trick is that you need to modify the following registry keys and flip them from 1 to 0:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm\RunSwitchbackWizard
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm\RunUpsellNotice

However, the problem with doing so is that Zone Alarm has these keys locked, and quiting ZoneAlarm doesn’t unlock them, so you need to reboot Windows into Safe Mode to do it by stabbing F8 during boot a few times and then selecting to boot in Safe Mode.

Once you’re in Safe Mode, you can either go and flip the flags manually using regedit, or you could dump the following into a file with a .reg extension and then execute it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm]
"RunSwitchbackWizard"=dword:00000000
"RunUpsellNotice"=dword:00000000

Or, you could download and run a version I created earlier (Right click and Save As…): ZA-NoNag.reg

Done & done.

Credits: Many thanks to oldsod on the ZA forums for the fix!

The Kinect just came out in Australia today, so I’m already a little bit late to the party, but I’m keen to see what I can do with it so I went and picked one up earlier – a couple of minutes after unboxing and it’s happily working with Linux. Awesome =D

The GLView example running on LibFreenect

Anyways, here’s what you need to do to build the library for yourself:

1. Using synaptic or apt-get, install the following packages: libusb1.0-dev, freeglut3-dev, git, cmake

   sudo apt-get install libusb1.0-dev freeglut3-dev git cmake

It’s possible you may need to install some other packages as well depending on what you currently have or don’t have installed, but if you need anything additional then cmake will let you know about it when you get to that step.

2. Download the libFreenect source code using git (this will make a directory for you called libfreenect):

   git clone https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect.git

3. Make a directory inside the c folder where you’ve downloaded the libFreenect source code and use cmake to configure the build:

   cd libfreenect/c mkdir build cd build cmake ..

4. Actually compile the library:

   make

That’s it – you’re done!

Now you can check out what the kinect’s seeing by going into the examples directory (which will now exist at ~/libfreenect/build/examples) and running ./glview as root:

cd examples
sudo ./glview

I think we’re going to have a lot of fun with this… =D

Woo-hoo! Microsoft’s Kinect computer vision hardware for the XBox 360 (which uses the structured light technique for motion detection) now has open source Linux drivers available for it – and it took one talented hacker a whole three hours to do it!

Read more here.

To re-appropriate Sony’s marketing pitch: This changes Everything =D

Unrelatedly, the dude in the video has the exact same laptop as me – an Acer 8920G, unless he has an 8930G which has an additional TV-Tuner card.