tech links

To get things started off nerdily on this beautiful Monday morning:

• Xbox-Scene translates an interview with TheSpecialist, the guy who’s responsible for the XB360 DVD firmware hack and is helping further the state of the art in attacks on the core system. Microsoft did an impressively good job on this console’s security: hackers have decrypted pretty much everything on the system, but still can’t run homebrew code. Yet.
• The RIAA is scared of Harvard. The article tries to make it sound as though the school’s big scary law professors are responsible. But I think we all know that it probably has more to do with secret convocations of robe-clad figures, who clutch ceremonial daggers while writing our nation’s energy policy and Simpsons episodes. You’re not fooling anyone, Yglesias.
• Remember when I was all excited about Pownce? Well, Rich was nice enough to send me an invite. I tried it and it kind of sucks. Twitter + file transfer would be great, but the client doesn’t integrate as cleanly with OS X as Twitterific does (i.e. there’s no Growl functionality) and whenever there’s a network error the whole thing grinds to a halt until you notice what’s happened and click a button. I was also disappointed to see how half-baked the event stuff is.
  
  
  But none of this is stopping Valleywag from wetting themselves over the service in a deeply embarrassing way, then whining that no, they were just kidding (or something) in the comments. Bah! For more, see Uncov.
• If you’re interested in Processing and not yet reading Flight 404, start. It’s written by one of the Barbarian Group guys, and he uses it to detail his experiments with artwork generated from physics simulations. His visualizations of magnetic fields are particularly nice, I think.
• Motors! Building a soda-can motor might be fun.
• Oh yeah! There’s this, too: a new version of the Google Analytics OS X dashboard widget. Nice. Thanks for the link, JP.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 11:15 am and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.