Time to build a NAS

So I have a heap o computer crap laying around the house, a good few hard drives, none of which are used for anything any more. Perhaps its time I take stock of everything I have, Install freeNAS onto the fastest box I have, give it as much ram as possible and go from there.

UPDATE: ITS ALL CRAPPY AND TO OLD TO DO WHAT I WANT!!!!!

Although whatever NAS solution I do use it needs to fill the following roles all in one:

• WebServer
• SSH Server
• DNS Server
• Kai Server (For playing XBOX, 360 and PSP online without Live accounts)
• Some form of network monitoring
• Security Camera Monitoring
• Mumbles Support (OS X Growl notifications) - This one send notifications to my iPhone
• Obviously FileSharing
• Print Server
• Fax2Email wouldn't hurt
• CallerID Announcment to xbmc would also be nice
• Asterisk Server - Although this might go into its own box
• Torrent Server (Transmission will suffice here)

So thats the list - Time to find the possibilities.

iPhone Jailbreak - No Signal

What a pain in the arse this is! I've finally got Pwnage Tool running on my mac, and i went through the steps of creating what I think is a fantastic ipsw file containing not only the jailbreak software but a 1GB sys partition and some apps that I need installed from the get go such as OpenSSH and OpenSSL. The creation of said firmware worked without a problem, installed on the phone without a problem... Now I find the phone has No Signal. Testing this theory by calling my phone... VoiceMail... DAMN IT!!!!!!

So whats the problem all of a sudden... one frikkin tick box in PwnageTool I inadvertantly forgot to untick.

Theres an active phone option that I dont need to have ticked and well I left it ticked. So this morning I fired up the mac, re-created the firmware and when I goes home at lunch time i'll install and see what happens.

Peace Out!

Free IPv6 Usenet

So I was getting fed up with downloading torrents as the speeds are not always that fantastic.  It was then that I decided to try out usenet utilising the mac with leo installed.  I'd been using igrabnews whilst tiger was installed, however this doesn't seem to work all that well with leo.  Tried Unison next, quite happy with it, but theres something lacking still.  Time to pull out the big guns and finally get hellaNZB installed.  I'll write up a howto and get back to you.

DVD43 Stuffs 360 Ripping

Well after making myself look like a douche in front of friends I now know why I couldn't get games to rip. DVD43 sits between the drive and the computer and blocks xbox backup creator from seeing the disc in the drive. Why does this ocur.. well derrr... (Can't believe I didn't think of this)... When the xbox disc is presented to the PC, the computer sees the video partition only. So of course DVD43 kicks in to be helpful and tries to unencrypt the video partition.. not gunna happen..... And of course because of this, the disc becomes invisible to xbc.

Useful only has one L

Who says you never learn new things. After many moons of incorrect spelling I learn today that useful only has one L. Now that I think of it and actually look at it, OF COURSE IT ONLY HAS ONE L...

Thanks R3Dux for letting me know.

Adding Sata port to xbox 360

<-- Here was my first idea at a sata mod - Run the cables out the side and just use a piece of an old PCICard as a female to female sata connector... FAIL that would be crap and who wants cables dangling out the box when you dont need to. There simply had to be a better way... Well I FOUND IT!

Note to self: The rubber tape to guard cables against the sharp edges worked a treat. Will use that in another project.

It's been a long time in the planning however I finally did the mod to stop me having to open the xbox ever again. What I did was splice a switch in between two sata cables and an eSata backing plate.

I pulled apart the xbox in the usual way, used my dremel to cut out some metal shielding, and some plastic that helps hold the 360 together. This however will make no difference to the 360 as the case still closes without issue

I flick the switch one way and the DVD drive connects to the 360 motherboard allowing game play. I flick it the other way and the drives output is switched to the eSata port and out to my computer.

List of parts and prices (AUD)

1. eSata Cable -$4
2. eSata external backing plates x2 -$5 each (needed one for pc as well)
3. 4PDT switch - $7
4. Sata cable x 1 - $0 (Came with data card)

Only needed one extra data cable as the esata plug can be cut to make another cable to connect to DVD drive.

So it's basically, cut all sata cables in half,
Strip wires back a little, solder wires to switch contacts
Dremel case and shielding, drill hole for switch, coat switch in hot glue to provide shielding.
Install switch and esata portto top case
Instal cables to motherboard, middle cable to DVD rom, top to esata port.
Close it all up and enjoy.

Here are some finished pics, will upload some more soon. (These look crap and make the mod look untidy. GRRrrr - Will Get some good ones soon)

Installing OSx86

This is the second attempt - after getting fed up with things not working out of the box thought i'd try two different distro's to see if it makes a difference to the out of the box experiance.

Installing now should take 15 mins, will see how we go.

First was iakos7 - Install went fine, rebooted and then:

Boot - Reboot Loop on the Grey Screen

Turn off Hyperthreading... Boots to a blue screen with music playing - Sounds like the audio drivers work - Grahpics drivers - Not So much, Time to try Kalayway as I dont want to spend the vening working out the correct .kext etc to use to get it to function and who wants to use it without hyperthreading :d

Kalaway's Turn

1. Turn hyperthreading back on - I want this out of the box.

2. Boot from Kalaway DVD without the use of boot options

3. Installer startup is taking a while longer than iAktos, although its scanned the NTFS partition for some reason for consistency.

5:31pm greeted with northen lights background and welcome to installer text.

Use English for main Language.

Mac OSX - Barbers Pole - Preparing Installation

4. Utilities Menu --> Disk Utility --> Erase OSX Partition from previous install

5. Select newly erased partition to install to

6. Press Customize - And go through options keno'ing answers :D

7. Leaving Graphics Drivers Empty.

8. Unselected Language translation - My english is pretty good so i'll stick to that

9. checked to install additional 3rd party apps - removed network drivers that i dont have such as marvel etc

10. Click Okay and then Install

11. OSX would now "hypothetically" be installing :D

6 Mins to go :)

Boots up with grey apple boot screen - Wont load past that

Okay - check the manual... need to run a few commands to get it to boot past the grey apple logo - Seems this is the same as the blue screen fix

Boot as normal, press F8 to enter boot options,

enter -s as boot option to go into single user mode

Once it boots and presents with a command line enter the following:

mount -uw /

/movevideo

Go through and say yes to the correct chipset and no to the others

once its all done, type exit and BOOM into OSX we go.

Next comes sound...

No sound has been installed it would seem, time to start with the drivers (Called .kext's in OSX)

I have a sigmatel AC97 sound card that shows as Intel HD Audio in windows.

So time to go diving for a driver. ... meh.. can't be bothered - I'll do it later.

Haze - you've got to be kidding

Ohhh great. Now the game wants to quit and update itself. Grrrrrrr


-- Post From My iPhone

Ps3 Game - Haze

My seond game ever. Haze from ubisoft. Talk about snore fest. I've started the game only to be greeted with this...


It's now 10 minutes later and I'm at 82%. Surely I could have decided if I wanted to install to my hard drive. Game better be worth the wait.

-- Post From My iPhone

1ST Blog from iPhone

Figured I'd try a few apps out and see how well they work. This ones blogpress. Now to add a photo :)




-- Posted On The Go

iPhone 3.0 - MMS

Yes its true - After 2 years of waiting for a feature every other phone seems to have been capable of since late '03/early '04 we can finally send and recieve MMS using the iPhone.

I have to admit, the implementation has been done very well, however there seems to be a small bug, well at least with my phone there is.

When a contact sends an MMS regardless of if their name is stored in the contact list or not, I am shown the phone number of the sender and not the actual Contact Name.

All good if I'm expecting the mms, not so good as I havn't yet memorised every persons contact numbers. Nor do I have any intention of doing so. Would be interesting to know if anyone else is experiancing the same problem.

iPhone 3.0 - Now With Extra Tethering

Bye bye PDANET - By bye SmallProxy for iPhone.

Gone are the days where you needed to download and install extra apps to use your iPhone as a portable modem. Now you can use the inbuilt tethering option via either a usb connection or Bluetooth.

After having just updated my iPhone to 3.0 and finding the tethering option was disabled with Optus Australia and that I needed to contact them to enable it.. Bugger that I thought.

So I did my usual and found a very very helpful site that lets you download mobile configs straight to your iPhone without ever needing to go near iTunes or your mobile phone carrier to ask for permission *(ITS MY PHONE ANYWAYS)*

Follow these steps, and you too could be using Tethering on your iPhone.

1. Open Safari on your iPhone
2. Goto the following url: http://www.iphone-notes.de/mobileconfig/
3. Click the Mobile Configs Download Button
4. Select your Country
5. Select your carrier from the list
6. Press the Install Button that appears
7. Press Accept or Replace depending on your previous settings.
8. Press the Done button
9. Goto Settings --> General --> Network --> Tethering
10. Change the options as required

And there you have it, nice easy way to enable Tethering withotu needing to play with iTunes and downgrading and reflashing etc.

USBLoader - Load wii games from hard drive

It's finally here.. the moment i've been waiting for.. Hard Drives usable to run your games on a wii.

With the 4.0 firmware update available for everyone.. Waninkoko has release his USB loader. What does it do i hear u ask?

Its lets you run your wii ISO's from a usb hard drive attached to the wii's usb port.

Gone are the days of needing a flat mii

Rips games to the hard drive in minutes.. wii sports for example took 5 mins to copy and compressed down from 4.5 Gigs to 860Megs or there abouts. not bad at all.

Running the game works without a hitch and load times are decreased so much its like playing games on the old xbox. smooth.. seemless and without the annoying load times that come from dvd based game consoles.

Well done to waninikoko for his great USB_Loader tool. I'll get back to you all when I find an external Hard Drive that works with the tool.....


anyone wish to donate :D

Downgrading Wii From 3.4 to 3.2 - Error 1035 *WORKING FIX*

After stupidly upgrading my wii to 3.3E firmware, and finding out the trucha signing bug had been cleaned up. I wanted to find a way to take myself back to 3.2.

So reading a few guides on the net, the first step always seemed to be updated to 3.4. No idea why this is required, but thats what I did.

Next stepp install a few wad files, one of which is called cios_fix.wad and requires a speical IOS16 wad manager to install.

This is where things stopped working. Everytime I tried to install this wad file, I would get an error message. Usually something about retval (-1035).

I tried for a few months to get it all to work, but nothing ever worked. Hundreds and hundreds of Google searches and forum searches showed up nothing at all.

You know you've tried almost everything when all the guides start to sound the same and you can do it in your sleep.

I say almost, because after a while I began to think about what was happening. The 3.4 dowgrades were designed for people that had never used custom ios' and such so perhaps something I had allready installed was causing the problem.

After a fair bit more reading I began to find that Nintendo in their wisdom had block ios249 which is the one used to install cIOS (Custom IOS).

I had also installed a custom IOS quite some time ago to allow me to use my Ripping software at full speed. At least thats what I thought it was for at the time (Yes I know... WRONG WRONG WRONG)

I first tried Any Title deleter to remove IOS249 and this didn't work. Error after error appeared.

I then recalled the big who ha about the cIOS when it came out and how it was considered such a wonderful thing that an uninstaller was provided in the case you didn't want the software. At the time I wondered who the hell wouldn't want it, but I digress.

I ran cIOS uninstaller 1.2 and was given errors. Okay I thought... perhaps I have an older version of cIOS so i'll get an older uninstaller. Yes I know it makes no sense, but thats what I did.

Downloaded cIOS uninstaller 1.0 ran it and within seconds... No more ios249

Holding my breath I now hoped I could follow all those guides and get through installing everything. Obviously without any cIOS installed, ripping wasn't going to happen.

Running through the guide, installed IOS16 to allow the use of Custom Wad Manager 1.3.

Using this I was now FINALLY able to installed cios_fix.wad It felt like my heart skipped a beat when this happend. Finally I'm on the way to 3.2 again.

And thats exactly what happend. after running the IOS downgrader and cIOS downgrader cIOS installer, StarFall installer and blocking updates etc, IOS51 and shop channel install. I'm now all good.

Although on another note..

I got myself wiispeak - So I needed the hardware updates to allow that to work on the wii.

This I found out is really quite simple. The update on the Animal Crossing disc is ios38. So I used wiiscrubber to extract this wad file, used wad manager to install it, and boo yeah.. wii speak working a treat :D

Backing Up Wii Games

Having purhcased a USB Gecko some time ago from OZModChips and since updating my wii to the new 3.4 Firmware (I know... shouldn't have done that), it became difficult to backup my game collection via wifi.

With that in mind I decided to switch back to using the USB Gecko to get things rolling again.

I found on the USBGecko site (www.usbgecko.com) a Wii mode ripper that claimed to be nice and fast and utilise the gecko's usb connection.

By following these steps, I am now able to once again backup my games and make sure they dont get scratched.

1. Download the following package - http://rapidshare.com/files/133785362/usbwiirip1.zip
2. Unzip the package to somewhere on your computer.
3. Inside the ZIP File is a readme.txt file that will explain exactly what needs to be installed and to where.
4. Once all is installed - Run the wiiripper
5. Insert the disc you wish to backup into your wii
6. Plug in your USBGecko to port B of your Wii
7. Run the PC Application that comes in the zip file
8. Click on the USB Menu and press the Connect button
9. Select Single or Dual layer Wii Disc
10. And press the backup button
11. Set the location for the backup to be saved to
12. Press OK

Sit back for four hours and wait for it all to happen.

Hope that helps someone new to the wii

Google Streetview - Why is it so?

Simple question.. who uses it???

Why is this such a major update to the iPhone that it was required to be released before frikkin Turn-By-Turn? COME ON APPLE.. think about it!

XBOX vs Wii - A simple test

My brother has just purchase an XBOX 360. He asked me to make an adapter to power the extra dvd drive he has from a pc.

Seemingly this is required because the xbox doesn't use a standard power adapter. Okay fine I can live with that. Why has no one created an app for the 360 that will let you rip the games for backing up over wifi.. ohh thats right... its not a wii.. cough cough splutter splutter. I thought my machine was inferior... turns out... NOT SO MUCH

iPhone 2.2 Update - Better Battery Life

I updated my iPhone to firmware 2.2 this morning, jail broke it using quickpwn as I'm not worried about the unlocking side of things. I have to say the battery life on this is fantastic!



Now it could just be me and wishful thinking however I've been able to send a few text messages make a few calls, make a few voip calls via wifi, GPS all over the city and I still have life left in my battery.



I do however have an idea. Why don't we start measuring battery life. Something simple like play a known mp3 track over and over and see just how long it takes for the battery life on the phone to deplete. Get a number of users who haven't upgraded to do the same thing and average the results.



Then take others that have upgraded, run through the same process and see what kinds of figures we get to.



Now that I think of it. Time to start a post on xsellize.com and see what we come up with.

Wii Ramblings

So I've been messing around with the wii for quite some time now. And have come to a conclusion

Those waiting for Warranties to run out are wasting their time and money.

Look at it this way. Here in aus a wii sets you back roughly $388.
A modchip costs - $150 installed
So with that in mind... Wii + Modchip = 388 + 150 = $538

Now with those two items games have gone down in price from $40-$90 down to about the cost of a DVD.

So working on that theory... If we divide the number of games required to make $388 which is the price of a we, we get a figure of roughly 6 Games @ $70 a pop (Which most of the good games are priced at)

Considering I know some people with collections over 55 Games which if purhcased at that price would amount to $3850 ... thats the same as buying 9 Wii consoles with some change left over.

So why wait for warranty to run out when the savings your making on your "backups" more than pays for the wii quite a few times.

Have been playing with mPlayer on the wii and have to say its comming along in leaps and bounds. If only someone could get XBMC to run on the wii.. that would be heaven. A wifi Media Streamer small enough to take with you :D

The Blessed iPhone

Well its been quite some time since I actually updated this blog, so thought it was time to put some more words down.

I've been playing with my iPhone alot lately, and have not got it up to the stage where the only thing missing is GPS Turn-By-Turn.

Forward text messages - Check
MMS Messaging - Check
Turn-By-Turn - Not happening :(

So how did I do it... well with the use of jailbreaks and cydia software installer.

After Jailbreaking your phone the two apps you want to utilise are SwirlyMMS which takes care of the MMS Settings. And biteSMS.

biteSMS is made with the idea that you will purchase SMS credits from them and use the app to send text messages at a reduced rate. The other thing this application does is allow you to use your cellular carrier to send messages.

So with the app setup to use my carrier all I do is slide my finger over an existing message and a popup menu appears.

Select Forward and BOOM away goes the message to whomever I choose.

SwirlyMMS cost me $8 and was the best money i've ever spent.

The Swirly team are constantly updating the app with fixes and optimisations so its deffinatly worth a look.