Finally got around to restoring my blog database backup, some content will be missing, mainly images and downloads. If you need anything thats missing, drop me an email and i’ll see what I can do. One of the most visited and useful things was my iPhoto fix, i’ll try and get the file back up soon.
Three months after getting the wii chip and clip for my girlfriends wii, I finally made the time last night to install it. Â
I’m currently ill with a whole host of things, and looking at a computer screen for long periods of time makes me ill – so I decided to undertake a fairly simple bit of modding.
I took the wii apart, and to my annoyance found this;
Zoomed in;
Yep, it looks like Nintendo have dumped a whole load of “black stuff” around the very chip that I need to attach the wii-clip to.
Very annoying! Â It looks like I’m going to have to use the soft mod technique unless I can find a way around this. Â I’ve asked the wii-clip makers for their comments.
Pandora is a fantastic website and concept, a radio station that plays music based on the mood you are in. You start out by specifying a song or artist that you like, the system then finds something very similar to that song or artist and streams it straight through your browser. As it plays each song, theres a simple “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” system, hit “thumbs up” and it learns that you like that type of music and plays more of the same and similar. In the same way, hit “thumbs down” and it skips to the next track it finds suitable.
There is a MASSIVE amount of choice, and its a good way to find new music you haven’t listened to before. Accounts are free and you can create multiple stations, for example I have seeded a station using Craig Armstrong, and called the station “Chilled Work”. So when I am at the office, I have my little Pandora Player sitting on the desktop playing some nice mellowed out tracks.
Now, although Pandora is a web based service, I have thrown a VERY BASIC (I must stress at how basic it is!) application together. You will need to have the flash plugin installed – but if you’ve been using the web service you’ll already have that. If you don’t have the .NET 2.0 framework, the installer will grab what it needs and install those files too.
Once installed, the application sits in the middle of your screen, just leave it up behind your other windows, this way you don’t have to have a web browser open all the time. I know most of us actually have a browser open all the time, but this prevents you from accidentally leaving the pandora site, and thus stopping your music.
Get the install files from here. Its a tiny 259Kb in size. If you have any comments (other than “this is really basic” – I’ve already covered that) or would like me to add specific features to it, just post a comment 
PS: Won’t work on 64bit OS, as Adobe don’t support 64bit Internet Explorer.
As some of you have noticed, and emailed me about (thanks), the RSS aggregator’s format changed slightly a few days ago. The new layout should make it easier to read articles and news items. The aggregator started out as a personal project, it allows me to keep up to speed with whats going on in the news (BBC/FT), IT Security Industry (various), IT Industry in general (thereg + others), and a few other things that interest me. Since allowing google to spider http://rss.hamleshmotah.com, its started getting a lot of hits, 1000+ unique visitors a day, so obviously other people find it useful (thanks for all the emails ).
Its been a long time since I was active on the Rosetta@Home folding project. I thought I’d check my stats today and was quite amused to find that;
I stopped participating in April of 2006.
Maybe at some point I’ll get fired up an contribute again, who knows.
They arrived at the office today, and I’ve just finished putting them together. I’ve also just finished modifying my amplifers so that they work in a balanced way with the main AV amp. This ensures that while watching films, or listening to music the top and bottom frequency levels are “balanced†in terms of volume. Of course there will be many a time when I will just crank the sub amps right up 
These will join the rest of the home cinema setup at some point (most probably over the weekend) when I am home during the day to do some loud testing.
PS: Yes, thats 3 amps, the Samson and Wharfedale work on powering my 3 subs – I like my bass
Before I turned all my focus to Berkeley IT, I speant a lot of my time on the internet talking to people on IRC, working on opensource projects, and keeping “up to speed” with penetration testing and IT security.
Well since then I blog irratically and post files and photos from time to time – today just seems to be a day for updating things. I know people read this site as there are the odd comments from both people I know and people I dont. I just looked at the site stats/traffic, I didnt expect to get “this many” visitors: 918 unique visitors last month – for a personal blog type site I dont think this is bad traffic.
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Click for the full view.
In short this is a specifically designed distribution of Linux focused around security and pentesting.
Knoppix-STD is a customized distribution of the Knoppix Live Linux CD. Boot to the CD and you have Knoppix-STD. That would include Linux kernel 2.4.20, KDE 3.1, incredible hardware detection and hundreds of applications. Boot without the CD and you return to your original operating system. Aside from borrowing power, peripherals and some RAM, Knoppix-STD doesn’t touch the host computer.
Read more and download the ISO from here.