You couldn't ask for a lamer topic!

[Spectere]

It's a 2007 model pontiac G5 (which makes me forget they dont even make those any more... The cobalt is actually quite a bit different despite looking the same).

No, the G5 is just a rebadged Cobalt. Same basic trims, same platform, same engine, same transmission. The body and interior stylings are different, and I think some of the accessories packages are different, but otherwise it's basically the same. Same as the Pontiac Solstice and the Saturn Sky, not to mention countless other GM cars, especially prior to GM's recent marque culling.

In other news, that car was built assembled at a plant that's less than an hour from my house. Hah!

wo ist?

I'm not sure exactly where it is; I'll have to ask next time I see the guy who told me about that.

Edit: I've pretty much come to the conclusion that the only reason that osu!stream for iOS is difficult is because they combine an unforgiving lifebar with sneaky, bullshit beatmaps.

Maybe they weren't specifically designed to be sneaky, but if they weren't then they were just poorly designed. If you're playing with a stylus you can pretty much see the whole screen regardless of where the notes pop up. In osu!stream, even when you use an iPad your hand is blocking a large chunk of the screen. So, what do they do? Hide entire sequences underneath where your hands would clearly be placed. Nice.

It's a rhythm action game with a large field, so some memorization is going to be necessary, but pulling that crap prevents you from reading the chart altogether. It's atrocious and is virtually unplayable without a ton of trial and error. You could autoplay the chart, sure, but that doesn't help you when you develop any rhythm or muscle memory. There is also no training mode to speak of, and you fail after missing only a couple of indicators, so if you can't see the ones that you're missing it's extremely difficult to improve in a song.

I can't believe they managed to fuck up a good game so badly. It's not a third party hack job, either. It's developed by the team that created osu!

[Bobbias]

No, the G5 is just a rebadged Cobalt. Same basic trims, same platform, same engine, same transmission. The body and interior stylings are different, and I think some of the accessories packages are different, but otherwise it's basically the same. Same as the Pontiac Solstice and the Saturn Sky, not to mention countless other GM cars, especially prior to GM's recent marque culling.

In other news, that car was built assembled at a plant that's less than an hour from my house. Hah!

I'm not sure exactly where it is; I'll have to ask next time I see the guy who told me about that.

Edit: I've pretty much come to the conclusion that the only reason that osu!stream for iOS is difficult is because they combine an unforgiving lifebar with sneaky, bullshit beatmaps.

Maybe they weren't specifically designed to be sneaky, but if they weren't then they were just poorly designed. If you're playing with a stylus you can pretty much see the whole screen regardless of where the notes pop up. In osu!stream, even when you use an iPad your hand is blocking a large chunk of the screen. So, what do they do? Hide entire sequences underneath where your hands would clearly be placed. Nice.

It's a rhythm action game with a large field, so some memorization is going to be necessary, but pulling that crap prevents you from reading the chart altogether. It's atrocious and is virtually unplayable without a ton of trial and error. You could autoplay the chart, sure, but that doesn't help you when you develop any rhythm or muscle memory. There is also no training mode to speak of, and you fail after missing only a couple of indicators, so if you can't see the ones that you're missing it's extremely difficult to improve in a song.

I can't believe they managed to fuck up a good game so badly. It's not a third party hack job, either. It's developed by the team that created osu!

This just in: 95% of beatmaps for osu are fucking garbage.

[Spectere]

What?

This is a paid app.  There's no excuse for a lack of quality control of that magnitude.

[Bobbias]

The bitch at peppy... Except that I doubt that would accomplish anything :/

There are quite a few things Ive got a problem with for Osu... Like the way they moderate their beatmaps. The whole system is retarded, but especially the part where they set arbitrary cutoffs where "if your song is too long, it's not rankable" and "if your max score is too high, it's unrankable".... There's no exact setpoint, but the beatmap moderators get to chose maps on a case by case basis and arbitrarily decide whether something is rankable or not.

[Spectere]

I wound up getting a 3TB NAS late last week at a reasonable price from Newegg.  It's a Seagate BlackArmor 110 NAS.  I mainly got it because of its price point, though it did have support for a media server, so I figured that would be a nice addition.

After getting it hooked up and transferring a bunch of TV episodes to it, I grabbed 8player for my iPad and discovered what I already knew -- that DLNA media streaming is fucking awesome when it works.  And did work, oh so well.

I did, however, notice that music streaming for the Xbox 360 was half-broken.  When I was playing with 8player I discovered why.  The daemon on the NAS didn't support track numbers for music.  Odd, but I figured a firmware update might fix it.

Well, originally that was a mistake.  Not only did it not fix the track number issue (though it did add an "Xbox compatibility mode" box to the media sharing screen, which, as far as I can tell, does absolutely nothing), but it completely broke video display.  What's worse is that the latest firmware was six months old.  Nice support.

Luckily, some enterprising hacker created a small patch to install dropbear on the device and provide SSH access, so I pulled a Bobbias and rooted my NAS.

A quick check revealed that the NAS uses Firefly Media Server, something totally not suited for DLNA streaming, though it does work.  I also discovered that the reason videos didn't work is because the firmware update reset the extension list back to an incredibly pitiful list of common audio formats.  I added a bunch of video extensions and, lo and behold, it worked.  Track numbers are still broken, but I think that's beyond what the .conf file can do for me.

But anyway, a little bit of investigation revealed that this device is actually quite overspecced for what it is!  It uses a Marvell 88F6192 SoC, containing an ARMv5 core clocked at 800MHz (Edit: judging from the BogoMIPS score, that particular package is probably clocked at 600MHz. Still, not bad!).  It would be a hardware hacker's wet dream.  Basically, the SoC is so badass that you could literally build an entire system from it.  Here's the spec sheet (warning: PDF; here's a Google Quick View link as well).  That aside, the system contains 128MB of DDR2 RAM.

What I find even more impressive is that the system contains 1GB of NAND Flash.  Want to know how much is actually being used out of that?

Code: [Select]

/proc $ df
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0                  3444      3444         0 100% /old
/dev/md0               1027416    128724    846500  13% /
Practically nothing.  The possibilities are practically endless with this sucker.

Honestly, it's kind of a crappy NAS for Joe User; just about everything out there is friendlier and probably works better out of the box.  But for Ian?  Mmmm, tasty.

[Bobbias]

I wound up getting a 3TB NAS late last week at a reasonable price from Newegg.  It's a Seagate BlackArmor 110 NAS.  I mainly got it because of its price point, though it did have support for a media server, so I figured that would be a nice addition.

After getting it hooked up and transferring a bunch of TV episodes to it, I grabbed 8player for my iPad and discovered what I already knew -- that DLNA media streaming is fucking awesome when it works.  And did work, oh so well.

I did, however, notice that music streaming for the Xbox 360 was half-broken.  When I was playing with 8player I discovered why.  The daemon on the NAS didn't support track numbers for music.  Odd, but I figured a firmware update might fix it.

Well, originally that was a mistake.  Not only did it not fix the track number issue (though it did add an "Xbox compatibility mode" box to the media sharing screen, which, as far as I can tell, does absolutely nothing), but it completely broke video display.  What's worse is that the latest firmware was six months old.  Nice support.

Luckily, some enterprising hacker created a small patch to install dropbear on the device and provide SSH access, so I pulled a Bobbias and rooted my NAS.

A quick check revealed that the NAS uses Firefly Media Server, something totally not suited for DLNA streaming, though it does work.  I also discovered that the reason videos didn't work is because the firmware update reset the extension list back to an incredibly pitiful list of common audio formats.  I added a bunch of video extensions and, lo and behold, it worked.  Track numbers are still broken, but I think that's beyond what the .conf file can do for me.

But anyway, a little bit of investigation revealed that this device is actually quite overspecced for what it is!  It uses a Marvell 88F6192 SoC, containing an ARMv5 core clocked at 800MHz (Edit: judging from the BogoMIPS score, that particular package is probably clocked at 600MHz. Still, not bad!).  It would be a hardware hacker's wet dream.  Basically, the SoC is so badass that you could literally build an entire system from it.  Here's the spec sheet (warning: PDF; here's a Google Quick View link as well).  That aside, the system contains 128MB of DDR2 RAM.

What I find even more impressive is that the system contains 1GB of NAND Flash.  Want to know how much is actually being used out of that?

Code: [Select]

/proc $ df
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0                  3444      3444         0 100% /old
/dev/md0               1027416    128724    846500  13% /
Practically nothing.  The possibilities are practically endless with this sucker.

Honestly, it's kind of a crappy NAS for Joe User; just about everything out there is friendlier and probably works better out of the box.  But for Ian?  Mmmm, tasty.

Damn, that is far better than the one I've got. (300 MHz arm core, not sure which arm core though, and the system is actually contained on the hard drives in their own partition.)

Also, I like the term "Pulled a Bobbias" lol.

[Spectere]

Yeah, it is pretty nice. It actually has a slightly more powerful processor than my T-Mobile G1 does (it uses an ARMv5 clocked at 576MHz).  So yeah, my NAS is more powerful than my old phone.

And yes, I was thinking about your MyBook adventures while I was getting Dropbear installed on mine. :p I think most of the disparity between CPUs is simply because of the age of the units. I think my NAS was developed a couple of years after your MyBook was.

I was kind of impressed that it used an independent Flash chip for the firmware, especially one that's so wildly overspecced. And, if all else fails, I can always symlink to a directory on the hard drive.

[Bobbias]

Yeah, that is an impressive SOC. Unfortunately rooting my Mybook hasn't really provided me with the platform I had been hoping it would. It's more or less too slow to do much of anything.

[MortifiedocAlot]

So I'm wondering if I should find a good wired cheap PS3 controller, or if I should just pick up an adapter for a PS2 controller (probably the latter).

Also why is it that I have 2 working PS2 controllers (slightly busted, but every button works perfectly minus the R1 slipping out of place and a big crack on the other) after I treated them like shit and seriously tossed them around in my youthful fits of rage, but my shitty Logitec pad and my madcatz are hardly a year old and they have both fallen apart (Logitec pad is just all sorts of broken, the madcatz d pad now sticks, making it useless for fighting games and super meat boy).

Either my hands are now strong as shit or these pads are shit. I do know I held my Dpad down hard as shit on my madcatz pad playing Guile (to the hand were my hand would be sore after a short while) but still, it should still be fine after that.

[Spectere]

Yeah, that is an impressive SOC. Unfortunately rooting my Mybook hasn't really provided me with the platform I had been hoping it would. It's more or less too slow to do much of anything.

Heh, even that thing isn't all that quick.  Last night I tried setting up a chrooted Gentoo install on it.  HOLY SHIT.  I gave up when I waited 15 minutes for it to compile eix (basically, an insanely fast Portage search tool) and it still didn't finish up.

I was going to try setting up a chrooted Debian install last night, but I gave up because I was too tired.  That's going to be my best bet for putting a real environment on it.  The one downside of having an EEPROM holding the OS.  The fact that I can nuke the bootloader is a little scary, especially considering I don't have a JTAG handy. :x

[Bobbias]

Heh, even that thing isn't all that quick.  Last night I tried setting up a chrooted Gentoo install on it.  HOLY SHIT.  I gave up when I waited 15 minutes for it to compile eix (basically, an insanely fast Portage search tool) and it still didn't finish up.

I was going to try setting up a chrooted Debian install last night, but I gave up because I was too tired.  That's going to be my best bet for putting a real environment on it.  The one downside of having an EEPROM holding the OS.  The fact that I can nuke the bootloader is a little scary, especially considering I don't have a JTAG handy. :x

Eep. I just stayed with busybox, small, and it was already there. Mind you, sitting through building PHP 3 times at 45 mins a pop was insanely painful lol.

[Spectere]

It's not so much busybox that's holding me back.  They used a rather old toolchain to build all of the components -- circa 2005 (we're talking glibc 2.4 here).  Cross-compiling a compatible toolchain has proven to be rather painful on a modern Linux 3.0 system thus far, as expected.  Then again, compiling binutils, gcc, and glibc does tend to be a pretty painful process.

So, basically, I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do this.  I think that installing a Debian chroot (chroots are very easy to maintain and run servers from; they're far less intimidating than they sound and can still easily access data on the main hard drive) will be the best option.

I suppose I could always grab qemu here, install Debian for ARM on it, and transfer it over.  That would probably be easier than trying to bootstrap it, as debootstrap requires either perl or pkgdetails, and possibly other packages that would be painful to get working.

Oh, speaking of Linux, I decided to try out Linux Mint.  Out of all the binary distros I've used, this is the one that's impressed me the most so far in terms of friendliness.  I even decided to try out a close-to-vanilla Gnome 3 (I added a couple of features, like a dock on the main desktop, removing the accessibility options button, and a few other minor things) but, honestly, it's not bad so far!  I haven't tried to do too much serious work with it, so my opinion could easily change in a flash, but so far it's not completely awful.

One thing is for certain: it borrows a lot from OS X and throws a little bit of Windows 7 in the mix to spice things up.  The "overview" screen is basically Expos

[Bobbias]

Screenshots incoming?

And yeah, I've chrooted in before. It's a regular occurance for me installing gentoo since I always seem to have an insane amount of trouble installing wifi drivers for the system, but the autodetect on the install CD works fine because the compressed kernel they use has a bunch of firmware built in that's not normally part of gentoo.

[Spectere]

Sure. Here's a screenshot of overview mode with a few applications running. If you have multiple monitors it'll show the applications that are running on that current monitor and give you the ability to easily drag applications between monitors in that screen. As you can see, you can also close applications from that screen.

I just dragged everything over to one monitor so that the image wouldn't be 3849023x1200.

Here ya go:

[Bobbias]

Nice, that looks pretty cool.