rob was here.

i just came across a brief article where actor johnny depp has stated he wants to do a movie about pink floyd original frontman syd barrett.

This made the hairs on my arm stand up.

For those of you who don't know the basic story of syd, he was the original singer/guitarist/songwriter for the floyd. He was only in the band for the first few years (66-68 or somewhere around there).. He very quickly burned out from excessive LSD usage combined with apparent mental delusions. Since 1970 (when he released his last solo project) he abandoned public life and became very much a recluse. He hasn't been interviewed and has been rarely spotted since.

Essentially he shined for a very brief period in the 60's before slipping into a downward spiral of madness. He did open the doors for psychedelic music and was the vital precurser to the more popular pink floyd era that we know well from the 70's.

I'm very interested to see if this movie will be made, and how depp would play barrett. I wonder if someone tried to contact Syd about the movie - and if they got through to him about it?

A week or two ago i decided that I would finally take the plunge and mod my gamecube. What will this mod do, you ask? Well, there are really two parts to my mod. First, I'm adding a qoob brand modchip. This involves soldering a little chip that I purchased to the gamecube's mainboard via 6 little wires. The purpose of adding a modchip is that it allows a sort of bypassing of the nintendo-brand bios and allowing the use of a 3rd party bios... Using a 3rd party bios allows you to do things that the nintendo bios doesn't let you do, like booting multi-region, back-up, and homebrew games or applications. Pretty much anything that one can rip, code or download is then playable by your gamecube. Since this blog is internet accessable, for legality reasons, let me state that i have no intention of running any unlegit programs...

;)..

anyways, where was I?.. Oh yes.. the second mod involves moving the entire internal hardware of the gamecube into a new case which is designed to use full sized dvd-r's instead of the mini sized disks that the gamecube normally takes. Let me point out that the eye (or laser) of the gamecube can still only mechanically move out as far as the maximum range on a mini-dvd, So you can still only fit around 1.5 gigs of relevant data on a disk. However, dvd-r's are more common and cheaper than using dvd-r-mini's, and thus are more expendable.

So let me begin.. I have an original DOL-001 gamecube from their first year.. This device has served me well since i picked it up 2nd hand in 2002. Here it is:



The very first step was, unexpectedly, the most difficult: Removing four screws out of the bottom of the original gamecube. Good gravy, was this amazingly difficult. Nintendo use their own custom screws ( a sort of funny octagon shape head) to prevent people from opening these things. I had the proper tool (or so i thought) ordered in with my replacement case. It took a good 2-3 hours to get the four screws out.. I ended up using a combination of using a hand screwdriver, a power screwdriver, swearing at it, prying with my fingers, prying with a flathead screwdriver, etc, etc.

Lets just say that, eventually, I got the four screws out and the top came off:



After this dreadful experience, i needed a beer.



and a nap.



Okay.. back to work i guess. The next step was to remove all the screws and latches keeping the optical drive mounted on top of the computer board. Not too bad; it came off easily enough.



with the optical drive removed from the assembly and put asside, the computer board was revealed. This is like reaching the tasty innards of a boston cream donut. Notice that big heat sink on the middle of the board. I had to remove that at one point when i did the soldering.. it was pretty difficult to remove, but a little muscle and twisting dislodged it.



I removed the computer board and put it aside. The next step was taking out everything from the base of the original case (blue) and installing it into my new case (green). This included metal plates, rubber feet, the power supply board, etc.



once i got the basic base-components over into the new base, I re-installed the computer board on top of it. This is where things got interesting.. I began scoping out the computer board for the best positioning of the modchip so the wiring I would have to add would be the least intrusive. I didn't have to worry too much though, the qoob sx is a tiny modchip and had lots of room to fit inside the case. Here is the modchip before the install:



Oddly enough, I am much more comfortable soldering and playing with the digital system of the machine that I am unscrewing screws and what not.. I soldered the modchip's wires onto the mainboard as per the instructions and verified i had no shorts with a multi-meter. Here's what it looks like after the install, 6 wires later..



After the modchip was installed, I re-sat the optical drive on top of the assembly and bolted it down. I also added all the junk i took off during the disassembly such as the cooling system (fan), and the front plate where the controllers plug in. The mod is pretty much done now.



I placed the top of the case on and screwed it in. The screws didn't go in very good (i swore a lot here as well).. I didnt screw them in all the way, as I plan on getting some similar sized phillips screws to replace these painful ones. Anyways, once it was all together, i decided to first test out an original game to make sure my gamecube still worked. I tried my favourite gamecube game: the legend of zelda: the wind waker:



And here it is, my gamecube still plays all my original games!! huzzah!!



I then tried a backup version of a game. No dice. After much confusion, i realized that the qoob chip's default bios doesn't support backup's out-of-the-box.. I had to download an updated bios of the qoob chip and reflash it. I burned the updated bios file to a dvd and put it in the gamecube. A message came up indicating it was updating the bios. After the update, i retried the backup:



Success! It worked. My cube is now 100% bonafide modified. Gravy!

At a party last night, i was discussing google and mozilla shortcuts with a friend. Before I go on, let me state that yes, this this a pretty geekish thing to be talking about at a party. I know already! Anyways, just to recap, here are some shortcuts that I often use which some people may find interesting or useful:

dictionary:
if i want to know the meaning of a word, or perhaps alternate spellings, i just type "dict word" into the address field of mozilla firefox. This will look up the dictionary.com definition of whatever word you entered after "dict". Instead of word you use whatever you're looking up, of course. Try it. dict awesome.

wikipedia:
wikipedia is an underrated tool in the world of the internet. For those who are not familiar with it, it is a user-run free encyclopedia, where anyone (even you), can add or edit articles. A while back I started a wikipedia artcile about conception bay south, where I was born and raised. Looking back at the history of article edits, a few people have added or edited my entry, probably to fix my horrible grammar or add proper links. Anyways, if you want to look something up fast, try typing "wiki whatever" into your firefox address bar. Try it. wiki johnny cash.

Does anyone else have any favourite shortcuts they use?

Also in life news recently, i won another ipod contest!! One day I got an unexpected phone call from a local resteraunt, who drew my name in a monthly draw for an ipod mini! Alas, I have recieved an ipod already from a previous soft drink contest. No man needs 2 ipods. I suprised my girlfriend with the mini, and she liked it a lot!

Oh yeah, and regarding the last post, I exchanged my router and am back online. Unfortunately it was an over-the-counter exchange for another netgear. Netgear didn't get back to me after, as expected. Maybe it's because I told them i'm no longer a netgear customer ;) :D


loot.

It's Netgear's fault.

Three months ago i bought an netgear WTG624 wireless router from futureshop. It has been working as expected over the last 3 months, every now and then it needed a power cycle if my internet connection dropped but no big deal. Untill last night, when i pressed the "check for new firmware" button in the administration menu. The software told me that a new firmware was available and asked if I would like to upgrade to it. I clicked "yes".

After about 3-4 minutes of doing whatever it was doing, the router stopped working, and the power led was blinking between green and amber colors every few seconds. I bipassed the router and got the cable modem working directly to my dad's computer so I could goto netgear's website and find how to resolve this funny problem.

The next few minutes can only be described as horrific. I found myself going to netgear's community forums, where there were several large threads about how people's WTG624 router's are blinking green and amber and not working whatsoever. At first I was sort of intriged that there was so much information about this problem, thinking that there must be a solution offered for such a wide spread problem. Guess what? There is no solution other than mailing the router back at my own cost.

It turns out that the dozens of people complaining on the forums have done the exact same thing as me (auto-update to newest firmware) right before their router died, but Netgear apparently WONT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY.

I sent Netgear this comment:

Hi Netgear! I just want you to know i've been a loyal Netgear customer for several years now, and have really enjoyed your products (routers, access points, wireless NIC's, etc!)

That is, of course, until I tried to do an firmware auto-update on my WGT624v2 router last night, which turned it into a useless paperweight. If you are not familiar with this problem, just check your customer forums: there is a huge thread there where dozens and dozens of your valued customers have been posting the EXACT SAME PROBLEM there for several weeks! and they are all looking for a solution but are calling upon deaf ears!! Hooray for Netgear!

Here's my post on that particular forum thread, please take the time to read it:

I've had the router for about 3 months so far. As many people have done, i went ahead and tried to do an auto-update from the admin screen before reading the forums or anything. My router's power light is now blinking green and amber, and not responding to pings.

After reading this forum for the last half hour regarding the multitude of people with this problem, i'm shocked that netgear is not trying to correct the situation with people with failed routers. RMA'ing us a new router at OUR cost is NOT A SOLUTION, especially when the company is to blame for the failure.

I refuse to jump through hoops to try to get another equally faulty router. I'm going to try to bring mine back to the retailer where I bought it tommorow, and exchange it for a d-link or a link-sys.

Netgear: Never Again.

If you ever want to contact me regarding this mis-hap, my email address is robnorris@gmail.com

As of right now, i'm no longer a Netgear customer.

Good day to you.
Rob Norris

I'm interested to see if I hear back from them, but i'm not holding my breath. I dunno. Hopefully futureshop will be more understanding at let me switch to another model.