I apologize for taking this long to post this! I’ve been busy non-stop since 27c3 and never got a chance to get around to it. Finally, though, here it is: the description of the Mark 1 laser projector that I use with OpenLase.

But wait, there’s more! If you don’t have the hardware and don’t want to build it, or you want to try out OpenLase, or you want to be able to mess around with it on the go, you can now do that. There’s a new OpenGL-based simulator in the OpenLase tree. It works off of the JACK data (so you still need JACK) and it tries to simulate the dynamics of my laser scanner, including brightness effects and some of the physical limitations of the galvos. Here’s a comparison of the simulator vs. the real thing:

I’m aware that documentation on the software is still sorely lacking. Please bear with me while I get my act together and write that up

Update: see this post for hardware info and also a new GL laser simulator for those without hardware.

First of all, as I’m sure everyone knows by now, I’ve been working on hacking the Kinect and writing open drivers for it. There’s a website for the community and a Git repo with the code, and it’s working fairly nicely by now.

With that out of the way, here’s a project that I’ve been working on on-and-off for the past year or so. I’ve been interested in laser scanning and DIY laser projectors, but I couldn’t find any good open source software to drive them. Specifically, I was interested in the realtime aspect: rendering and showing dynamically generated images and responding to events, not just making and preprocessing laser shows. So I set out to write my own set of software to do real-time rendering. This was the result:

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As most of you will probably already know, I’ve been working on a project recently which aims to run Linux on the PS3 (including the PS3 Slim) using the PSJailbreak exploit, effectively replacing GameOS on the fly. I think it’s gotten to the point where it’s useful enough for other people to be interested, so here’s something resembling an official announcement.

Obligatory demo video:

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It seems the ongoing trend for laptops is to integrate and hide as much as possible from the user. We’re all used to minimalistic crappy BIOS setups with two or three configuration options. However, things go way too far when OEMs remove options related to features that the hardware is capable of but which are disabled by default. This happens with Intel VT on many laptops – even if the CPU supports it, you may not be able to find the BIOS setup option to turn it on.

I certainly wanted to use a feature that I paid for, so I started investigating the BIOS and here’s what I found out.

Update: There’s a 1.21 BIOS floating around that seems to have VT enabled natively. See below.
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After a few days of reading very, very weird disassembled code and poking registers, the odd 2D hardware finally works (for the most part). It can draw lines, so I threw in a software 3D transform. Here’s the Stanford Bunny in a glorious 448 vertices and 1416 lines of jaggy wireframe awesomeness.

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I’ve joined a bunch of friends in a quest to reverse engineer and write custom software for Sunplus SPMP305x chips. These chips are inside all sorts of chinese media players, particularly the fairly powerful kind with a camera, video playback, etc. The chip is based around an ARM926EJ-S core, but the peripherals around it are completely custom – check out the marketing blurb. Most current work is on reverse engineering the hardware interface so we can completely replace the default firmware.

If you’re interested and you have one of these or don’t mind spending $33 to get an interesting ARM machine, check out the wiki, Google Code project for the Prex port and other stuff, and my Git repository with a port of MINI and a bunch of client utilities for reverse engineering and testing the hardware stuff. Most importantly, however, come visit us at #spmpdev on the EFNet network! Most of the work and chitchat happens in the IRC channel.

With newer iPods and the iPhone 2.x firmware, Apple decided to implement a new hash scheme for iTunesDB to prevent third-party apps from managing the iPod database. Stupid. They decided to make it part of the FairPlay codebase, including its obfuscation. Very Stupid. But just in case that weren’t enough, then they went ahead and tried to take down the iPodHash project which was attempting to reverse engineer the (annoyingly obfuscated) algorithm. Completely Stupid.

I had previously patched the check out in the MusicLibrary binary, and forgot to write it up. However, I just looked at it again, and it turns out that you can get it to work just by changing a simple XML file. I guess they didn’t really care if jailbroken iPhone users used third-party software.
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