FredMcD.com

As smartphone hardware is so similar from phone to phone, Android OS is so freely modifiable, and smartphone companies insist on loading their phones with useless bloat in a frantic attempt to differentiate an increasingly comoditiezed product, it is possible to take quite a cheap phone and turn it into something rather amazing. Made all the easier by the fact that others are willing to do all the complicated stuff and package it up for you.

A couple of months ago, my friend and neighbour Andrew, of 303s.com fame, gave me a Hauwei U8220 (More commonly re-branded as a T-Mobile Pulse, among other names.) on account of it being admittedly a bit on the slow side.

After about three months, a new microSD card and some extensive investigation into different firmware implementations, and I have an Android phone that runs light and smooth.

I’m not going to go in-depth with instructions, as most of the places you can download firmware will also provide the instructions for implementing them.

Major modifications include:

• FTB-Mod firmware from the guys over at Modaco’s T-Mobile Pulse forum.
• While not running the most up to date Android kernel, it is smooth and stable.
• Class 10 (Actually 8.) 16GB microSD card.
• Tested with H2TestW 1.4 and came out as being 8MB/s write with 15MB/s read.
• As 6MB/s is the minimum, it works alight.
• Pretty cheap from Ebay, can get an official Samsung 8GB class 10 for about the same.

Preparing the MicroSD card.

Downloading and installing firmware.

Once you have your SD card set up, plug it into your computer via an adapter or the phone itself and download the firmware file (Or do it directly from the phone, with the handy QR code on the right.). I am assuming you have already read one of the upteen rooting and installing Clockwork how-tos littered across the internet.

App it up!

For the longest time, bittorent has been largely the domain of geeks the internet over yet, despite it’s incredible usefulness of being able to send files without the need for expensive servers, it’s overly technical nature of torrent files, clients, upload ratios and abillity to hose a connection if not properly managed leave it’s best utilization out of the reach of most.

The Blimp’s aim is to take existing technology and make it far more accessible by taking care of problems, both in terms of utilization and management, making itself as invisible as something like Flash or HTTPS.

Currently looking at Webkit and Libtorrent for candidates to build from, but I’ve only got a bit of C# experience, so it’s going to be a while to re/learn, in which time, I thought I’d get some feedback on the idea. If someone wants to take this over, you’d be doing great work (And I got vidjagaems I’d rather be making.).

First Phase: Prototype/Proof-of-concept.

My first idea of a way to better utilize bittorent was by making a deamon, instead of a client, that any program on the computer could ask to fetch files. A good showcase for this would be by rendering the following code, consisting of HTML5 video tags and Magnet links (Expanded to make it more readable.).

<video width="1024" height="720" controls="controls">
  <source src="

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:54dec3e7b1169fad5587d5a9e30fafa92097eab7
&dn=Big+Buck+Bunny+%282008%29+BRRip+720p+x264+-MitZep
&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80
&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80
&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.ccc.de%3A80

" type="video/mp4" />

  Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

Side note: For those of you unfamiliar with Magnet Links if you click this version of the above Magnet URI, it will download the link through your torrent client of choice.

Without any complication on the part of the user, when the browser loads the page, it immediately sends the relavent info onto The Blimp which looks up peers ready for the video being clicked. If a click comes, it downloads the file, grabbing chunks in order, and passing them back to the browser to render.

As part of the prototype phase, making this work with with the audio tag and anchor tag (E.g. Clicking to download an Ubuntu ISO.) would be useful to give an example the final project’s uses. Though just having a video playing from no fixed source would be a great achievement.

Second Phase: Core features.

A feature I’ve nicknamed Fleeting, Blimp deamons on the same local network can be told to work as one. Either by having a single computer (E.g. A large desktop or server with CAT5 connection.) do all dealings with the internet at large or a redundant cluster of deamons which, when they realise one of their number has gone offline, will download and upload chunks on behalf of their counterparts, making it easier to utilise upload bandwidth at times of day not usually busy.

In addition to programs being able to ask for files, they can also place a temporary restriction on all deamons on the network, for instance when a Skype call comes in or you connect to a game server, downloads would be reduced to half and uploads could be temporarily stopped (Some of us only get 50kB/s up.) to make way for more latency crucial tasks.

Enough for now.

I’ll stop there before I run out of steam. A high quality user interface (Those bittorrent links are a pain to copy.) could be provided by some kind of extension and, though I’ll probably save it for another project, once storage has been separated from location, some use of authentication technology could be used to make entire websites distributable without any central location.

You’ve probably wound up on this site after tearing your hair out for a bare minimum of half an hour trying to get a printer, attached to a Windows XP computer, to print a document sent to it by a Windows 7 computer.

First of all, can you see the printer?

Specifically, can you go via, network places (My Computer –> Network), locate the computer the printer is connected to and open the computer’s shared folders and printers in order to have the printer icon with the little pipe under it appear on your screen?

A common problem for this is having different workgroup names:

• In XP, right click My Computer and go to properties at the bottom of the right-click menu then over to the second panel (Who’s name I can’t remember, please post in the comments.) and look for it in the lower half.
• In Windows 7, it’s in the System Properties window found by opening My Computer and clicking the “System Properties” link below the address bar.
• If they don’t match, you can find the relative buttons pretty easily.

Once you get those matched up, you should be able to see each other, if not, post a comment and I’ll get back to you.

I am assuming you can now see the printer over the network, but trying to connect to it will give you a driver not found error no-matter what to try and do.

First USB, then network.

Before we continue: If you can extract the driver and have the installer manually find it, you will probably be better off that what I am about to outline as this method will break if you change the XP machine’s network name. Though this may break it either way.

First we’re going  to plug the printer in and have it automatically add the printer. It may handle this with the in-built drivers, or you may have to download and install them yourself. In your own time, plug in and install the printer to your Windows 7 computer as you would normally. You can print off a test page if you’d like.

Then, unplug it and plug it back into your XP computer.

Next, go to the “Devices and Printers” window (Find it in the start menu.) and find the printer, it should be greyed out. Right click on it and go to “Printer Properties” and head over to the “Ports” tab. This is where the magic happens.

You want to click “Add port” and then “Local Port” (Not “Standard TCP/IP Port”.) and then click the “New Port..” button.

What you want to ender in the text field is an address that will look like “\\computer-name\printer-name”.
For instance, “\\fred-desktop\CannonIP4500″, this is not case sensitive and you get the names as follows:

Start –> Computer and click Network in the sidebar. The computer name, as it appears here, is the target computer’s network name, the first part of your printer’s address. If your computer’s name has spaces in it, you can find the “%40″ or similar used to replace a space.

Open up the target computer by double clicking it, and find the printer’s name, as it appears there, is what you want for the second part of the address.

Clicking “OK” should give you a new port in the Ports tab of Printer Properties. If it isn’t selected, select it, and you should now have a networked printer, just print a test page to find out.

If you found this useful..

please leave a comment. If it didn’t work or, better still, you found a better solution, please leave a comment and I’ll look into improving this for guide for everyone to use.

What if it were possible to embed a video, music or any kind of file, into any website, and have it load every time, without restrictions or technical limitations other than raw hardware capability.

Bittorrent has come a long way since it’s beginings as a replacement for older P2P networks like Limewire. Over the years, we’ve seen Mainline DHT become much more useful while consuming much less bandwidth, thus phasing out trackers as an absolute necessity and the addition of magnet links mean we no longer need to host torrent files anywhere.

In short, we are now at the point where being able to insert a file by URI is within our grasp. What does this mean in practical reality?

Files no longer need to exist in a set location, instead being stored by a swarm of it’s viewers but can be augmented by servers if you want. Each person who watches a video acts as a host for that video, meaning that you are no longer restricted by Youtube’s 10 minute limit, it’s resolution limit or it’s slowness on congested days. Files will stay up as long as people are interested in them (Servers can also be added via magnet link’s “as” locator parameter.), and no longer will half the videos from yesteryear 404.

Major problems faced:

1. Building it in the first place: Some combination of Chrome/Chromium + MPlayer (Built in.) + LibTorrent should be enough for a proof-of-concept.
2. Specifically for video: Not having people use insane codecs, encoding and subtitle formats.
   1. I’m not holding my breath for a single standard, hopefully WebM and H.264 will cover most video.
3. Unsure whether having different video resolutions rolled into a single link (Entirely possible.) would be a good idea.
   1. Leaving the option in would work.
4. Links you click on are no longer checked by anyone, so you have to trust the person linking you to/embedding a video.
   1. This is how most content on the net works, no big problem.

I hope this gives you something to think about. While you’re thinking, give the Wikiepdia article on the Magnet URI scheme a look, it’s quite fascinating.

With zombies popular so recently, I began wondering why other types of enemy in games are almost always so uninteresting or often outright frustrating. While actual AI, a program that learns and modifies it’s behaviour based on interaction, is a long way off in all but abstract senses, giving enemies more than the typical run towards player shooting behaviours that ruined Farcry 2 and many other games, and jars against the complex physics and visuals in todays games, would be a start.

First and foremost, giving enemies a basic sense of self-preservation opens up a whole range of dynamics. In a basic form, the enemy is given a health bar and some kind of panic meter. As the panic meter increases, the enemy’s program is changed to respond differently.

What kind of events affect the panic meter?

• Death of a teammate with no player in sight (Stealth kills.).
  • Discovering a body.
• Taking non-fatal damage.
  • Could even take effect when enemies feel bullets hitting around them.
• Explosions, fire and destruction.
• Being aimed at (Mexican standoff.).
  • Seeing squad member being aimed at.
• Player neutralising or incapacitating either a number of the enemy squad and/or it’s leader.

Other factors to add in:

• Is the enemy facing towards or away from the player?
• Do they have their gun ready?
  • Can they hit the player reliably (Shotgun vs sniper situation.).
• How notorious is the player?
• How far are they from help or cover?
• Is shooting already happening (Calm before the storm.)?

What does this open up?

• No longer is gunning down hordes your only option.
• Enemies value their own survival over killing you.
• Scaring enemies away through shock and awe tactics gives the player a way to feel even better blowing things up.
• Being able to take on a much larger threat using thinking instead of just more force.
  • Feeling bad ass.
• No need to mop up after a fight. Killing the majority of a force will cause a retreat.
  • Giving you time to loot and go before reinforcements show up.
• For a real challenge, players can attempt non-violent resolutions.

Note: Enemies should probably drop their weapons when running away.

Leaving you with these things to think about (Feel free to leave a comment.), this is Fred, signing off.