Two more MVNO!? So many prepaid cellular deals

hrm. can't wait to get home and see what this 'StraightTalk' (by Tracfone) is about. Tracfone, from my previous research, used AT&T or Verizon depending on the area you register it with. StraightTalk seems to resell Verizon just like pageplus... at least in summerville... i thought i checked Tracfone back in the day and they offered GSM phones (Guess AT&T costed them less) weird! so many new "virtual" providers now with this $40-50 sweet spot. :) thing bout StraightTalk is it's $5 more but no limit on DATA!?!? omg! Wonder if I can activate a phone that I don't buy from them!?!$@#$

the other was "OMG! Simple Mobile" which uses T-mobile's fairly decent network and equipment. this is great because it's so simple to just throw a SIM card into a older GSM phone et voila! they also hit that $45 sweet spot with unlimited talk/text, but if you want data it's $50 and it only gets you 20MB a month. Page Plus does that for $39.95 on a larger network. sorry, fail. :)

So yeah, I'm very interested in looking into this 'StraightTalk' I wonder if plugging in a Verizon phone ESN into the website activation will work? :)

T-Mobile @Antarctica

I should of done this from the get-go. My mom mailed me my Nokia 6301 so I could use it on my return trip (hopefully over WiFi to avoid international roaming, or unlocked with a New Zealand SIM), but without my SIM. I got it today. So I can definitely text from my room now hah.

Nokia 6301 is a "T-Mobile @Home" phone or @Hotspot whatever the hell they call it now... It uses UMA over WiFi. I have dial-up on a desktop that feeds my wifi router (adhoc may work too but this is less trouble eh -- maybe I'll confirm that later). So basically, Nokia 6301 -> Linksys WRT54g -> Desktop -> Dialup -> Microwave link to satellite uplink -> Denver, CO. hah. Amazingly the GSM codec ALMOST works over dial-up. I called my voicemail and heard it fine but I think it has difficulties hearing me.. Obviously 56k dial-up is asynchronous, with like 50k down 33k up?

So yeah, I'm a bit excited. Just received my first text in Antarctica.. w00t.

ipod touch iscsi target ? no wai!

I looked into iscsi targets that don't need anything changed in the kernel before, because I wanted to try one out over the internets using my vps... Well that one didn't work on the ipod touch. iPod touch isn't an intel x86 cpu neither. Too much linux stuff involved. NetBSD is very portable stuff, right? Of course.

netbsd's iscsi target compiled with some warnings about implicit definitions of some crap but woohoo it ran just fine. hah. i got that 100MB disk exported right now. So my t5510 is setup to netboot from iSCSI and basically, if I wanted, it could be my iPod touch serving up the Windows XP disk. That'd trash a flash drive tho, so I'm also going to play with EWF (Enhanced Write Filter?) again. Fun.

So many fun programs and projects keeping me busy in Antarctica, even tho they're overall very ... not useful, they are (re)teaching me a bunch.

Rambling about HP t5510 t5515 Thin Client, USB Boot, Windows XP Embedded, and Slax linux

I tried this before with all kinds of problems messing with booting a USB drive... Tried the reinstall image offered by HP and it had problems booting the FreeDOS kernel. I got a newer kernel and saw... omg, what the HELL kind of drive geometry is it giving my 512MB usb stick? fdisk did as old freedos kernel did - "Divide by zero" error. It set it as like 4000-ish Cyl, and 1sec/trk..!? So thats why USB booting sucked.. My 8GB one got something a weee more standard but still weird, it would always eventually boot..

So ANYWAY. I tried lots of things, Linux always ran EXCELLENT with syslinux in the MBR (not in the volume boot records tho, of course). Problem is CHS address 0/1/1 on one PC ended up different than on this one, always. So I could mess with partition tables and get stuff working, or ...

DOWNGRADE TO BIOS 1.04 OR OLDER. Reading the release notes, they "increased BIOS compatibility with USB devices" in v1.05. I've not rechecked what my drive is reported as yet, but my 512MB actually booted BartPE ... [note: edit later if this is true or not hah]

So I grabbed the Windows XP Embedded system from a HP t5700-something. Removed the first 0x200 bytes, and it's a NTFS disk image of a 256MB drive. Write to USB flash, and it'll start to boot.

Of course you can see I've great interest and success at booting XP installs from USB when they're not suppose to... but XPe made for a different machine is, wow, tough. The usual registry edits don't do it. It loads the USB drivers, but still the infamous STOP 7B blue screen.

Why? The whole SYSTEM hive is from a t5710 (or whatever it was) and uses different USB controllers is my guess... I tried basically manually changing the USB hardware in the registry to make sure it knew about the t5510's USB stuff... That wasn't enough. I merged the registry from BartPE and the t5710, that didn't work either.. DAMMIT.

Well, if you still want to run XP on your t5510, you can of course. There's a nice popular torrent out there called Micro XP by eXperience that should work fine for you. You'd still have to add EWF filters yourself to fix slow write times if using a USB flash. I imagine it'd run aight. My t5510 has 256MB of RAM. yours might not, not sure if I upgraded it or not.

The CPU is 800MHz, but don't let that confuse you. It's no intel nor desktop chip. USB I believe is super-slow 1.1 (not confirmed, this isn't my only thin client and I get confused). I may be wrong, but a good idea if you can is network booting. use/google gPXE and try booting XP over the LAN from a SAN service (theres free ones for Windows even). Booting over 100Mbps LAN is MUCH better than using USB!! Of course, best solution is a small laptop drive and 44pin IDE cable & velcro it in there haha! :)

Slax runs decent yo. Again, it's kinda heavy on the windows manager so RAM helps here but CPU is aight :)

Was pretty easy grabbing that XP Embedded image out of HP's Softpaq, if only it proved useful somehow... hrm...

PS2 FREE SOFT MOD HACK WITHOUT BUYiNG SHIT!

for real, i read an instructable that said, "free without buying anything" and the second line said, "you need swapmagic discs" hah.

Shawn: keep typing!
i'll read it in a sec

Scott: DONT STOP
OOOHHH YAH BABYLIKE DAT
...hrm wonder if there is more coffee...

Scott: so anyway this ps2 has hacks now, doesnt need a modchip, or a swapmagic, or action replay, none of that shit

took some research, ingredients where: PS2, Standard Memory Card, PS2 Retail Game (I used Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Bites?), and then made a backup of that game, swapping a file on the disc first, onto a DVD+R, swapped it at the right moment, et VOILA! hacker code started

then, that hacker code impregnanted my standard 8mb ps2 memory card with some autobooting hackerware

now i just turn on the ps2 with that memory card in, and has the launchpad to warez!

Details are here: http://freemcboot.psx-scene.com/swap.php

I wanna play StarCraft!

OK 800ms pings aren't the end of the world. I do believe a 1v1 game would do okay. Problem is, my buddy and I can't join each others games, and when I get into someone elses I get banned, of course. heh.
WWWWWWWWWWWWHHHHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYY

Weird thing is, even with the Hamachi zero-config VPN, we don't see each others games. That's encrypted over UDP... I saw network activity. Wonder if it ignores high latency games since it's suppose to be a "LAN"

*cry*

FAST Install of Windows 7 from and to USB HDD

Okay, I am in Antarctica and have a Windows 7 RTM Professional product key, thanks to my college. But I got a Windows 7 Ultimate ISO with me. I installed the Ultimate easily to USB using VHD, but no need for this, nor ghost. I have Windows XP already on my EEEPC internal lil 4g solid state drive. yippeee.

ImageX works with the install.wim inside the Windows 7 ISO. You can find it and the directions I followed here.

So I got the ISO on the internets, extracted it, with lovely free 7-zip, to a fresh NTFS formatted USB hard drive, and ran imagex. I edited the ei.cfg thinking it'd install professional, oops. Of course it didn't. The setup program reads ei.cfg, imagex looks at 'image index' which those instructions just gave the number 5. Index 4 is for professional. If you want to know the rest, imagex /info install.wim and look through that. In mine, 1=Starter, 2=HomeBasic, 3=HomePremium, 4=Professional, 5=Ultimate.

I already had the BCD boot loader installed, but that shouldn't be too tough to figure out.

Okay, so all the files are on the USB drive, but it won't boot USB just yet. Either edit the \windows\system32\config\SYSTEM hive in regedit to change USB services to start at boot-time, or use UsbBootWatcher that someone made here.

After setup does its thing and reboots, you need to go back into XP and run it again tho, because setup will hose what UsbBootWatcher did. It shouldn't mess up again tho.

A Voila. Got Windows 7 Pro legit on my netbook, without use of any of my usual hacker resources (broadband internet, bittorrent, ghost, cdrom, etc) hah. Easiest method yet! :)