my W810i housing mod

well, i got my rma'd W810i back. so nice having a decent phone vs a crappy one. hehe.  however, after verifying that it worked normally i decided to the front camera case mod.  its probably one of the easiest housing mods you can do w/the W810i.  Just remove the two screws under the battery cover, pop off the housing, put on the K750 or W800 housing (almost identical housings / hardware is used among these three phones).




afterwards!



in addition to the camera housing change, i also fully disassembled my W810i and used my silver buttons from the spare parts K750i i had. the camera cover slide will not turn off/on the camera (i even purchased the camera ribbon for the K750i which did fit, however the connector that goes to the phone's pcb was vertically set not horizontally). i can now fully disassemble and reassemble my W810i in prob under 5 minutes (tried to swap out a few parts but had to then go back and replace w/the W810i pieces).

my next step will be doing some File System customizations and CID49 hacking using XS++ and Far Manager. i'll post some screenies of my phone once i get some new flash themes added and custom drivers updated. should be fun, given i don't brick my phone!!

the future of the ps3.. brighter?

well, its been about 4 months since i've purchased my PS3 and figured its time to do a little recap on on my past, current and future thoughts on the big black beast (aka ps3.. hehe).

my past relationship w/sony has been a love / hate relationship. i loved the original playstation, didn't get a ps2 at all (really just modded xboxs, didn't really get into this generation; got into the computer gaming side), got a psp but was disappointed w/the lack of good games, had no original interest in the ps3 since it was just gonna be all glitz and not much of a new experience. my sony allegiance in the other consumer electronics area still burned bright. i love sony digital cameras and their nice highend mobile phones (ie K800).

however, after jumping into the HD realm i realized it was time to pick my other next gen system. i already had my wii and enjoyed it for what it was and not for what it wasn't. so it came down to the xbox360 and the ps3. the x360 had the game advantage and a year headstart on the ps3, however the x360 didn't do the music and photos like the ps3 so the ps3 it was. the bluray player also was a selling point and the possibility of future firmware updates to do upscaling of dvds helped.

bluray looked great, the audio/video options were a nice bonus, and the initial games were pretty decent (being a racing fan, nfs:carbon was my kind of game). however up until recently, the ps3 saw a pretty nasty game drought, which really wasn't that bad since it was from early to late summer and i was super busy and its summer!

the near future for the ps3 looks very promising. we'll see some great looking games in the next few months including Lair, Heavenly Sword, Stranglehold, EyeCreate, Warhawk, and the usual sports games. the game i'm most excited for is LittleBigPlanet. that game looks amazing and so much fun, plus i'm a huge fan of games that allow for user submitted content. should be a blast and perhaps will establish its own cult following to say the least. plus, we'll have metal gear and gt5 to look forward to and also ffxiii (however that may be late 08 or even 09 for us americans.. boo! however i'd take a remixed/upconvert of FFVII to hold me off though. ).

i haven't lost faith in sony yet. i'll give them to 2008 to sell me on my purchase and the next few months should do that. lair could end up being a system selling game, the scale of it seems almost on the epic side (seeing that many enemies on screen is crazy!).

so go sony, keep up the good firmware updates and releases!!

is july RMA month?? wsod on new W810i and more geek pains

is july the official RMA month? sure seems so for me, had to RMA three items this last week: my new W810i phone (arrived DOA, argh!!), a 1GB MicroSD card, and of course my Western Digital 80GB laptop hd.  however, i guess i can't really complain since prior to this month i've only had to RMA 4 items in the last 5 years (considering how many geek toys/items i buy, not a bad number).

i've officially given up on getting OSX on my HP TC1100.  using a different external cd/dvd drive did not seem to resolve any of the install problems/slowness.  i might try the deedmo image method but at this point don't see any reason to try since it will prob run slow as heck.  so instead, i'm back to my dual booting XP/Vista setup.

been thinking about a few of the mods i want to do w/my new phone (that is once i get a replacement and verify that it works fine since my mods will nullify the warranty).  so far these are the mods i plan to do (given the phone is CID36 not CID49; the RMAd W810i was a CID49 so i may be limited on what i can do w/the filesystem and UI hacks).  glad i held onto my buddies dead K750 so that i can use those parts w/my W810i. i love how sony ericsson phones are so moddable! now if only they could get rid of that WSOD; however i think the problem i had w/my phone was mainly because it was really not a NIB phone (phone had signs of wear and tear; the camera lense had a nasty coating on it and the memory card slot was broken and the LCD display was not properly centered; i could see light on the side of the lcd). so hopefully get that back soon.   here's the mods list i want to try:

-housing mod:  going to use K750i camera cover side, replace all black buttons w/silver K750 buttons

-software mods: complete overhaul of UI (black/orange brushed metal style) and Walkman player.  Possible camera and acoustic driver hacks (use drivers from K750, W800). I may see its possible to add the camera lense switch from the K750 (given there this is supported on the W810i, which it may not be).

and i'll see if i can get tethering working too since i was able to get the non-existant VPN Internet plan from Tmobile (the $19.99 that doesn't include wifi since who wants hotspot service to start with eh?).

i'll be posting up some recipes to my hacks/mods later next week.  btw, if your a sony ericsson user, head over to my other fave SE hangout area: http://se-nse.com  some good SE fanboys/hackers over there.

peace

my tip on getting 'hooked up' in life as a geek/person

let me start off on the right foot and warn my readers that this is not one of my typical geek posts. it is, but isn't.  no, this really is a post with some tips on life itself and getting oneself through it a little easier.  like most geeks of my generation (ie Nintendo generation, late 20s to 30s), i've got 'soft' skills.  no, i'm not good at knitting or stitching, but i'm good with people.  the previous generation geeks were always criticized for lacking these skills (for most of the prev gen, you could get away with being a total geek/tech expert and not have to worry about the people skills.  the technical knowledge itself overrided dealing w/co-workers and supervisors and others outside of the tech realm (not a rip on any generation or a 'my dads stronger than yours' statement, our world got much more 'PC' than previous).

OSX86 update and other geeky tidbits

well, i figure its time for me to do a follow up post on my recent experience on getting Mac OSX 10.4.6 on my HP TC1100.  previously i was having some major problems getting OSX86 to install and to even boot after install.  sadly, my situation/experience has not changed in regards to getting OSX86 installed and running on my TC1100 tablet pc.

my installation will take over 5 hours to complete (if it does complete) but never boots.  i have tried using all of the known flags for darwin to see if that would speed up the install but none of them seem to have any effect (ie tried platform=x86pc and acpi, tried idehalt=0 and cpu=1, nothing seems to help).  i also have tried using a different install dvd (10.4.6 and 1.04.8, both JaS versions w/the amd/intel patches built in), different harddrive (since my 80gb died, but should be back this week), removed my 1GB memory and used only the builtin memory (512mb), removed the battery; again still over 5 hours to install and no luck on booting.

happy 4th of july!

some fireworks from the good ole taste of mn (where you can get anything fried! hehe)

hacks and developers

just recently two huge breakthroughs were made in the PSP underground/hacking world.  Noobz and Archaemic found an exploit in the game Lumines that basically allow all PSP firmware versions (1.5 to 3.50) and allow it to run homebrew.  this is a pretty huge find, so much so that for a few days Lumines sales on amazon exploded, at one point its sales were up 5,700%! whoa.

however, this is not the first instance that a game exploit/buffer overflow has been the entry point for hackers into a gaming console.  with the xbox there came to be a way to softmod it via a hacked game save file, i believe the game used was mech assault. 

the gamecube also had a game hack too, that game was phantasy star online. it allowed users to even put linux on the gamecube.

so i've always wondered, do developers purposedly leave the rare exploit in their code in hopes to drive their own software sales due to the exploit? even though the console maker and other software makers may not like the idea, it really seems to be plausible thought.  one that i am sure that most devs would ever speak of. 

anywho, i also see that the iphone activation has been hacked, DVD Jon has figured out a way to emulate the apple activation servers, however you will not have any cell phone abilities (but give this some time, once the sim card lock has been broken, a combination of this hack and a future one could allow those non-cingular/att users to have actual working iphones; not saying it will be me but ya never know.. i like a good hack!).

peace