It’s really, really paining me to watch the beating that the openmoko project is currently taking. I’ve been majorly into this idea for some time now, about half way through ‘07. FOSS is a brilliant thing, and it’s only a matter of time before the telecommunications industry wakes up to that. After all, Linux sprouted from Unix which sprouted from a telco.

Sadly, it looks like the openmoko team has set the effort back a fair ways. It’s been released before it was ready and Dave Fayram has pointed that out. I thought Dave gave a reasonably fair assesment. He doesn’t seem to have spent much time with the manual, but most users don’t. His review has unfortunately been leapt upon by every Apple fanboy out there and it’sgaining a life of it’s own.

I’m a rank outsider, no involvement in the project whatsoever aside from voraciously reading news about it for the past 12 months. Frankly, it seems that it’s been mismanaged by FIC. There has been a fair amount of disgruntlement coming from the developers working for the company. The fact that they switched from the original GTK platoform to the qtopia stack at the eleventh hour smacked of desperation.

This wouldn’t really bother me if it wasn’t for the fact that openmoko had gained so much media attention. So often you hear outlets talking about the triumverate of iPhone, Android and openmoko. Up until this week I’ve been really proud to see such a rabidly open source project be given that much airtime. It’s frustrating to now find out that they weren’t deserving of it.

I think those of us looking for an open source phone now need to turn towards the slightly-open-source-but-not-really Android, and hope like hell that something great comes out of Nokia’s plans for opening up Symbian.

I bought a Wii recently with a bunch of vouchers I scored from work. While this entire thing is undoubtedly awesome, there’s one problem for me. I have a projector in my loungeroom, and the Wii needs a “sensor” bar for the Wiimote to work. What’s annoying is that this bar needs a cable that has to run across the centre of my loungeroom in order to work.

Luckily, all that’s in that “sensor” bar is a bunch of infrared LEDs. Nothing more. So, why not build your own? There are plenty of people out there that have done so, and I decided to do it as well, with a few differences from what else is out there. I’ll leave the gritty details to a future post on garagehacker. This post is merely to highlight my retardedness.

I spent an hour or so wiring up the circuit, and spent a decent portion of that calibrating a potentiometer to the right level of resistance. Unfortunately, I then wired up both points to the same leg, completely removing the resistor from the circuit.

Niiiice.

Needless to say, removing 440ohms resistance from your circuit results in Colonel Dave’s Crispy Fried LEDs. I’m not sure how many I’ve burnt but I’d say it’s at least 4-5. Financially, they’re only $1 a peice. It’s still bloody annoying, however, and I feel like a real moron.

So hence the title, don’t try and hack if you’re retarded (like me).

I finally got around to modding my PSP to Dark Alex’s new 3.03OE Rev A firmware last night. I’d been putting it off since it looks like an absolute nightmare to do.

Thankfully, however, this is just due to the fragmented nature of all the information that’s out there. The guides suck, but the actual tools are excellent and the process was really simple. I downgraded from 2.0 to 1.5, then back up to the custom. Peice of piss.

The best bit is that I can now play game images from the memory stick instead of UMDs. Also, I can play emulated PS1 games. Added to that, I can play ROMs and run homebrew programs and all sorts of other great stuff.

It’s definitely a change from the state my PSP has been in for the last 6 months or so, sitting uncharged under a pile of crap on a shelf in my bedroom.

Also, 9pm tonight is 0-hour. I find out whether I’ve been offered a university placing in the first round of offers. I’m kind of freaked out, but staying cool about the whole thing.