Brian's Brain

Following up on yesterday's post (for which exploits are already in the wild, so like I said before, get patchin'!) I hit my router's embedded web server and saw the bad news I feared...with the Linksys WRT54GC, it's not possible to override the PPPoE-assigned DNS server addresses so that I can use OpenDNS's servers. There's a workaround, of course; I could give everything on my LAN a static IP assignment, complete with hard-coded DNS server information, to override the normally ro...Read More

This is one of those times when I really hate to have to say 'I told you so' (but of course I will anyway). Back in early 2004, I crafted one of my more popular editorials (at least as measured in number of scathing responses) based on my personal experience with hacker-surmounted gear running a no-longer-updated-by-hardware-supplier Linux distribution. Much of the feedback from the Torvalds-and-Stallman faithful was frankly ridiculous. Insisting that I should maintain the O/S and its bundled apps in the absence of Toshiba's continuance (assuming, of course, that I even know about the vulnerabilities as they emerge) might be ...Read More

Speaking of downloadable video...in my initial inspection of the frequently-mentioned VUDU settop box, I pointed out that (like the Xbox 360, for example, but unlike the Apple TV, Netflix Player, Nintendo Wii or PlayStation 3) it didn't offer integrated Wi-Fi as a connectivity option. The company announced a wireless bridge add-on adapter set in early June, and I finally got my hands on a review unit late last week.

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It seems like just yesterday (but it was actually 1.5 years ago!) that I was first writing to you about the world's first 1 TByte 3.5" HDD. That five-platter monster from Hitachi might have been record setting, but at 200 GBytes per platter (aka 100 GBytes per side), it wasn't terribly cost-effective, nor was it particularly power-stingy. But, as I pointed out in a November follow-up, you don't necessarily need to be perfect when you're the only game in town!

Hitachi's accomplishment didn't remain sole-sourced long, of course, given the hyper-competitiveness of the HDD industry. Seagate launched a four-platter (250 GByte/platter) configuration in June of 2007, along with a Samsung paper-launch of a three-platter (333 GByte/platter) ...Read More

As I type these words, I've just pressed 'play' on Hellboy in high-def (in preparation for a cinema viewing of its highly-rated sequel, shepherded by one of my favorite directors), played back over my PlayStation 3. But I don't have a Blu-ray disc in the drive. And no, I didn't do any arguably illegal ripping.

Hellboy represents my third sampling of the long-rumored, Tuesday-promised, and ...Read More

Speaking of wind power...Monday's Sacramento Bee included an interesting article about local ski resort Kirkwood's plans to install 20 wind turbines in partnership with Synergy Power, based in Reno, NV. This bit particularly caught my eye:

The spinning blades would provide 6,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity daily – enough to satisfy about 20 percent of demand during the peak winter season and virtually everything needed to keep the lights on in summer.

"This would allow us to eliminate fossil fuel generation for all but four months a year" Kirkwood CEO Dave Likins said. "We could go almost eight months car...Read More

If my past coverage of Oppo Digital's DVD players (or Steve's, for that matter) has piqued your interest, get thee to Woot! asap in order to pick up the DV-981HD 1080p upscaling unit for $99 (plus $5 for shipping). The unit's MSRP is $229, thereby explaining this post! I daresay, though, that the promotion probably reflects an evaporating overall market for red-laser DVD players in the face of inevitable next-gen hardware price declines. Oppo might want to hurry up and get its Blu-ray player into production...

Continued from 'CPUs and Chipsets: Centrino 2 and A Computer Status Update'...

A Best Buy promotion last Wednesday got me seriously headed down the hardware upgrade road I'd long been eyeing. Truth be told, I even placed an order, though I subsequently canceled it. This particular hardware configuration exemplifies Intel's Santa Rosa platform; it includes a Merom-generation Core 2 T7250 CPU (2 GHz, 800 MHz front side bus, 2 MBytes of L2 cache), 4 GBytes of DDR2-667 SDRAM, and a 320 GByte SATA HDD. And, at $999.99 on sale ($1249.99 regular price), the sticker shock...Read More

Yesterday, Intel unveiled its Centrino 2 (aka Montevina) CPU-plus-chipset platform, and as such I thought it'd be a good time to update you on where I stand on the notebook computer front. As a reminder, back in late May my long-erratic MacBook 'threw a bit' (or a few) in its Boot Camp-created NTFS partition while I was overseas, rendering me unable to boot Windows XP on the system. Fortunately, once I got home, I was able to resurrect my dependable Dell Inspiron 700m (complete with a ...Read More

I was admittedly baffled when, two weeks ago, Roku proffered to Forbes (without providing any hard specifics) that additional capabilities were en route for the Netflix Player. That same week, the company released (at least some of) the device's software under an open source license. I honestly doubt that everything's included; Netflix, for example, would probably object to a leak of the protocols by which the unit accesses a Netflix customer's account and streams video from the company's Watch Instantly (aka Watch Now) servers. Microsoft similarly...Read More

While I'm on the topic of Analog Devices, now's as good a time as any to put cyber-pen to cyber-paper on another long-planned piece. The last two years at the Consumer Electronics Show, I've attended demonstrations of the company's wavelet compression-and-decompression processors, integrated within partners' wireless audio-and-video transmission equipment. The 2007 showcase was fairly underwhelming, with jerky video playback at the receiver end of the link, but a follow-up discussion somewhat clarified the root cause; ADI was (for reasons that remain unclear to me) attempting DVD-derived playback using gear intended for low-to-no frame rate digital signage applications. In (welcome) contrast, this year's version of the demo was pretty pristine, ...Read More

My contacts at Analog Devices recently sent me a multiple-slivers-of-ADI-silicon-inclusive Yamaha RX-V563 A/V receiver to test-drive. I haven't yet fired it up; I'm particularly curious to eval a few particular features, listed in no particular order below (hit the links to see why):

• 2-input/1-output HDMI switching
• The Compressed Music Enhancer
• YPAO Automatic System Ca

iFixit's Kyle Wiens sent me a nice complimentary-and-apologetic email late Friday night, in response to the publication earlier that same day of my two-part 3G iPhone analysis. He admitted that, in the rush to get iFixit's teardown treatise on the company's website, it'd messed up in reporting that Apple (and partner Samsung) had combined the ARM processor and NAND flash memory within the same package in this iPhone product generation. In fact, as with the first-generation iPhone, Samsung bundled the CPU and DRAM (1 Gbit), and the 8 or 16 GBytes of NAND flash memory (interestingly, from Toshiba, at least on this particular unit) is again standalone.

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My friend Lisa (who I've mentioned before) recently canceled her AT&T cellular plan early and sold her 1^st-generation iPhone on Craigslist, citing longstanding frustration with AT&T's spotty coverage throughout the Truckee area. Instead, she's gone with Sprint's 'iPhone killer', the Samsung Instinct (which is in the laundry list of teardown victims I mentioned last Friday). Lisa's impressions of the Instinct were very positive when she auditioned it in the Sprint showroom, aside from an inability to ...Read More

I continue playing around with my Microsoft Zune, and I continue to be generally quite pleased with the player (an 8 GByte green unit) and service. About two weeks back, OfficeMax had the 8 GByte model in black for $119.99 (MSRP $199.99) and I thought about picking up a spare, but the deal had expired by the time I got around to visiting the website. On a hunch, seeing several in-store OfficeMax coupons trickle through Dealnews this morning, I revisited the site and saw that the deal was back on!

The closest OfficeMax to me is in Reno, 30-ish miles away, so I rang up my friend Keith in the Bay Area and he was able to snag me one for $108.24 inclusive of sales tax. Here's how to mimic his success: