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AddOn Spotlight: LootLink
Regardless of how long you've played, I'm sure you've run into LootLink at some point or other. LootLink is an in-game item database that's populated as you encounter new items in Azeroth. It's searchable, and the items within the database can be linked in game to other players. (Yes, this is how you end up with countless linkings and relinkings of every new and awesome piece of gear in the game.) However, besides the infinite amounts of fun you can have with this mod by playing around in the dressing room or teasing your friends with epic items, there's some good utility to this mod as well -- though perhaps it's just my poor memory that makes me say that.Have a favorite mod, or a unique mod you can't live without? Send us a tip and maybe it will wind up in our next AddOn Spotlight!
MS banning firmware modders?
Xboxic has a detailed post on Microsoft's response to Xbox 360 firmware modders that I won't attempt to explain in full. Supposedly, MS is now banning users with the easily detected hack. No surprise there, unless you don't happen to have hacked firmware and get the axe anyway.
AddOn Spotlight: TheoryCraft
I'm always a fan of more data. The default interface only provides very basic information about your spells and abilities, and as the base abilities are modified more heavily by gear, it becomes impossible to determine what exactly your abilities are doing for you without the help of a calculator and several pages of notes. This is why I like the TheoryCraft mod that I ran across on Curse Gaming, which gives at-a-glance info on what all of my spells hit for right on my toolbar, as well as providing more detailed tooltip information. And, while I'm looking at it as a caster, it provides equal amounts of information for physical damage-dealers, giving an average damage per attack (and other statistics) based on equipped gear. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go back to switching out gear and staring at numbers...
Divineo 'evolves' PSP face plates
If Divineo's chrome PSP faceplate wasn't your bag, the Talismoon Evolve series might be.According to Divineo, everything needed to create a new-look PSP is included in a single package, consisting of the faceplate color of your choice, an illustrated diagram, hardened steel jeweler's screwdriver, a dazzling set of diamond series buttons as well as a finely made polishing cloth to preserve the appearance of your PSP for years to come. If you want a custom look for your PSP but can't afford one of Sony's Signature PSPs, this may be an excellent way to go. And for only $15, you won't be out too much if you don't end up liking it. However, keep in mind that removing your face plate will void your PSP's warranty.[Via DCEmu]
AddOn Spotlight: Lizzy's interface
My horde priest, Lizzy, is the level 60 I play most often (though frequently, time limitations mean I'll end up playing alts for a half an hour here or there), but the interfaces of all my characters are mirrored off the needs of this one priest. I try to keep things simple -- which makes patch day a lot easier. So if you're curious as to what all is cluttering my screen, keep reading!
How to supersize your Mac Pro's SuperDrive
Oh, those tricky engineers over at Apple; how they love to slip little treats inside their boxes. Recently we found out that Cupertino had surreptitiously included 802.11n chips from Broadcom into its latest lineup of all-in-one iMacs, and now we've learned that many of the SuperDrives in the Mac Pro are even more super than their spec sheets or current functionality would have led us to believe. The good folks over at HardMac decided to find out the real deal behind Sony's DW-D150A DVD burner that ships with most Mac Pros (the others sport a Pioneer DVR-111D), and after disassembling the drive and doing a little research, discovered that this previously-unknown model is actually just a rebadged NEC ND-4570A. Normally such a revelation wouldn't be very interesting, except for the fact that NEC's version of the burner touts superior performance and more features than Apple endowed the Sony with, and a fairly simple firmware tweak is all it takes to make your SuperDrive even more powerful. We won't go into the specifics of the hack here, but after you've successfully followed the instructions laid out in the Read link, your drive will suddenly be able to burn DVD-RAMs and dual layer DVD-Rs, write CD-R discs at 48x (as is, these SuperDrives max out at 32x), and perhaps best of all, read DVDs from around the world (i.e. the new firmware is region-free). Next up for Team HardMac? Getting ahold of some LabelFlash-compatible discs and attempting a firmware update to the ND-4571 -- soon, your Mac Pro may be able to get its label on as well.[Via TUAW]
Updated roundup of essential Oblivion mods
PixelRage has assembled a collection of 13 Oblivion mods that they feel Bethesda Softworks should have included as in-game features to begin with. Some of them may seem trivial, but they add to the game's realism and overall usability. In addition to map, inventory, and environmental enhancements, your inebriated hero will now have blurry vision after boozing it up at the local tavern. And if you need a moment of silence from Jeremy Soule's brilliant score, there's a mod for inserting pauses in the soundtrack. My favorite on the list is the extended death camera, which suppresses the load screen and gives you the pleasure (or pain) of watching your character get beaten to a bloody pulp.What are your favorite Oblivion mods?See also: Oblivion: let the modding begin!
TiVo Series3 + plasma TV = big problems
So you just paid $800 for your brand new Series3 TiVo ($1,000 if you transferred your lifetime subscription), waited patiently as the morons from the cable company tried to get their heads around installing CableCARDs in a non-TV device, and finally sat down on your couch to begin recording and commercial skipping all that great HD programming -- just to find out that your damn TiVo remote doesn't work! As many home theater aficionados know (first-hand, unfortunately), plasma TVs emit a significant amount of EMI and RFI signals from their surfaces that can confuse nearby IR sensors and render them useless, especially if your home theater gear juts out in front of the display. Well this problem has been happening in spades to new Series3 owners, as the box's IR receiver seems especially sensitive to other frequencies, so much so that they often need to press a button 10 to 15 times for a command to actually register. TiVo seems to be aware of the issue, but has not yet offered a solution, which is why the good folks who frequent the TiVo Community forum have put their heads together and come up with several effective workarounds. The most ghetto of these fixes involves attaching a tiny opaque "hood" around the box's sensor window, so that plasma interference can't go through but line-of-sight remote commands are still received. Since you probably don't want an ugly piece of cardboard hanging off of your beautiful $800 device, forum user "lightspeed" has come up with a slightly more difficult but much more aesthetically pleasing alternative: after carefully disassembling your Series3, you simply need to attach 6 to 8 small squares of GLAD Press 'n Seal to the inside of the IR window on the front face plate, which will serve to shield the sensor from the bad signals but let the good ones get through. Good job, intrepid TiVo devotees, but what we wanna know is: out of all the folks who beta tested this product, was there not even one of them who used it with a plasma and could have caught this problem much sooner? TiVo: makes a great product, but needs a little help in the e-commerce and quality assurance departments.Read- ProblemRead- FixRead- Fix pics
AguaT brings the Aqua back to iTunes 7
If you aren't hip on the un-Aquaness of the new iTunes 7, AquaT might just be the remedy for adding some of Apple's more standard UI elements back into their straying media software. As you can see, it brings the candy-blue scrollbars, light blue sidebar background and other various UI elements back in line with the rest of Mac OS X. It even goes so far as to make tweaks to some of the file type column names, like slimming down 'MPEG Audio File' to 'MP3' - great for those to whom screen space is a premium.Now AguaT is free, and it works by replacing a few files inside of iTunes itself, so if you're at all worried about fubaring iTunes, or if you want to revert back to the regular iTunes 7, the author recommends (and I echo) backing up iTunes.app before applying this hack (clicking on iTunes and pressing cmd-d to duplicate it should suffice).This looks like a well-done hack, but I agree with Dan: even though iTunes 7 is laughing at Apple's HIG docs, I'm diggin' it. Still, in the interest of 'to each their own,' I though I'd bring this to the table for y'all Mac OS X users keepin' it old school out there. Peace.
Ben Heckendorn's Xbox 360 laptop: best mod ever?
Every so often a mod comes along that's so intricate, so amazing, so over the top, that words simply don't do it justice (but we'll try anyway). Ben Heckendorn's Xbox 360 laptop is one such mod. Having garnered no small amount of fame from previous portable projects like the nPod, PPS2, and N64p, Ben was commissioned by a generous benefactor to somehow make a 360 "good to go" a la the Crunchwrap Supreme -- and since this is the great Mr. Heckendorn we're talking about, slapping a hinged LCD onto an out-of-the-box console simply wouldn't do. Instead, Ben spent three months designing and building the so-called Xbox 360p, machining a custom aluminum laptop enclosure by hand into which he stuffed a keyboard, 1,280 x 720 Westinghouse LCD, and get this -- even a custom-built water cooling system to replace the 360's stock, bulky heat sinks. The end result is a polished, professional looking (albeit heavy -- this machine weighs in at about 14 pounds) laptop complete with WiFi, USB ports, obligatory glowing green ring, and converged power supply so that the monitor and gaming system only require a single cable snaking out the back. Well done, Ben, well done; but as you yourself note, there's no such thing as resting on one's laurels, so we can't wait to see what you have in store for the PS3 and, most especially, the swing-your-arms-like-a-maniac Nintendo Wii. Hit the jump to check out the 360p's guts, and then head over the Ben's site for a ton of photos and one of the more thorough build walkthroughs that we've come across...[Thanks, Jeffler and kade]
Modding about Fallingwater; Frank Lloyd Wright house in HL2
If talking about music is like dancing about architecture, then what is writing about architecture like? Anyone with an affinity for the art and science of designing great buildings knows there is no better way to experience them than to walk through them; to experience the sense of scale intimately; see how light affects the space; see how the location affects the light, and so on. Unfortunately, that dictum still holds true, but for how long?One architecture student slash level modder chose Frank Lloyd Wright's tree-nestled modern masterpiece Fallingwater (aka the Kaufmann House) to recreate using Half-Life 2's Source engine. Anyone who's visited western Pennsylvania and taken the time to stop by Fallingwater knows the value of experiencing it first-hand.The video walkthrough (embedded after the break) does give some sense of scale, but lacks the same polish that all video games exhibit on closer inspection. Though you miss the craftsmanship in the details, you do get an unparalleled appreciation for the way Wright tucked his house into the woods. Using "noclip" mode, the video's tour guide takes us up above the house and the waterfall providing a point-of-view entirely absent from the real experience. [Via Boing Boing]
Colorize your Menu bar
I'm not a huge fan of color in the menu bar, but that probably stems from the fact that I'm not a huge fan of color in the rest of my operating environment (and why I use the graphite visual style). However, it seems that there are a good many people want their OS to look like it was made by Fischer Price, and that's where iColon and MenuPics come in. These two applications both do exactly the same thing; add a dash of color to the otherwise drab utilitarian menu icons sitting in the top-right corner of your screen. The only real differences between the two are universal binary status (iColon is, MenuPics isn't) and how many customization options they give you (iColon only adds color to the normal Bluetooth, Airport, and Battery Meter, while MenuPics gives you the choice to change the icons all together.)
DIY "adapter" for Memory Stick PRO Duo cards
The problem with all of these newfangled, fingernail-size memory card formats is that most require an adapter for use in standard card readers -- an adapter that many people lose within seconds of tearing open the packaging. Well luckily for you PSP owners out there, Wikihow has a quick and easy tutorial on building your own "adapter" for Memory Stick PRO Duo cards, and like many of the best mods we've seen, this one is super cheap. All you need to get your Duo card to work in a regular Memory Stick card reader is a paper clip and a strip of scotch tape -- a five cent project, at most -- and as the above picture should indicate, you're really just taping the clip to the card as a de facto handle. The perils here, of course, are that using too much tape could cause the contraption to get jammed up inside the reader, while not enough of the sticky stuff may leave you with a lost card. As usual, we take no responsibility for any broken cards or readers that may result from this modification; we just report the news, it's up to you to gauge your own handiness and perform the standard risk-reward analysis.[Via PSP Fanboy]
DS games on your TV: ugly, impractical solutions rule the roost
If you like the idea of playing DS games on your TV, there are two options available to you, both of which come close to topping the list of inelegant ways to play games on your television. Option #1 consists of dismantling your DS (yeah, we've already lost you), hardwiring a cable to your DS's motherboard, and preparing to say goodbye to the portable gaming experience you once enjoyed. Option #2 asks you to use a strap-on adapter (similar to PSP-on-TV solutions) with an integrated camera that outputs to your TV -- unfortunately this completely ignores the second screen. Forgive us for wondering exactly why anyone would want to play a portable gaming gaming device on a fixed screen, but even if we wanted to, we'd probably wait for a more flexible 1st party solution. It's not as if Nintendo is averse to the idea of letting users play or interact with portable games using their home console and a TV: the Super GameBoy, Transfer Pak, and the GameCube to GameBoy Advance cable set a strong precedent for connections between Nintendo's home and portable game consoles.[Via Joystiq]
Nokia handset doubles as a Bluetooth mouse
Even casual readers of this publication know that we're always seeking out ways to add more functionality to our existing gadgets, so when we heard about an innovative modder who was able to turn his Nokia cellphone into a fully-functioning Bluetooth mouse, well, we knew that we were approaching convergence heaven. Inspired by Jani 'Japala' Pönkkö's LogiNoki hack (in which Jani embedded a Nokia LCD into a Logitech G3 mouse), "Pyrofer" decided to forgo the hardware modifications and instead write a Java code and corresponding Windows driver that would allow him to use his 6230i as an impromptu optical input device for when laptop trackpads and control nubbins just don't cut it. Since it's still in development, Pyrofer has yet to release his code to the public, and the Nokiamouse does indeed have some serious drawbacks; most notably, he has to hold the handset a fraction of a millimeter above the mousing surface -- which must contain distinct patterns, so no direct desktop operation -- in order for the camera's CCD to pick up enough usable light. Still, once he develops a proper Bluetooth HID for the phone to work on any BT-enabled notebook (there's also talk of a GPRS connection) -- as well as an interface for mirroring the PC's screen on the Nokia's display -- this sounds like it'll be one sweet project that could see some serious widespread adoption.[Thanks, Mike]
No official Oblivion expansions planned
Here's an interesting nugget from the Elder Scrolls forums, posted last week. Bethesda employee mburg responded to the most recent thread discussing Oblivion expansion packs: "We have no plans to make an expansion for Oblivion. Should that change, we'll make an announcement on Elder Scrolls.com." The steady stream of downloadable content Bethesda has been providing only adds incremental enhancements to the best selling RPG. However, you can still get lost in Tamriel for months. So do we even need an official expansion, or are mod communities such as The Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary enough to extend the Oblivion experience for years?See also: Oblivion PS3 and PSP rumors resurface Modder makes multiplayer Oblivion
Control your iPod with an umbrella
Apple may think that future of iPod control lies in a virtual, on-screen scroll wheel, but we know better. As it turns out, the best way to change tracks, adjust the volume, etc. is by attaching your DAP to an...umbrella? Well, it may not actually be the perfect input method (or even in the top 10), but the homemade iBrella (in white, of course) certainly takes Apple's suggestion to "think different" to a whole new level. The makers of this strange device crammed a two-axis accelerometer, Hall-effect sensors, and a gyroscope into the handle of a standard umbrella, and using a PIC microcontroller programmed with the so-called iPod Mini Protocol, were able to translate the sensors' motions into commands that the 'Pod can understand. So, opening and closing the iBrella will play / pause the current track, while rotating the handle could either tweak the volume or change songs, depending on what mode it's in (mode changes are achieved by stabbing the umbrella skyward). There are obviously a thousand reasons why this device is completely impractical -- especially if you happen to be using it in the rain -- but we prefer to concentrate on the innovative design rather than the lack of real-world applications; after all, it's the seemingly useless projects that often inspire folks to go out and build stuff that really will make a difference.[Via Make]
Strangest PSP mods
TechEBlog is running a story about the top 5 strangest PSP & DS mods. Because this ain't no DS fanboy site, we'll focus on the PSP mods that the article covers:5. CollecTicWe've featured this pretty nifty "game" on our site before. Regardless, for those of you that missed it the first time around, it couldn't possibly hurt to see it again, right? The point of the game is to walk to the horrifying world outside, risk sun exposure, and collect wifi hotspots. I'm hoping that one day, Hideo Kojima creates a Boktai-spinoff for the PSP that uses the very same concept.3. PSP Robot Remote v.0.3This modification allows you to control a robot! A ROBOT!!! Sure, it's not a crazy mech... or even a Roomba... The "winning" PSP mod is featured after the cut.
Fan-made "portable" GameCube is a beast [update 1]
Ben Harklin over at Nintendo Central has constructed a real (big) beauty: a semi-portable GameCube. He writes: "After a month of on-off work, I've finished my handheld Gamecube. Calling it a Portable Gamecube is an [overstatement] because I'm still tethered to the wall and it is still bulky and heavy."And we thought the GameCube was known for its cute, little size. Hey, whatever it takes to play Smash Brothers on the go.[update 1: corrected quoter's misuse of understatement to overstatement]
LogiNoki: the LCD mouse mod
In much the same way that moving to a dual-monitor setup only makes you want to add a third and maybe even a fourth display, mod king Jani 'Japala' Pönkkö decided that if his Logitech G15 gaming keyboard sported an LCD screen, why, his mouse needed one too. Far from practical (after all, your hand is covering the tiny display whenever you're using the mouse), this is one of those projects you undertake purely for the love of the game -- and maybe to impress your handful of friends who actually think pimped-out computer peripherals are the epitome of cool. The build itself doesn't sound as difficult as some of the other mods we've featured here: Pönkkö simply hooked up a salvaged Nokia 6610 LCD to a standard controller, attached the wiring and and a parallel port connector to his Logitech G5's existing USB cable, and stuffed the components right inside the modified mouse. Obviously the screen is too small to to fit web pages or even an IM window, and it's too slow to properly display video, but you could still employ it for photo slideshows or visual alerts of some kind. Before you blow this concept off completely, keep in mind that a certain software giant is also trying to cram auxiliary displays into places they've never been; who knows, maybe Microsoft's got a commercial version of this mouse waiting in the wings.[Via Hack-A-Day]
