19May

MOASF presents The 22nd Annual HAYWARD FIELD MEET – June 2, 2012

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The 22nd Annual HAYWARD FIELD MEET
All British Car Show & Swap Meet

The last remaining All British Car Show in the Bay Area

Saturday, June 2, 2012
Cal State East Bay – Hayward, CA

• Event starts at 9:00 AM

• Awards at 2:00 PM

• Open to: ALL British Cars & Other Cars of Particular Interest

The HAYWARD FIELD MEET – All British Car Show & Swap Meet – will be
held on Saturday June 2 ,2012 at CalState East Bay in Hayward from 9AM
to 3PM.

As usual it will be on the field with the panoramic view of
the entire Bay Area.

Cars with all levels of preparation are welcome
and awards are by popular vote.

This is now the last remaining All British Car Show in the Bay Area. For more info and applications go to:

http://www.moasf.com./hayward/

13May

Imported blogger blogs!

Posted in Blogs and Rants | 1 Comment

With the new release of WordPress I decided it was finally time to take some of the old blogs floating around the internet, namely from Blogspot/Blogger.com, and import them here, so here they are!

This includes my posts on the Second Life vampire roleplay group “Atrum Infero” as well earlier iterations from StarLord Mini Podcast, Miniology, and whatever personal blog I may have had several years ago on the same site (before Google aquired it).

There will be some duplicate posts since I imported some of these before, but should clear them up as soon as I get the chance…

Stuff I wrote will get put under my name, other stuff will simply be listed as “guest” and this includes test posts, of those, I will delete!

Otherwise, enjoy!

12Mar

Is Garage Band Going To Project Me Into Rock Stardom?

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Why is this relatively cheap iPad/ iPhone getting top billing, and what is all the fuss about? It is featured in the new iPad 3 launch advert and other than the fact that it shows groups of people all using their iPads together at the same time there must be some reason that it has managed to claw to the front of the race in front of the other 100,000 apps that Apple could have chosen from.

What makes garage band so popular?

From the members of the womens wellness panel to the local choirmaster, everyone seems to have a copy. There is no doubt that its popularity since its first incarnation on the Mac OS has shown a meteoric rise. This has in some part been helped by the interface on the first two generations of the iPad. So what are the features that make it so intriguing? Well in the first place you don’t need to be a musician. This automatically includes a whole raft of people who might otherwise have said, “not for me, thanks.” In the same way as games like ‘Rock Star’ have taken off this app allows you to live out the fantasy of being in a band without having to shell out X amount of dollars on a Pearl Export Drum Kit or put up with your neighbours furiously banging the wall.

The app has also many well developed features which do allow you to piece together music almost as expertly as if you were in a recording studio.

The touch instrument feature

The setups for the instruments on the iPad and iPhone are simple, accurately sensitive and effective. You can set up a drum kit and tap the graphic on your screen using either a real kit or drum pad. The sounds are fed back in realistic times so you do need to have some sense of rhythm, but these can be augmented with a pre-layered track to help guide you along the way. The keyboard can be set up and split into a dual screen set up. This is not the place for a virtuoso soloist, but you can use the guides to record some chord progressions and riffs. Again touch the instrument and the response if fairly immediate and the string section gives you a great range of choice from double bass to the ever popular electric guitar.

Smart Instruments

This is the feature which has probably won the majority of people over and the reason the app is so popular. It is like having a bionic music ability. This feature is the proverbial leg up as far as playing the songs is concerned. You can set up your instrument; keyboard, guitar drums to play chords or riffs with a single tap. It saves on all the intricate finger-work and really is the lazy man’s solution to becoming Jimmy Page. For smart drums you can simply drag in the pieces and they will beat away to give your rhythm section the heartbeat it needs.

Into the studio

The thoughts of all this genius creativity going to waste and the inbuilt recording section ensures that all of your jamming can be laid down and mixed to within an inch of its life. The studio consists of an 8 track recording suite which for the average jammer is plenty. You can record your efforts in bars (sections) or as a whole piece. Once you have recorded your different individual sections then you can begin mixing them in an interface which is delightfully simple and responsive to the touch. The functionality here is fairly basic with little more than the usual cut, trim, copy and paste style options. The effects menu is also fairly limited with only ‘echo’ and’ reverb’ as your options. There is no opportunity to auto tune and if you are going to fix a section it is by deleting the unwanted piece and recording that section again.

So this app is not going to project anyone into super stardom. It is fun though and it will allow an escape and the pretence that you have got some musical ability. I know serious musicians will struggle with the basic functionality of it, but if you are aiming for something to create serious music there are plenty of suitable software packs for your PC, this is just a game, a really fun, slightly addictive and really pretentious (in a good way!) enjoyable feature for your iPhone and iPad. For under $5 it is no surprises that it is on the top of the pile.

22Feb

What’s in a Name?

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In the broadest sense, Anonymous consists of a collection of loosely affiliated Internet groups who believe in the freedom of information and the Internet as an open community for the whole world.

After memetic beginnings on image board website 4chan, they have become more prominent in recent years after a number of high profile hacktivism attacks on targets who offend their central beliefs by promoting censorship and denial of information. In their activities, although each member functions individually sitting at a computer desk or lounging across a chaise sectional with a laptop, they act as a hive mind with a core identity performing coordinated actions in a parody of the techno-anarchists they are often portrayed as. Or, as a spokesperson for Anonymous once stated, “For the lulz.”

Chris Forcand

Despite growing from a website notorious for its love anime tentacle porn, one of the group’s primary consensuses is a vitriolic hatred of anyone with a genuine real-world interest in pedophilia. Should such an individual be discovered, a no-holds-barred cyberspace beatdown will commence.

Chris Forcand was an Internet predator who was chatting on MSN to what he believed were young teenage girls, the interaction consisting of none-too-subtle innuendo and increasingly disturbing requests, such as asking a girl to mail him her underwear so he could “taste her.” However, the girls in question turned out to be members of Anonymous engaging in the popular Internet activity of “pedo-trolling.”

The response was swift and merciless. Copies and screenshots of the chat transcripts were posted on a Christian community blog Forcand was an active member of, as well as sent to the local authorities along with his details of how he could be located. The police soon tracked him down and, using techniques similar to those of the Anonymous, he was arrested and sent to jail.

Project Chanology

In January 2008 various members of Anonymous began a series of protests against the practices of the Church of Scientology.

A video of an interview with Tom Cruise, Scientology’s most high profile adherent, featuring the actor extolling the virtues of the controversial religion was posted on YouTube and subsequently removed following the threat of litigation from the church. However, the members of Anonymous took exception to this, claiming that the removal of the video was tantamount to allowing the church to censor information about itself, as well as going against their belief that all information is free.

Project Chanology was formed with the intent of educating Scientology’s followers of its malevolence, releasing a video that was simply titled as “Message to Scientology,” but came off more as a declaration of war. It declared that because of its “malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders,” Scientology must be destroyed “for the good of your followers, for the good of mankind and for our own enjoyment,” before signing off with the portentous declaration of “We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”

Although Anonymous’ standard methodology of launching denial of service attacks was undertaken, Project Chanology also seeks to enlighten people of the murky water surrounding Scientology, specifically criticizing the media for never mentioning objections to the church and ignoring allegations that some members have died under the church’s care.

Since the formation of the Project, regular mass gatherings have been organized to voice protest against the church, with participants hiding their faces behind masks in the likeness the title character of V for Vendetta, in turn inspired by the 17th century British anarchist Guy Fawkes.

SOPA and PIPA

In January 2012, right after file uploading site Megaupload was shut down by the FBI, Anonymous launched what it described as the largest attack it had ever organized. As well as Megaupload’s shutdown, the growing resentment for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) led to the group targeting Universal Music Group, Broadcast Music, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA); these four representing the largest supporters of the proposed bills.

Using the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, an open source network attack application named after a weapon from Command & Conquer, a large-scale distributed denial of service attack was launched. Over five and a half thousand people participated, with or without knowledge they were doing so, and the targeted websites were completely disabled forcing a complete restart that left them offline for days and slow to load once they were back up and running.

The Future

Although dozens of suspected hackers and Anonymous members have been arrested over the last year alone, it’s unlikely that the loss will have any noticeable effect on the group’s activities. On the contrary, it will probably cause them to redouble their efforts. The organization likely numbers in the thousands and they only intend to expand and endure, as “For each of us that falls, ten more will take his place.”

24Jan

How to update your iPhone 3G to iOS 4.2.1, unlocked, jail-broken, and keep location services working!

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Hi there, fellow iPhone 3G users..

I recently decided to upgrade my iPhone 3G again, because I really like playing Words With Friends and some other apps now will only work on the new iOS versions. iOS 4.2.1 was the last available update for the old iPhone 3G, so that’s what I went for.

Similar to using iPhone OS 3.1.3 (which works better on the earlier device), any app that was designed for later iOS’s simply aren’t backwards compatible and won’t normally install on the device. For the ones that do install (for example, Cycorder and most other video recorders for iPhone 3G), they normally crash/exit right after launch. Once most developers have decided to update their tools to later versions, there is no going back to support earlier iPhoneOS builds, indeed even among iOS developers, once they get to a certain build of tool compatibility, the option of doing cross development or testing on older versions is usually beyond their resources or desire to accomplish.

Anyhoo, it was very easy for me to launch iTunes and go to iOS 4.2.1, however, due to my unique circumstances I eventually ended up with Bootloader 05.08 [G2M3S2] and Baseband ICE2-06.15.00 (right, that’s an iPad baseband), only so that I could later unlock it.

Let me give a brief overview how I ended up there.

First problem for me was, the update process via iTunes. For the most part, updating your iPhone via iTunes effectively locks it to whichever carrier is activated with the device (for USA based iPhone, this was AT&T), even if you had it previously unlocked. That means if you stick a SIM card from another phone company in there, it won’t work. Period. Unlocking the phone is the only way to have it recognize the other SIM chip, and so for each firmware update, you must also unlock the phone again. Folks who aren’t savvy enough to do this themselves or get their carrier to do it can, on average, pay $30 for each unlock.

I guess the logic here is that people normally stick with the same phone company, right, but in this case I moved out of the country, and had already paid off the phone carrier to unlock the phone for me once, totally legit, so that I could continue to use the phone elsewhere. Once the phone is unlocked and your contract paid off, you are essentially on your own to keep it that way.

Yes, I wanted to keep using my $499 iPhone 3G as more than a glorified iPod. I didn’t want to upgrade it to a iPhone 3GS in exchange for a 1 or 2 year contract, I liked the freedom of my month-to-month plan.

Well, thanks to Apple and iTunes, going from iPhone OS 3.1.3 to the newer iOS 4.x, I now needed to re-unlock my no-contract iPhone AGAIN. Thats a bit of a SNAFU eh? Sure, sure, stop your bitching and just do it..

Since I was living in Canada at the time, and my cellphone carrier was now Telus, there was no way to reactivate it on the AT&T network. But, at the time there was also no way to carrier unlock the phone once it was upgraded past iOS 4.1, this has to do with a thing called baseband, which gets updated along with the other OS firmware.

You see, when Apple changed from iPhoneOS 3.x.x to iOS 4.0.x, doing carrier unlocks with baseband 05.13.04 wasn’t really an issue. You updated your firmware, unlocked it, and you were good to go — no need to jailbreak the device, for the most part.

It was only with subsequent versions of iOS 4.1.x and 4.2.x that they decided to make things more difficult for world travelers, by forcing the phone to lock itself once again PLUS giving you a baseband version 05.14.02 or 05.15.04 respectively, which were specifically designed to prevent people from unlocking their phones! You can imagine the upheaval this caused for international travelers, or those whose cellphone carrier was other AT&T (or others who had specific contracts with Apple). It’s probably enough of an inconvenience for people to run out and buy an Android or Blackberry instead.

Well, people will always find ways around such nonsense, and since Apple iTunes doesn’t like you to go down in baseband version, folks found that doing a silly workaround to “fool” the iPhone into going UP to a newer baseband version (which could also be unlocked) was the way to go.

Yep, someone figured out that the iPad baseband version numbers were greater than the iPhone, yet that modem firmware could be put into the iPhone anyway, so that’s what I ended up doing as well.

Naturally, It’s like taking parts from one car and installing them into a different one, sometimes they work, and sometimes the hack breaks something else in the process.

So, the caveat with taking a baseband for the iPad and slapping it onto an older iPhone 3G, is that your psuedo-GPS doesn’t realize it isn’t an iPad, and thus becomes completely worthless. Not only that, you wouldn’t be able to update the baseband until a successive new version came out, and since iOS 4.2.1 was the last available version for the iPhone 3G, you were essentially stuck with what you got.

Why, you ask? Well, the earlier iPhones didn’t have a true GPS, but instead, they used an old cellphone trick of triangulating your position based on the location of nearby cellphone towers, which was sort of accurate, not bad actually, but, if you were ever out of range enough, the tech behind the thing fails and there you are, lost. The iPad and newer devices have more-so a real GPS, but I’m not going into the details over this, simply put the code used by the iPad, iPhone 3GS/4/4S is kinda different. Different enough anyway that the iPad modem baseband breaks on the earlier iPhone 3G.

Having WiFi to aid the GPS in this case didn’t help, because it can only get you into the vicinity based upon your IP address and such things from your currently connected Internet provider. (I thought maybe I could get away with using WiFi and the Maps app, but it didn’t work because it wasn’t written to function that way).

So, what is a guy to do? Well, downgrade the baseband back to 5.13.xx! But how? iTunes only lets you upgrade basebands. Sure, you can downgrade firmware, but the baseband stays the same. I found this out when trying to downgrade from 4.2.1 to 4.1, to 4.0, to 3.1.3, no matter what I did, that baseband stuck at 6.15.00!

Enter a program called Fuzzyband available for free download using the Cydia App (a debian based iPhone repository, the popular alternative to AppStore and such).

I installed then watched this little app do its magic on my iPhone. The process was fairly easy for me because I already had OpenSSH installed (for logging in via SSH or SFTP) and iExplorer (for accessing over USB), yeah that’s right, I don’t have afc2add on my iPhone!

Sure, the process is a bit klunky, since iOS 4.2.1 is now considered old, even though that’s the last officially supported version for my aged iPhone 3G. But it still works today, so I am posting it for anyone who may find themselves in a similar predicament.

I must thank Haras Mhmud over at Redmond Pie for posting the earlier article over a year ago, that I used as a base for my modification procedure. That, and lucky my bootloader was the right version. If you have the iPhone 3G and the wrong (or newer) one, I don’t think this is going to work for you, but YMMV as they say.

I’m not going to cover unlocking or jailbreaking the device, there’s enough posts about that here as well all over the internet, and many people don’t want the advantages of jailbreaking to Linux on their iOS (or running Android on it for that matter) so we’ll skip all of that..

Other than the obvious advantage of getting your location services to work again, you are now able to restore your device to stock firmware using iTunes again. Yeah, remember that 05.13.04 was unlockable, but they made 05.14.02 and 05.15.04 rather unfriendly. As you get beyond the downgrade barrier, good things happen.

By the way, if you aren’t savvy enough to pull this off then you probably shouldn’t even try, but who am I to say? You can brick your phone if you like. Do it at your own risk. Everything may turn out okay, right? Mine works just fine, there ya go ;)

Here’s the step by step:

1) Update your iPhone 3G from 3.1.3 to 4.2.1 using a custom IPSW that includes the iPad baseband 06.15.00 mentioned above. I used Pwnage tool on my Mac for this.

2) Download the required certificate file ICE2-06.15.00.cert from here.

3) Install Fuzzyband to your iPhone using Cydia.

4) Connect your iPhone 3G over USB or SFTP and copy the cert file to /Applications/Fuzzyband.app directory. If you can’t see this directory, you may or may not need afc2add to make the hidden directory visible. I saw it just fine using SFTP.

5) Run Fuzzyband. Let it do its thing (takes a bit to read stuff, just wait!). Click the downgrade button to flash the 05.13.xx baseband firmware on your device. Wait again. if it’s successful it will give you a LOL cat style OK message.

I just left my device there and let it reboot itself after that, just don’t touch anything and it should do that. If not then reboot anyway. Boom you’re done.

6) When you are all rebooted, check the modem firmware using General -> About from the iPhone Settings app. Go to Maps or some app that uses your location and check to see that it’s working again (yay!)

Comment if you like on this, my facebook plugin to WordPress sometimes works, sometimes not (haven’t debugged it yet, though just patched it so maybe all is well) but if you have any questions, I am willing to help those who contact me via the website (cheers!) I’m enjoying my iPhone 3G again, now I can use Foursquare and Maps and all those apps that use location services again, neato.

PS: I still want an iPhone 4, if anyone has an extra one or two laying around and you don’t need it, let me know and I’d be happy to take it off you with my grabby hands, heh.