Hardware / Software roundup

Tiger

TomP and Danny O’Brien have made the same observation about Tiger’s new version of iChat – which means obligatory Genral Zod link.

The torrent fairy left me a copy of the Developers’ Preview – and am busy digesting it. The thing that impressed me most was the ease of developing Dashboard Widgets. I’ve never been a big JavaScript nut – but I managed to hack a web JS insult generator into a widget faster than I thought I would.

HDLoader

Another bit of software, but this time for the PS2: HDLoader. I bought this recently – and it’s quite impressive – you bung a normal hard disc into your PS2 (check compatibility here) and it allows you to rip games to the HD – turning your PS2 into a games jukebox. Load-times are improved as HDs can read faster than optical drives – but there are two down-sides:

1 – The HD is formatted in some HDLoader-specific way, which means that the HD cannot be used as a “normal” PS2 HD. Since the official HD hasn’t even been released in Europe this is not such a big deal.

2 – The more annoying downside is that On-Line components of games will not work — this is because when they connect they use Sony’s Dynamic Network Authenication System (DNAS) which checks the validity of the disc in the PS2 at network login. Of course you can always boot from the original disc when you want to go online – but that rather defeats the point.

PCI Express

Ars has another great article that explains hardware in a way that mere mortals can understand – this one’s about PCI Express.

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