the nintendo ds is an awesome portipal gaming system. i have the ds lite, its thin, weights under a pound, has two super bright backlit screens, pretty sweet integrated speakers, the classic nintendo plus d-pad, four front buttons, and two sholder buttons. the bottom screen is touch sensitive, which makes for some awesome gameplay. the touch screen is sick, but a lot of people can be put off by it. so tons of games let your switch between the touch motion and d-pad motion. another thing i love about the ds lite is it's backwards compatable with gameboy advance. the new nintendo ds-i however is NOT backwards compatable, which i think is rediculious.

so the R4-DS is a revolution in homebrew/emulation/mod chip technology. the cart is what i like to call a "hack loader". basically during the normal boot sequence the data being read executes an exploit that allows the user to run any custom code they want. this affords many interesting possibilitys. for instance custom operating system and interface graphics, running homebrew applications, or running roms/archival copys of games. the official site is here. but i bought mine on amazon.

as yew can see, the r4-ds is the same size as a regular ds cartridge. the game shown is chrono trigger, which is a revamp of a classic super nintendo rpg, its one of my favorite games of all time. but the r4 has a tiny sd-micro slot on the back. the size of the sd card supported varies depending on which model of the r4 yew have. i have the r4-ds sd-hc version, which supports the maximum of 32 gigabytes. i suggest you get the sd-hc version, the R4-III only supports up to 2gb, which is a huge difference.

the main interface can be customized to look how ever you want. the developers of the r4 dont provide you with a tool to customize it with themeselves, but someone else has created a program called alice. its a freeware gui application that tells your all the necessarly file sizes and resolutions for each of the images, as well as help you create layover, transparency, and rollover effects for menus.

here's the theme i made for my r4-ds. i call it circuit board. download it here. the three buttons on the bottom left screen are the three main options of the r4. the first is ds emulations, this allows yew to play archival copies of games. the center icon is the media player moonshell. it can play mp3s and a custom ds video codec. the final option is to boot to slot-2 (gameboy advance slot). this however will not play regular gba games (you have to remove the r4 to do that) this option is for booting legacy gba hackloaders.

playback of emulated games is flawless! the speed, the sounds, the graphics, everything looks exactly the same. even games with multiplayer functionality work perfectly. whats great about the r4 is yew can grab an 0-day rom of a new game and check it out. if it sux, yew just delete the rom and forget about it. and if yew find out its awesome, then yew can buy the game and feel assured what its gonna be all about. i think if nintendo allowed yew to download demo roms directly to an sd card on the hardware to "try before yew buy" people would go crazy, and the ds scene would explode.

so now, yew might be asking...

 

"so xero, what can you play on this? and where can i get it???"

 

nectar by phlogiston – nectar is 2 EPs in one. part one, Croquel Adventure, continues in the chip-tune tradition of short, fun, pure NES songs. while part two, HEAT, transports you to an 80’s vision of the distant future. the album is a tour through a vast dystopian cityscape where high-tech low-life roam the streets. and the lines between man and machine have been washed out.

southbridge by nonfinite – southbridge combines triumphant melodies with though provoking harmony and infection head-rocking beats. like northbridge, each track has a unique feel to it. and will peak your interest to the last bleep! you can listen to the entire album online but it's not free. 25% of all proceeds will benefit "chip-in" a group of 8-bit people trying to help out.

future, and it doesn't work by starscream - in the not so distant future awaits the election of the first third party candidate to the white house- they will hail from the space party, a political coalition founded by astrophysicists, former democrats and ex-NASA employees. starscream tells a tale of victory, science, and potentially catastrophic foreign policy.

start with a small container of margarine
(like 7.5oz of promise or smart balance)

blend in some sugar.
i use about 1/3 brown sugar, 1/3 white sugar, and 1/2 a cup of confection [powdered] sugar.

*optional*
you can also use 1 table spoon of honey and/or agave nectar.

stir until creamy.

add 1 tea spoon vanilla and stir.
add flour.
(i like to mix 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour and 1+1/2 cup of white flour.)

*NOTE*
if you used honey / agave nectar you'll need and extra 1/2 cup of flour.

add 1 tea spoon of salt.
add 1 tea spoon of baking soda.
add 1 tea spoon of baking powder.

you want the dough to be stiff not sticky. if necessary, add more flour.

then stir in a small bag of semi-sweet chips. (i use the dark chocolate minis.)

shape the dough into walnut sized balls.
put on a cookie sheet and flatten slightly.
bake at 350 degrees for 12-14 minutes.

getting the dough the right consistency is crucial. if your first batch is coming out too thin or flat, you need to add more flour. the dough shouldn't stick to your hands when rolling then into balls. just keep adding a small amount of flour at a time until they don't feel so sticky.

let cool.
enjoy!

i just got clued in on a new project from one of the members of the cDc (cult of the dead cow), a notorious hacker group from way back in the l0pht days. the wave bubble is a self-tuning, wide-bandwidth portable RF jammer. an internal lithium-ion battery provides up to 2 hours of jamming (two bands, such as cell) or 4 hours (single band, such as cordless phone, GPS, WiFi, bluetooth, etc). the battery is rechargeable via a mini-USB connector or 4mm DC jack (a common size). alternately, 3 AAA batteries may also be used. self-tuning is provided via dual PLL, therefore, no spectrum analyzer is necessary to build this jammer and a single wave bubble can jam many different frequency bands - unlike any other design currently available! to reconfigure the RF bands, simply plug it into the USB port of your computer and type in the new frequencies when prompted. multiple frequency ranges can be programmed in, each time the device is power cycled it will advance to the next program in memory.

its capable of jamming a few different frequencies:

cellular bands:
GSM/PCS broadband 1900 downlink – (us standard)
GSM 850 downlink – (us rural areas)
GSM 900 downlink – (original and most common in Europe)
GSM 1800 downlink – (gaining popularity in Europe)

other Bands:
cordless phones – (900-930 mhz frequency)
blue tooth – (2400-2483 mhz frequency)
802.11b/g wifi - (2400-2483 mhz frequency)
zigbee – 868 (Europe) 915 (usa) & 2400-2483 mhz
GPS – 1575.42 (civilian) and 1227.6 (military)

WOW!
this thing can block just about anything you can come up with!
for more info, including circuit diagrams, schematics, building instructions, parts lists, and firmware available from the inventers website http://www.ladyada.net/make/wavebubble

so i bet you havnt you heard about "the blue pill"... so here's the basics. In like 2005 (maybe before) amd and intel started adding virtual machine functionality to the instruction set of the processors. the idea behind that was that you could have a virtual machine running nativly on the processor and not be emulated which would cause a speed increase. the processor switches to what's called ring1 mode which is like a basic user (not much privileges) and can't touch any of the memory and what not of the standard os which is running in ring0. this switch only happends when weird instructions go in that need to take advantage of the full cpu

the blue pill code exploits this and what it does is it loads a virtual machine with bluepill, then it hyperjacks the hypervisor (the thing that controls the os switching) and then switches operating systems so that blue pill is moved into ring0 and your os (ie: vista) moves into ring 1. now you have an infected computer that can't even access the virus that's infecting it and it is completely undetectable. this is a serious rootkit...

read more here

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everyone is going crazy over this. incase yer a n00b and dont know, this is the 'processing key' for all HD-DVDs out currently. this means that linux will now have the abilty to decode and play HD movies, as well as ficilitate the creation of HD-DVD backup warez.

since this story hit, it's got over 24.000 diggs. which is crazyness. this number cannot be copywrited, so feel free to share!