Leaving for another day the question of whether consumers have the right to modify video-game software they’ve legally purchased, a federal judge last week dismissed a lawsuit by California game maker Tecmo against the proprietors and users of a game-hacking website, after the company quietly settled with the two main defendants. Not sure what the settlement was so this might not be over yet. Link.
A handful of clay, yesterday’s coffee grounds and some cow manure: the ingredients that could bring clean, safe drinking water to much of the third world. The simple new technology, developed by [Australia National University] materials scientist Mr. Tony Flynn, allows water filters to be made from commonly available materials and fired on the ground using cow manure as the source of heat, without the need for kiln. The filters have been tested and shown to remove common pathogens including E-coli. Via BoingBoing. Link.
Add a NES emulator to the growing list of hardware you can emulate on a PSP. But this is for the 1.0 version of the PSP which was on the early units in Japan and now Ebay. So for now, there’s only a handful of folks that can run these emulators and homebrew games, but there’s a lot of effort being put in to this and soon we’ll see emulator and other apps for our 1.5 PSP units. Via Waxy. Link.
Today Sony announced the new PlayStation 3 IGN has the specs here. Last week was the Xbox 360 (specs here). Both impressive devices, I’m more excited about the millions of “old” Xboxes and PS2 out in the wild and how they’ll find new uses in the hands of Makers. For under $50 (eBay, etc..) you’ll be able to get an amazing system to do a ton of projects- we’ll of course have them here and in the magazine.
This week 8 years ago, the humans lost the chess battle to Deep Blue. I netflixed “Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine” a great documentary on Kasparov’s Chess match with IBM (he lost, but they’ve yet to rematch) but noticed Netflix branded the DVD as well as watermarking the menu system. Is this a new way netflix will cut down on the “Netflix project” – an effort to copy of 25k DVDs. Or is Netflix Longtailing DVDs becomming a distributer for independent films? Photos of the DVD and menu here. IBM, how about open sourcing Deep Blue, it’s been 8 years. We’d love to do a DIY chess supercomputer for MAKE.
Waxy points to story about how Nintendo will be beaming demos wirelessly at E3. I don’t think there’s time to do a project around this before next week, but by next year we’ll likely have the ability to broadcast homebrew games, content and all sorts of things- for the DS and maybe the PSP depending on how all the hacks keep going. It could be a bit of war of the signals DIY vs demoware… Link.
In the Build your Own Arcade Controls Message forums there are tons of great ideas suggestions and how-tos- here’s on on flush mounting a Trackball. Frosty says “Basically, I set my router depth to match the depth of the top of the mounting plate (about 1/8″ of an inch), and routed the outline of the plate. When dropped into the recess, it sat flush with the top of the CP. The artwork was placed on the panel and mounting plate (covering it) and then Lexan on top of it“. Link.
