bitbucket.kylewelsh.com

Curious folks around the world enjoy a bit of hackintosh every now and then (although once is enough for many), but no geek has successfully ventured as far as Toni Nikkanen of Finland, who became the first person to run OS X on a phone — the Nokia N900. As you can see in the video after the break, Toni’s hack relies on PearPC — a PowerPC emulator — to install good ol’ OS X 10.3 (Panther), but the mammoth sluggishness means it’s far from usable. Still, if you can spare 90 minutes for each boot-up plus plenty more for the snail-paced cursor, then head to the source to learn from Herra Nikkanen.

[Thanks, Matija]

Continue reading Mac OS X 10.3 installed on Nokia N900 via PearPC, barely usable for impatient geeks

Mac OS X 10.3 installed on Nokia N900 via PearPC, barely usable for impatient geeks originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 19:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So: Visa and Mastercard—who’ve helped ensure that your brokeass stays broke after buying things that leave you broke—waived fees on Haiti donation transactions. Wells Fargo didn’t….

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Adobe is not going to take Flash’s exclusion from the iPad lying down. Their latest salvo: enlisting their friends at Bang Brothers to show just how badly you’re going to miss Flash video on Apple’s…

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Adrian Ludwig / Adobe Flash Platform Blog:

Apple’s iPad — a broken link?  —  As I drove by Yerba Buena Theater in San Francisco this morning, I couldn’t help but be impressed.  Apple certainly has the ability to excite people with great products, and with the iPhone they even managed to generate momentum for an entire product category.

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Get some amazing deals in the midst of all the iPad fury. There’s a nice Core i7 laptop, an unbelievable price on one of the best games of the last decade, and a free version of Terminator Salvation….

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South Korea has just released beautiful schematics and visualizations for a natural preserve — to be housed in a series of state-of-the-art, glassed in domes totaling 33,000 square meters. Including an indoor wetland and botanical gardens, in addition to an education center and environmental think tank.

The landmark technology behind the project, dubbed the “Ecorium,” is the architecture devised by Korean firm SAMOO. To be constructed out of low-iron and low-e double glazed metal panels, wood and plexiglass, the structure is designed to respond to external conditions by adjusting internal temperatures and humidities to support the life taking root inside.

The idea is to give South Korean citizens, especially young people, the incentive to learn more about the natural world, the delicate balance of ecosystems and the responsibility to conserve and protect the environment. The center’s creator, the National Ecological Institute of South Korea, hopes to do this by breaking ground on a big, flashy project that could undoubtedly become a national treasure.

The Ecorium is very similar to Britain’s Eden Project, another series of geodesic domes that actually exist in Cornwall, including the world’s largest greenhouse. The preserve is a vast collection of plant species from around the planet, each dome simulating a particular type of climate. It will be interesting to see if South Korea’s efforts inspire the U.S. to do something similar. America is home to Biosphere 2, an indoor ecosystem in Arizona, but it fell short of expectation and hasn’t attracted a popular audience.

The Ecological Institute has yet to specify a construction timeline for the ecological domes in South Korea. Here are some more pictures of the plans:

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Jon Stokes / Ars Technica:

Why Amazon won’t launch its own tablet, but will use Apple’s  —  The Kindle game is up, and Amazon knows it.  In 2010, the world plus dog will be hawking an E-Ink-based e-reader, and major distribution and publishing houses like Barnes & Noble, Google, and Hearst will be offering their digital content on everything with a screen.

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The first rule about fight club is that we don’t talk about….oh wait that is the other club.  So you want to learn to fight like a Ultimate Fighting Champion? You want to rule the streets and kick sand in a bigger guy’s face?

Make sure you are learning how to fight like a UFC fighter for good reasons and not to act like a jerk. What’s that? You want to fight? Oh you want to know how to fight!  OK, let us take a look at some free online resources such as videos and tutorials that should help you get started.

The first site I found in my conquest for street fighting domination was Defense On Demand.

You will notice the arrow pointing you towards the download videos section here at Defense On Demand. I find these a very good starting place. Once you get there you will see these options:

Click on the first one to begin learning how to fight like a UFC fighter and watch the video. Continue on watching all 10 videos. Then you will have a base understanding and can move on. Each section has multiple videos and they appear to be YouTube embedded videos like this:

They have a bunch of other sections on different preparations and training. Get your free learning on and soak up that information!

Next up is some awesome defense techniques and maneuvers I found over here.

This looks to be someone’s personal not so pretty site but hey it’s awesome for a fighter. If someone criticizes him he could always go “hey what, you wanna fight tough guy?”

The site is made up of step-by-step picture tutorials on how to escape certain moves and come out on top. The shot above shows how to escape from a head lock.  They cover everything here on how to maneuver your way out of certain holds and situations. You will be able to use this awesome information when you start training and fighting, As they say the best offense is a great defense. Don’t let your opponent get you into a sticky situation.

And finally there is some great information over here on how to fight like a UFC fighter, or simply how to be victorious in a street fight.

They cover the important stuff that these other sites seem to have left out such as watching your surroundings and staying alert. They talk about knowing when to walk away from a fight, when to go on the offensive and when to fall back on the defensive.

There are loads of resources online for how to fight and win. Read, watch and take it all in and then – and only then – you should seek out a gym to actually try to put your skills to use. You will want to actually test out your skills before challenging someone to fight. Know your limits.

Don’t go picking on someone bigger than you or anyone at all. Use your skills to defend yourself and defend others. In other words be good and don’t be evil! Be a good Samaritan, not a bully!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Google just put out an SEC filing saying founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin plan on dumping some of their holdings of the company’s stock.

When they finish selling 5 million shares apiece, they’ll…

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By getting drunk. Spike Jonze latest project I’m Here, a 30-minute tale about the ups and downs of robot love, is set to premier at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s also being used in an ad campaign…

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We’ve discussed peer-to-peer lending sites in the past, though mostly with respect to regulatory questions revolving around their attempts to securitize the loans. However, every time we mention those sites, we get comments or emails from people insisting that such sites are terrible and much riskier than they make out. Right after the economy crashed back in 2008 the various P2P lenders all stepped up their PR campaigns, claiming that such P2P lending could step in and provide credit where the banks were pulling back. Of course, now reports are starting to come out suggesting that, indeed, peer to peer lending is incredibly risky with extremely high default rates:

To look at the results of Prosper’s loan marketplace, though, is to see not a solution to the credit crisis, but a microcosm of it. Loans to unqualified borrowers; reliance on mathematical models that turn out to be a lot less useful than they seemed; failed hopes that high interest rates could make subprime loans profitable; sky high default rates–Prosper has it all. Prosper’s Web site advertises returns of 6 percent to 14 percent for lenders. But the reality is that the lenders who loaned $188 million through Prosper have not earned anything like these returns. On the contrary, the majority of them have lost money, as they’ve watched their loans go bad at shockingly high rates.

Much like the loans made by banks during the mortgage boom, Prosper’s loans have gone into default at rates much worse than predicted by historical credit data. In November, 2007, Larsen told the Associated Press that Prosper’s default rate “hovered at around 2.7%.” That, however, included many new loans that simply hadn’t had time to go bad. Larsen refers to this obliquely in the AP story, noting that as more loans matured the rate would rise, but there’s no hint of just how steep that rise would be. Prosper’s data now shows that now shows that close to 36% of the loans made before Nov. 27, 2007–the date of the AP story–have ended in default, roughly thirteen times what a casual reader would have thought from Larsen’s comments. That is close, coincidentally, to the total 39% (or roughly two in five) default for the Prosper loans that have reached the end of their three year term.

The article goes on to highlight more and more ugly looking data concerning these sorts of loans — noting that for those who try to counter the high default rate with higher interest rates, the default rate goes up sharply. This is not a surprise — it’s basically how it should be based on your typical risk/reward tradeoff — but when the default rate on certain types of loans is over 50%, that’s not exactly a reliable investment strategy.

And from there, the article highlights how Prosper appears to mislead potential lenders with some sleight of hand:

In other words, only by cutting out more than two-thirds of its loans, does Prosper manage to eke out the positive results for AA to E rated loans that prospective lenders see on Prosper.com. Or you can look at it another way and ask how many investors have actually gotten returns in the 6 percent or 14 percent range that would-be lender see blazed across the Prosper.com front page? Thanks again to Eric’s Credit Community, we have a pretty good idea: Of investors with a portfolio of loans that are an average of at least two years old, folks who have lost money outnumber those who’ve earned 6 percent annual return by more than six to one.

The article goes on and on in that vein, and it’s really damning to the claims from some of these sites. Given how many articles have praised such services as potentially “revolutionizing” how people raise money for things, it’s definitely worth highlighting these questionable results.

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It looks like a lot of us enjoy torturing island natives during our spare time. Bolt Creative said today that its Pocket God game has sold more than two million copies on the iPhone.

The company contends that it is the first to create a paid app that has crossed the two-million sold sales mark. Other higher-priced apps have generated more revenue, but the 99 cent Pocket God app has had tremendous staying power since its launch in January, 2009.

The game, which has a sick sense of humor, is the brainchild of Dave Castelnuovo and Allan Dye, a two-man team whose efforts have become a textbook case on how to launch a hit game on the iPhone. In the game, players can play with the natives on an island, as if you were a god. You can pick the little people and feed them to the sharks, hoist them on spears, burn them and otherwise inflict cruelties on them. My kid plays it and pretends that she’s doing these various things to mommy and daddy.

The clever thing about Pocket God is that the regular updates keep you coming back. Castelnuovo said the company has launched more than 30 updates since the launch of the game, effectively turning the game into an ongoing service rather than a one-time product.

Castelnuovo said that the game has benefited from a strong community of fans who keep the buzz going. Players have made thousands of YouTube videos inspired by Pocket God, and the company created collectible characters that users can buy.

Pocket God held the No. 1 spot for a whole month in March, 2009, and has declined in rank ever since. But the game saw a resurgence during the holidays. At the peak, the game sold 53,000 copies in a day, and it sold more than 100,000 units per week during the 2009 holiday season. One of the things that has helped is good PR. Castelnuovo recently appeared on Bloomberg TV, has been interviewed by the New York Times and other outlets.

Castelnuovo has no plans to build a big company, though he sees big competitors such as Electronic Arts moving into the market. Rather, he is focused on running an independent studio where he can focus more on creative work than business. He has hired a consultant for business development to license the game to other platforms. The company is in the midst of wrapping up a lot of contracts on those licensing deals, and Bolt Creative is also working on a second game as well.

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Earlier this week, I covered MiniUsage, a menu-bar utility for monitoring your Mac’s performance. As part of that review, I noted that MiniUsage doesn’t track the available space on connected hard drives. A useful tool for monitoring this data is SpaceControl.

Like MiniUsage, SpaceControl sits in your menu bar and shows the remaining free space on your startup volume. Click the SpaceControl icon and you see a list of the remaining space on each connected volume; you also see the sum of these numbers–the total free space available on all volumes. (Unfortunately, there’s no apparent rhyme or reason for the order of non-boot volumes in the menu. It would be nice if you could choose the order manually, or at least if the volumes appeared in alphabetical order.)

Displaying free space isn’t an unique feature; a number of other utilities provide similar functionality, including the excellent iStat Menus. What makes SpaceControl especially useful is its notifications. As I noted in our article about routine maintenance, it’s important to keep an adequate amount of free space on your boot volume: If your hard drive gets too full, performance can suffer and you run the risk of losing data.

SpaceControl actively watches your boot volume, and if the amount of free space dips below a configurable threshold (by default, 10 percent, but you can change the amount), you see an onscreen warning, receive an email, or both. The former option is useful for computers at which someone is actively working. The latter option is great for remote servers; it’s also useful for computers you maintain, officially or otherwise–say, the ones you take care of for family members spread out in various geographic locations.

SpaceControl offers the same notification service for non-boot volumes, and, in fact, lets you set a different threshold for those. (I’ve got mine set to 10GB.) You can choose to monitor all non-boot volumes (which, unfortunately, also includes mounted disk images and thumb drives), or just specific ones. The downside of this feature is that you can’t choose a different threshold for each non-boot volume; for example, I want to know when my Boot Camp or Media drive dips below 10GB, but I don’t really care about my scratch drive (which stores temporary files and downloads) until it dips below 1GB.

I also wish there was an option to hide the remaining-space display on the menu bar–showing just the SpaceControl icon–in order to save menu-bar space. And I found that SpaceControl’s text/number fields are a bit hinky: I occasionally had to close and re-open the program’s Preferences window to be able to enter text and numbers. But the program’s core functionality works well, and the program has already notified me several times about drives that are getting full.

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charliesome writes “Hexxeh, a student from the United Kingdom, has been the source for ChromeOS builds since the release of the Google operating system. He’s just released ChromeOS Zero, a small build designed for speed and aesthetics. He recently did an interview with The Chrome Source.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ross Miller / Engadget:

Motorola Shadow is Nexus Two with sliding QWERTY keyboard?  —  Fan-made render?  Very possible, but we’re intrigued by the notion.  The gang at Mobile01 have laid out two more photos of what is being called the Motorola Shadow (not to be confused with the T-Mobile Shadow) …

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