Soup Up Your Homebrew-Hacked Wii
You’ve hacked your Wii to run homebrew apps and play back DVDs without any difficult hardware hacking and now you want to dive into more of your homebrew options. Let’s take a closer look at how to install new homebrew applications on your Wii through the homebrew channel, play back virtually any video or audio format, run old-school video game emulators, and more. Oh, and we’ll play a little Doom, naturally.
Browse and Install Applications with the Homebrew Browser
There are a different ways you can go about finding and installing new apps on your Wii, but none are more simple than the Homebrew Browser. If you followed last week’s guide to hacking your Wii for homebrew apps and DVD playback, you’ve already got the Homebrew Browser installed in the Homebrew Channel, so using it is dead simple. Power on your Wii, launch the Homebrew Channel, and then launch the Homebrew Browser.
The first time you run the Homebrew Browser, it’ll take some time to download the information for all of the available apps in the repository. (You’ll also need a network connection for this, so make sure that’s already set up on your Wii if it isn’t already.) Subsequent launches of the Homebrew Browser will only take a second, since it’s only updating that information.
Once started, the Homebrew Browser is pretty self-explanatory. Homebrew applications are separated into five categories: Emulators, Games, Media, Utilities, and Demos. To donwload an app from the Homebrew Browser, just click the download button. The Homebrew Browser takes care of the rest, and even shows you when updates are available.
After an app has been downloaded through the Homebrew Browser, it’ll automatically be available in the main menu of the Hombrew Channel.
Play Old-School Emulators on Your Wii
The emulators support playing ROMs from popular old-school gaming systems from NES and SNES to the Sega Genesis. You’ll find more than one version of different systems, so a little research may be in order. I’ve been using michniewski’s SNES emulator for games (that I legally own, of course), and it’s pretty great. It supports virtually every controller type the Wii supports, including the Wiimote, nunchuk, and Wii classic controllers.
When most of the emulators install, they’ll add a folder to the root of your SD card. Inside that folder, you’ll see a ROMs folder. This is where you put ROMs of the games you want to play. If you don’t know where to find a ROM, hit up Google—it’s easy.
Play Back Any Video with MPlayer
I already showed you how to install MPlayer for DVD playback, but the same app you use to play DVDs can also handle virtually any video filetype you throw at it. To use it, I’d recommend creating a Movies folder on the root of your SD card and copying any videos you want to watch to it. Once you’ve done that, just fire up MPlayer in the Homebrew Channel, then navigate to Open… etc.
As far as I can tell you can’t play back music over your home network yet, but one can only assume this is a planned feature.
Use Your Wii as a Jukebox with DMP
MPlayer is great for playing back videos, but it’s not much right now for a jukebox (it works, but it’s pretty light on features). Instead, check out the DragonMedia Player (DMP) app from the Homebrew Browser. It provides a barebones but very usable interface for pointing your Wii at a folder and playing back music. Like video playback with MPlayer, just fire up DMP and point it at a folder on your SD card or a USB drive that you’ve filled with music. DMP supports several keyboard shortcuts, and though the default interface is rather barebones, you can download and install themes by unzipping them to the /apps/dmp/themes folder. Next time you run DMP, pick your new theme by pressing the Home button and selecting the folder name of the theme you added. I’m using the XBMC theme in the screenshot above.
Like MPlayer, DMP doesn’t yet support network playback.
Manually Install Applications on Your SD Card
If you happen to stumble onto an application that you can’t yet install through the Homebrew Browser, installing it manually is a very simple matter. In fact, if you followed my instructions for installing MPlayer for DVD playback, you’ve already installed an app manually (though the DVD-supporting MPlayer is now available through the Homebrew Browser). Just download and copy any new homebrew app to the /apps folder of your SD card and consider that app installed and available through the Homebrew Channel.
Apps Worth Checking Out from the Homebrew Browser
There are tons of apps available through the Homebrew Browser, and apart from the apps I’ve highlighted above, you may also want to check out:
Doom
It’s Doom. It works with your nunchuk. Nuff said.
Duck Hunt
Sure you can play it with an emulator, but this version lets you use your Wii remote and trigger just like the guns of old, where emulators can’t take advantage of that aim-and-shoot technology your Wiimote has going for it.
Wii Physics
Physics-obeying playgrounds are all the rage these days (like previously mentioned Phun, for example), and Wii Physics brings those good times to your Wii; controlling the world is now available by simply pointing your Wiimote.
Wii Operation
Twist and turn your Wiimote to drag bones through mazes. With the buzzing vibration of the Wiimote, it’s nearly as stressful as the classic board game.
That It?
If you’re familiar with everything you can do with a classic Xbox and Xbox Media Center (XBMC) (or even with XMBC on a Mac or USB thumb drive), you may be underwhelmed. Keep in mind, though, that the homebrew scene for the Wii is very young, and there’s a lot of potential for this little white box. And with a full operating system like Wii Linux already well underway, it’s only a matter of time before the Wii becomes a killer homebrew device that anyone can easily make their own. In fact, with the speed at which the XMBC folks have been porting XBMC to every platform out there, who knows—it may only be a matter of time before your Wii can run XBMC.
In the meantime, the current homebrew scene will do, so share your favorite Wii homebrew apps and tricks in the comments.
Source: lifehacker.com
CalorieLab Counts the Calories of Popular Foods and Restaurants
Web site CalorieLab provides nutritional information for popular foods and restaurants to help you keep your diet on track. With over 70,000 foods and 500 restaurants in their database, there’s a good chance that if you’ve eaten it, it’s in there. If you’re looking for that one healthy item on a restaurant’s menu, CalorieLab provides full menu overviews along with more detailed nutritional information for each individual item. Keeping your choices healthy and counting calories can be difficult if you do a lot of eating on the go; CalorieLab makes it easy. While you’re improving your dining-out habits, check out five fast food restaurants to feel good about, how to eat healthily at top chain restaurants, and how you can make the healthiest choices with your unhealthy fast food. Photo by pointnshoot.
Source: lifehacker.com
SpeedRead Increases Your Reading Pace, Retention
Windows only: Free application SpeedRead is designed to improve your reading speed and retention by quickly flashing a few words at a time on your screen in quick succession. You can adjust features like playback speed and number of words to display at a time, and SpeedRead keeps track of your stats as you read. At first you may want to stick to one word at a time, but with practice SpeedRead could really boost your speed-reading skills. The app comes with a directory full of stories in plain text to help you practice, but you can point it to any text file on your computer. If you’re on a public computer but still want to practice, check out previously mentioned Zap Reader or Spreeder. SpeedRead is freeware, Windows only.
Source: lifehacker.com
Ubiquity Prototype Offers a Natural Language Web Command Line
Firefox only: Mozilla Labs unveils the first prototype of a natural language web service connector called Ubiquity, a Firefox extension that adds a command panel to any web page. Ubiquity will look familiar to Quicksilver, Launchy, or Enso users: you invoke Ubiquity with a key combination and the text field drops down command suggestions as you type. Ubiquity’s built-in command set consists of “user-centric mashups” that let you perform tasks using various web services in one place using natural language. For example, you can insert a Google map into a new Gmail message (invoke Ubiquity and type “map [business name]“); you can look up a topic on Wikipedia in-page without switching tabs; you can select a paragraph of text in a foreign language and translate it in-page, or map a list of addresses from Craigslist by just selecting them. See these examples and more in practice in the introductory video.
Like Quicksilver’s three-paned subject-verb-object expressions, what makes Ubiquity exciting is that it lets you interact with the web in the natural way you want to do things (“email this to John”) instead of making you re-order the steps to accommodate the browser (“copy this link to clipboard, open new tab, start new email, enter John’s address, and paste link into body”). Ubiquity’s smart, too—it has access to your email contacts, for example, and can refer to the current page as “this.” Here’s what emailing an image to a contact named “Chris” looks like in the Ubiquity pane.
That said, convincing non-power users to hit a key combination to interact with what’s essentially a souped-up command line may be a hard sell. But, the command line is indeed making a comeback, and even as an early prototype Ubiquity is a very exciting step in that direction for application launcher lovers. Ubiquity is still an early prototype, but version 0.1 is available for download now from Mozilla Labs.
Source: lifehacker.com
Speed Up Your Vista Installation with vLite on a Flash Drive
Sometimes the most effective way to clean up Windows is to just wipe your hard drive and start over with a fresh re-installation, and that process can be so long and tedious—unless you know the shortcuts. Power Windows re-installers already know about slipstreaming with nLite for XP and using vLite for Windows Vista to trim down your installation disk to just the bare essentials and speed up the process. If you want to speed up your reinstall even further, you can copy your Windows installation files over to a bootable USB stick that has much better transfer rates. Here’s how.
Create Your Custom vLite Install
You already know the details of how to use vLite, since that’s been covered already. What we’re going to do is follow the same steps, customizing anything that you want to change…
Then you’ll want to click the Apply button at the bottom when you are done.
VLite will prompt you to rebuild the installation files, which it copied to your hard drive. This process will take quite a long time, but at the end your source files should be updated.
You should now have a folder with installation files that look very similar to the actual installation CD. These are the files we will need to copy to your flash drive.
Of course you could simply use the regular Vista DVD, or even just mount your vLite ISO image instead, but this saves you from the extra step.
Prepare Your USB Drive
Open up an administrator mode command prompt by right-clicking on the shortcut and choosing Run as Administrator, then type in diskpart to load up the disk partitioning command line tool.
The most important step is to run the following command, which will give you the numbers of the disks, so you can use it in the next command (and not accidentally remove a partition on another drive).
list disk
Now that you know the correct number for the disk, you can use the select disk command, substituting the number 1 for whatever number your flash drive is set to:
select disk 1
Now you can run the rest of the commands, which will remove any partitions before creating a new FAT32 partition and setting it to active so it can boot.
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit
That final assign command will let you access the drive from Explorer, so we can copy the files. You’ll want to copy all of the files from your installation DVD or from the vLite folder over to your flash drive.
At this point you should be able to stick the USB drive in your computer and boot from it. Note that you might have to enable USB flash booting support in the BIOS, and often it helps to use the shortcut key for your BIOS boot menu.
Got any other tips for a speedy Windows installation? Let us know in the comments.
Source: lifehacker.com
Know What Salary to Ask For in Your New Job
Questions about salary requirements are one of the very few questions guaranteed to come up during a job interview or screening process, as well as almost always cause some severe awkwardness on both sides. Once you’ve found a great job, how do you demand what you’re worth without sounding arrogant? What if you toss out a low number and lock yourself in at a loss, or shoot too high and scale yourself out of the running? The web’s chock-full of tools to help you gauge a reasonable asking rate, and we’ve received some pretty sound advice over the years on how to pull off the salary tightrope walk. Follow along for a guide to finding and asking after just the right pay rate. Photo by AMagill
Use a salary search site
These things seem to have cropped up faster than social networks in recent years, and they all promise the same thing—an objective take on what people with similar skill sets are earning in their jobs. There are, of course, differences in methodology, accuracy, and what fields the sites cover best. Here’s a rundown on some of the better-known comparison sites. Note: We’re not covering the major job search sites—Monster.com, HotJobs, Yahoo!, etc.—because their salary comparison tools are often locked behind a sign-up wall or cover jobs as entire categories.
- Glassdoor.com: Focuses on salary reports and management reviews. Requires a sign-up and salary disclosure before offering up detailed data. Because it’s newer, one strong opinion—or misleading salary report—can skew the data values.
Good for: Anyone in the tech or financial worlds, toward which the reports and reviews tend to tilt, or looking at a bigger-name company. Also, as of this morning, Glassdoor is opening up multi-currency salary information for companies in more than 100 countries, so those looking abroad should check it out. 
PayScale: Much more detailed data-sorting than most sites, with salaries detailed by years of experience, location, education levels, rather than just a job title at a company.
Good for: Researching job scenarios you hope to have (editor in NYC, IT manager in Las Vegas, etc.) rather than trying to pigeonhole a specific company.- SalaryScout: Like Glassdoor.com, SalaryScout requires your own contribution before forking over too much information. It’s similar in other respects, too, but the killer tool is an RSS feed for searches you perform—perfect for keeping yourself up-to-date on job titles, salary ranges, and blue-sky thinking.
Good for: Complementing other salary searches, and adding onto your job-finding RSS feed. 
Indeed: As we’ve mentioned before, job listing aggregator Indeed lets you pull off some interesting searches, including an all-options-open search for something like “Web editor $40,000,” which will show you where you’ll pull that salary for that job title anywhere in the country. If you’re not looking to move, you can also compare salaries in a given zip code.
Good for: Seeing if your salary estimates are anywhere near realistic, or finding alternative jobs in your market that pay just as much.
Stay quiet on your salary, or come out with it?
This is a topic that’s spurred a lot of discussion. The post that started it said that saying what you want was a no-win game when it came to interviews, ending with you either leaving money on the table or nixing your chances at the job by shooting high. While we can’t claim to be experts on the matter, we think commenter vered has a good point: If you’re confident in your job hunt and really don’t want to pen yourself in, you can refuse to offer your own number—but only if you’re willing to let the job fall away. If not, you probably can’t stonewall on the issue, and it’s seemingly best to try and shoot a little high.
Checked your credit lately?
No matter what you salary you end up asking for, a growing number of employers won’t be giving it to you if your credit report has notable problems or is in general disrepair. If you haven’t already checked it out, head to AnnualCreditReport.com to get your actually-free-once-a-year report, and be prepared with trustworthy explanations of any serious issues there. If an employer thinks you can’t handle money, chances are, they won’t be offering you as much of it.
What tools or tips have you used to suss out how much pay to ask for? What salary-hunter sites have worked best for you? Share your stories in the comments.
Source: lifehacker.com
