I subscribed to TekSavvy internet services before moving into my new apartment, not knowing how much they actually kicked ass! (Un)fortunately our super switched apts half way through the month after having my dry loop set up in the old apartment leaving us with a leeched wifi connection that was sketchy at best.

Today was pure shit so I decided to hit the subway and grab some KFC and find some alligator clips to mess with our demarkation box in our “bunker” (temporary apartment until ours is painted).

Got some clips and went one by one down the trunk until I found a loop with battery and 411 service – thank god no one heard me on their phone!  Here’s a pic demonstrating tonights madness :

For some ridiculous reason I started from the bottom of the trunk… anyway the third last available selection happened to carry a DSL signal – Woohoo!  Anyway I am celebrating my accomplishment with rum and a mess of downloads – hope you all enjoy your night, cheers!

PS : I am now enjoying  unlimited bandwidth (avec MLPPP) at about 760 KB/s via usenet – Rod stewart playing all night!

There are tons of giveaways and contests out there that make you jump through hoops filling out way too much information only to receive a million unwanted emails.  I have set my browser homepage to one I really do not like in order to remind myself to fill out the form every day (I will not tell you which one because I want to win!).

A Quick Briefing : cURL is used to send / receive data to and from other computers via command line.  Since I know PHP quite well I decided to install the php-curl module and instantly got an automated spambox, data grabber, post submitter and whatever else one can do with a normal browser – the best part is I only have to set it up once.

I now have a crontab installed to spoof a web server into thinking I am being referred from an affiliate link, in which it then sends my information as well as some hidden values and instantly generates a report (which is emailed to me).  I know this is shady business however the last thing I won was a Nevada pull ticket when I was 8 and I couldn’t claim the winnings – fuck you world LOL.

Here is just a taste of something you can set up yourself – should be quite simple to modify to your needs.


#!/usr/bin/php
$name = "Gregory";
$email = array("email1@gmail.com", "email2@yahoo.com", "email3@slopsbox.com");
$zip_code = "90210";
$url = 'http://the-url-to-post-to.com';
$user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)";
$referer = 'http://crappy-affiliate-program.com/index.php?affiliate=poor_sucker";
foreach ($email as $mail) {
$params = "name=$name&email=$mail&zip_code=$zip_code&hidden_value1=someValue";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $referer);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$params);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $user_agent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
$result=curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
}
?>


Really all you have to do is investigate the <form…> on the page you are attempting to post to – examine all text inputs, textareas, checkboxes, radio buttons and hidden values. You should be able to form the POST data string, similar to JSON (key=>value pairs).

As for captcha, just hope your target is either lazy or stupid – most of those things are a pain in the rear end.

Enjoy!

After years of soft-modding XBOX consoles I have learned a few tricks that I now feel confident work on any XBOX console. I know that there are already a ton of tutorials available out there that walk you through this same process, but since you are here why send you elsewhere, right?

After seeing almost every possible error code in the book, I can honestly say that I have never bricked a system (though have come very close). The one thing I have found to work beautifully over the years is hard drive hot-swapping. I know this is not the most elegant solution however if you have destroyed your dash (and can’t boot a disc), or want to install a larger hard drive – this is the method for you.

I will walk you through my typical modding dilemmas and explain how I was able to fix them.  It really helps if you already have a modded system to transfer a savegame however if you do not a cable is VERY easy to make.

What You Need : 

• USB Female (usually known as extension)
• Spare Controller
• Electrical Tape
• Supported USB stick
• XBOX HDM (torrent)
• Save Game (google : xbins auto installer)
• Splinter Cell (Original Version ~ $5.00 @ EB)
• Torx #20

Now that you have everything you need lets get going.  First you need to get that save game on either an XBOX memory card or onto your USB stick.  To create your own XBOX -> USB  adapter cable simply cut both cables and match the colors, disregard the colors that do not match.

Plug in your cable and USB stick and boot your unmodded XBOX dash – under memory, select “erase” (if your thumb drive is recognized everything should go very smoothly).  Next you need to get that save game on there, there is a Windows application to do this however I suggest finding someone with an already modded box to transfer the save (I am not going to go in depth with this because I have did not have success with the Windows App).  We can now transfer our save game to the XBOX hard drive through the memory menu. 

Now we need to boot our Splinter Cell Game and load our hacked Save, this will cause the system to “Kernel Panic” and allow us FTP access as well as install the modification.  By default the FTP username / pass is xbox / xbox.

Using the auto installer follow the on screen instructions and BACK UP your eeprom – it generally saves to /E/backup/eeprom.bin.  FTP to your system immediately and copy this file to your desktop, make a backup of your C and E drives as well (we will need them later).

We now have a modified system that will play backup copies of your games as well as allow us to run unsigned code (such as XBMC).  At this point you can go ahead and download “t3ch XBMC” (Google it) – follow XBMC instructions for installation. 

Now lets say you followed the instructions however now when you boot your system you get an error code – no problem, this happens to me all of the time.

We will now use our XBOXHDM application to generate an ISO file complete with our EEPROM as well as backup C and E drives.  Extract your HDM zip and place C, E ,and eeprom.bin accordingly (inspect the README). The whole reason we are doing this is simple : the XBOX hard drive locks and unlocks itself at certain points using a specific key unique to your system.  This means you can not just duplicate hard drives on your computer that will work on your XBOX, they need to be unlocked, copied and relocked with using your key.

So this is how I hot swap my hard drive EVERY TIME without question.

1. Remove the cover of XBOX and place the system close to a computer.
2. Turn on your computer with the XBOXHDM disc in the CD ROM drive
3. Press “Pause Break” immediately after the system POSTS (beeps)
4. Turn on your XBOX and place your ear on the hard drive (yes – put your head against the system).
5. The system will thrash four times – long – long – short – short
6. Pull the IDE ribbon from the back of the hard drive between the third and fourth thrash (clicking sound)
7. Plug your computer IDE ribbon and press any key.
8. Your CD should boot – select 1 and you will then be able to run xboxhd

The key to this is timing, here are some “not to do’s” :

• Pause break is mandatory – you will not successfully boot into XBOXHD without this.
• Do not disconnect power to your XBOX whilst the hard drive is unplugged – you will regret it.

Additional tips

• Hard drive should be on your primary IDE channel (master – do not change jumpers)
• CD ROM should be on Secondary channel
• Don’t give up, you will get it (I spent four hours on this once)

I kind of went out of scope for this article however I think I got idea across, leave comments if you need any help (or if you think I missed something).

Originally I bought an outstanding (used) original XBOX from EB complete with (free) Component cables and even a Phillips DVD ROM. Well  I am too nice and offered to SoftMod an XBOX for someone and ended up destroying it (AFAIK) by installing the wrong kernel font exploit. I ended up giving him my dream XBOX for his shitty Samsung (which didn’t work) as I told him “Yeah it only takes ten minutes, no problem”. I was eating my foot to say the least.

I ended up wasting an entire day trying to find a solution for my bricked box, eventually I found a linux Live CD called XBOX HDM that looked promising. I followed the hotswap steps and after about 4 hours attempting to swap the drive at the right moment I figured it out and once again had a running box with XBMC default dash. All was well except this specific SVN release was buggy (Nov 2007). I stuck with it for an entire year until I couldn’t take it any longer and a few days ago attempted to upgrade  XBMC.

Turns out the XBOX HDM version I was using (which was some horrible auto installer) put files all over the place and I ended up overwriting a lot of things I shouldn’t have.  I did not have a backed up eeprom, I did not have FTP access, but I did have an XBOX that would reboot immediately after “Microsoft” would appear. Another 4 hours of hotswapping (I got it down pat now) and I get a result, not a good one but at least something changed. Error Code 5, then 6, then 13 then 21 and finally I got the idea to try booting a game.

Not to my surprise my backup copy would not boot, and occasionally I could get Halo 2 (retail) to load the splash screen. At this point I was VERY worried. Luckily I remembered I bought Splinter Cell when I bought my original XBOX so I tore through the closet and found it.  It eventually booted (POS Samsung) and I was shocked to see there was a hacked savegame still in the UDATA folder!  I was saved!  UnleashX booted right up and I immediately backed up my eeprom to three different locations.  I then continued to install the softmod and UnleashX.  Rebooted and everything was good.

Afterwards feeling so proud of myself for cheating death, I decided to attempt a hard drive upgrade, or at least create an additional drive if anything messes up again.  I grabbed the original (not shitty auto installer) copy of XBOX HDM and built an ISO with my eeprom, C and E drives.  I then went ahead and popped my 320 GB in my computer and built a drive from scratch, locked it and tried it out.  Everything worked great and I learned a lot – especially to not offer free softmods to people you really do not care for much in the first place.

Anyway here are a few tips for those of you who currently  / want to run a softmodded XBOX.

• Create yourself an XBOX HDM disc as soon as you backup C, E and your eeprom.
• Read instructions carefully and slowly, even several times over even if you think you got it.
• Be very nice to people using IRC even if they call you a cheapass for not buying a mod chip, they are full of great pointers (and sarcasm).
• Nine times out of ten, all is not lost – think of alternate ways to access your data and be creative (I once used an external USB hard drive enclosure with a (128MB) CF-IDE adapter as a memory card!)
• Avoid hotswapping as much as possible, it should be a last resort!

I think I will play some Battletoads in my XBOX neogenesis emulator now, have fun.

I have about 12 clients on my LAN and I like them the way they are – so when I had to setup a mini network to fix a Phone I was pissed.

Instead of tearing my nice tomato configuration a new one, I decided it would be more fun to go through my junk and construct a router / firewall – plus get a chance to step away from the keyboards for a few.

So I started with a busted old 12 port switch chassis we pulled out of the dump last year – I salvaged the optic modules and gutted the rest, I wanted to have a slick 1U chassis for my new “appliance”.  I also decided to use a 17 Port (24 port, most do not work) D-Link hub that has been waiting to see a hammer for months.

I call them the dynamic Duo