This is a post about open source Wii mod chips. They're pretty interesting, but the actual content is quite nerdy.

I recently put a mod chip in my Wii. This means I can play Gamecube imports, Wii imports (kinda) play games from burned DVDs, run homebrew (such as a NES emulator), etc, etc. To get all this working I had to open up the Wii and solder a pre-programmed microcontroller to some contact points on its motherboard. A micrcontroller is a low-powered computer on a chip: at the very least it's got some RAM, and some nonvolatile memory (such as Flash). Often they come with other things built in as well, such as an analogue-to-digital converter.

Anyway, installing the mod was a pretty easy job, especially compared with the last time I installed a mod chip (in a PS2). The Wii is pretty much a turbocharged Gamecube with some extra devices, so all the work that has gone into Gamecube mod chips carries across to the Wii. To mod a Wii, you hook the mod chip up to the DVD controller. When the Wii resets, the mod chip reprograms some functions of the DVD controller (which is itself a microcontroller -- an mn102). The DVD controller has its own API which the rest of the Wii can use, which does the expected things (such as "read sector" and "set drive speed").

Anyway, this behaviour is so well-known by now that that there are a bunch of open source mod chips! You can literally go and download Chiip or OpenWii or whatever and write the program onto a microcontroller, such as the Atmel ATMEGA8L:

So anyone with a suitable console, a soldering iron, and some soldering experience / soldering bravado can buy a $7 microcontroller and mod their Wii.

But it gets even more interesting than that: the commercial mod chips also use cheap microcontrollers! In fact, the one I bought (Wiikey) uses the exact same chip (in surface mount form):

(Note that if you click the above Wiikey link, the identifying information has been carefully removed from the chip. :)

So of course someone has extracted the code from a Wiikey, and so now in addition to all the OSS options you can also install the Wiikey program on your mod chip. 

The coolest thing about the mod chips is that most of the mod code doesn't actually run on the mod chip itself: it runs on the Wii drive controller. This means that the code that runs on the mod chip itself doesn't have to do much: it just has to detect when the Wii has been reset and patch the drive controller firmware. This in turn means that if you don't want to spring the $7 for an ATmega8L you can at least in theory buy a PIC microcontroller instead, or an ATTiny, or an MSP430 -- all of which have been supported by OpenWii at some point.

After a conversation with liedra I've been trying to come up with rhyming food. Ideally each rhyme should describe a multiple-course meal. So far I've got:

• Cheese on rye, stir fry, rhubarb pie
• Cannelloni and panettone (with mascarpone -- OK, Italian is a bit of a cheat)
• Milk shake, steak, and cake (or a pasta bake)
• Bread rolls, sausage rolls, and profiteroles
• Tea (brewed), wild boar (subdued), and prunes (stewed)
• Cauliflower au gratin, and, um, fortune cookies in Latin...

Anyone got any others?

Tonight I went to a poetry evening with my mum where several local poets spoke, poetry-slam style, before the main event. I've never been to a poetry slam, but my prejudices about hipsters were pretty well-established. So I made sure to wear my finest brown corduroy-looking jacket. It worked! I blended right in!

I stopped congratulating myself on my self-deprecatingly ironic outfit when Shane actually began speaking, though, because he was amazing. Clever, emotional writing, masterfully presented -- and all of it was clearly heartfelt. He took me from tears (which don't happen too often, cf my fetid, blackened soul which I am sure I have written about elsewhere) to laughter in the space of two poems. But perhaps the most impressive part was the collection of nubile young women who sat up the front in rapt attention, like pre-schoolers during story time. I have a visual aid:

I thought poetry recitals were all about greasy middle-aged men in trenchcoats, and dingy lighting, and microphones which smell of stale cigarettes. Nobody told me that women were involved!

Have I missed my calling?

"Maybe that's a little creepy" - Shane Koyczan on youtube

Like most stereotypical female villains, Dr. Blight exhibits a rather sexy figure consisting of the idealistic hourglass body with a thin athletic body and big hips. It's not clear whether she achieves her perfect figure through working out, metabolism or scientific means.

- Wikipedia on Doctor Blight, enemy of Captain Planet. The article is full of other great quotes!

It's hard to make analogies about being a computer programmer because I honestly believe it is quite different to other professions in which practitioners tend to be held accountable for their actions. With programming, you are in charge of not only the Platonic ideal but also the real-world implementation of any solution. The implementation always sucks, but nonetheless people don't just put up with it but actually seem to think that what you have produced is innovative and life-enhancing. 

It's sort of like you're a combination architect / builder, but you're a really terrible one. Someone asks you to build a new bathroom for their house, so you do, but despite all your careful planning the finished product is just shite. For example, the shower wall is made out of soap, because you thought it would be convenient -- now nobody needs to buy soap, because they can just rub up and down against the wall for a bit and then hose themselves off (you installed a hose instead of a shower head for greater flexibility).

After a few days, though, the drawbacks become obvious, because rats start eating the soap. Every morning the owner, Susan (let's say), enters the bathroom, chases away the rats, rubs up against the wall and hoses herself off. You know you should fix the rat problem but it's too expensive to replace the wall, so you just mix rat poison in with the soap. Now Susan's boyfriend is complaining that she smells of zinc phosphide and there's a growing pile of dead rats in the bath. No problem though, because you hired a man to clean them out. Every week, on Thursday, sometime between 7am and 3pm, a big, burly man shows up with a spade, lets himself in, shovels up all the rats, puts boot prints on the carpet for no obvious reason, dumps the rats in the front garden, and leaves. 

Of course, nobody can use the bathroom while he's in there, so anyone who wants a shower on Thursdays (and many people do) washes in the kitchen sink instead. You do a deal with a builder and soon your soap wall / kitchen-sink shower houses are everywhere. After a couple of months owner's clubs pop up where residents talk about how great it is to wash yourself in the sink because then you can get all your daily chores done from the one spot.

EDIT: Sorry about the comment screening. It's just because of idiot spammers.

Red wine is good for you, because it contains polyphenols which probably act as antioxidants and reduce the risk of heart disease. On the other hand red wine contains alcohol, the regular consumption of which marginally increases the risk of malignant tumours of the lower colon.

So that's pretty great: choose between a heart attack and arse cancer. This is right after the hilarious study that reported that marijuana's active ingredient may fight lung tumours.

There is so much of this that it's starting to get to the point where if you pay too much attention to the latest back-and-forth on it you will go insane. Of course, then there's the theory that if you're already insane perhaps you won't notice that you're insane. I think this is a silly theory. It should be very easy to tell that you're insane because everybody looks at you funny.

Dihansaier, it is clear

that the thinking machines cognisable just ridiculous.

In Syntax,

he can dogma :

The mind is the internal body.

Sale said, because he drank his tea,

"I have my criticisms and joy!

Their thinking Workstation

is only simulation:

They will not learn the deeper meaning of L IKE so. "

You will find it very simple :

Breakfast is a language game

understanding? What,

if it looks like it will be?

But I do not think Sale share.

Rather than write what is going on in my life right now, here is me reading a palindrome (from here) about Panama: panama.mp3

You know how wizards have to actually say the magic words in order to get the magic out, right? Do you think trainee wizards learn tricks like, say, squeaking out the magic words with their armpit, or whatever? So they'd all be at a formal wizard dinner and little Jimmy would do that trick with his arm and suddenly the head wizard's beard would catch fire?

This is a critical time in my life. Depending on what happens next (E), it's possible that for the rest of time (G), there will always be some time in the future (AF) when I will like chocolate. However, if the wrong thing happens next, then all bets are off and there's no guarantee about whether I'll ever like chocolate.

- Wikipedia, Computational Tree Logic

This is a post about how things are sticky-taped to walls.

While feeling incredibly tired working on my paper, I started analysing the cartoons stuck up on the panel above the sink in the NICTA kitchen area. Most are stuck up with sticky tape, but I noticed that there are several different stickytaping styles. I found three major ones.

Style 1 is a big piece of tape stuck right in the middle at the top, like this:

+----====-----+
|             |
+-------------+

Really, one piece of tape is all that is required. The tape is quite sticky, the panel is very amenable to having things stuck to it, and the cartoons are very light. Even so, Style 1 cartoons are the most wonky, and the tape is frequently wrinkled. The Style 1 person clearly could have put more effort into it, but just didn't care. This is the sort of happy-go-lucky "just look at the fucking cartoon and stop examining the sticky tape, you nerd" attitude which I am keen to emulate someday.

Style 2 is a little more conscientious and involves more tape: two pieces on either corner, arranged so that if they were longer they would meet to form a V:

\-------------/
| \         / |
+-------------+

Style 2 shows that the cartoon-sticker has thought a little bit about how the cartoon is going to be stuck. Often Style 2 cartoons are just as wonky as Style 1 cartoons though, so clearly Style 2 is about ensuring the paper stays on the wall without wasting unnecessary effort on the minutiae of its presentation -- a pretty healthy attitude.

Style 3 shows that the taper has really thought about how he (given that this is NICTA, I feel quite comfortable writing "he") is going to to affix the comic: four pieces of tape, one on each corner, arranged so that they would form a quadrilateral surrounding the comic if extended, thus maximising sticking power while minimising coverage of the comic with unsightly sticky tape (vs style 2):

/-------------\
|             |
\-------------/

So. Style 1: Haphazard. Kinda cool. Style 3: Meticulous, bordering on obsessive. Style 2: Intermediate. 

Oddly, even though I think it's overkill, I'm pretty sure that Style 3 is the style I would use if I ever wanted to attach a cartoon. Further, I like the sense of humour of the Style 3 guy the best. It's closer to my own. For example, one of the Style 1 cartoons is from User Friendly featuring one of the tech guys handing a cluebrick to a sales guy and telling him to "apply rapidly to head until effective" because he installed Windows Vista. I just don't find this at all funny.

On the other hand, one of the Style 3 cartoons features two dogs in conversation, with one saying to the other "I used to have a blog, but eventually I decided to just go back to pointless, incessant barking." This resonates with me at some deep level.

So, readers. Is there any connection between stickytaping style and sense of humour? Who are the Style 1, Style 2, and Style 3 guys? Is this the kind of psychological research that could get funded, if I had a proposal, an army of willing first-year Psych student volunteers, and a brazen attitude? And when will I get a decent night's sleep?

Some cocktails aren't very nice, in particular the ones made of soda water, alcohol, and large, bristly chunks of pineapple. I'm beginning to doubt it was actually a caprioska at all.

MTV is marketing genius, because people don't watch a particular program on MTV, they just watch MTV.

Bright orange fluffy socks are no substitute for warm feet.

Walking to Subway to get lunch I was yelled at by some Greenpeace people asking for donations. Well, I presume they were asking for donations. What actually happened was a guy shoved a picture up in my face and asked me if I wanted some "whale sushi". The picture turned out to be a bleeding whale carcass being hauled up onto a ship.

This is actually consistent with other things I've heard Greenpeace does, but I wonder if they actually get people to donate through this sort of... uh, nontraditional solicitation. The first thing it reminded me of -- quite irrationally -- was the pictures of aborted foetuses that American anti-abortion activists sometimes like to parade around in front of clinics.

If Ally was a Dairy Milk, and Simone was a pecan whirl, Julia was a strawberry truffle dusted with coconut flakes: perhaps not the most attractive chocolate in the box, but definitely the most complicated.

- From Nicholas' Little Book Of Chocolate Analogies For Fictional People (unpublished)

Is there a reasonable way for a guy, such as me, to carry around phone, wallet, keys, etc, without shoving them all into his pockets and/or looking like a dork?

When you convert a song -- Oops! I did it again, for example -- to MP3, you throw out a lot of data. But unless you listen hard, the MP3 version sounds the same as the original, even though it's a lot smaller (7 to 10 times smaller).

This works because humans ears are pretty weird and we actually hear a lot less than we think. For example, if you hear a loud sound at the same time as a softer sound (say you're having a conversation on the phone and a marching band walks past) you can't hear the softer sound. Makes sense. A bit weirder is that if the soft sound plays very soon before or after the loud sound, you still can't hear it. It's like the loud sound casts a shadow around it a little way.

So to convert some music to MP3 you just use your knowledge of how weird the human ear is and throw away all the sounds that people can't hear anyway. At least that's how it works in theory.

But what if instead of throwing out all the bits people couldn't hear, you instead threw out all the bits that you'd normally keep? Then you'd hear the parts of the music that you never normally hear. You'd be listening to shadows.

You'd probably want to pick something other than Britney. :)

"Denise"

It was cold that night;

I gave you my woolly gloves

As well as my heart.

- rotten_poet, on the the A-Team of Haiku Bastards community which, sadly, seems pretty much defunct these days

I like reading arguments on fark.com. They're very rarely rational, but that's fine because most things aren't rational, and it's pretty interesting to see how people try to make their points known when nobody actually cares about making a coherent argument.

Most recently, I enjoyed a Fark flamewar on vegetarianism as part of the comments thread on this intriguing article (I recommend the article link, but not the flamewar link, unless you share my taste for the perverse). Someone brought up the point that always comes up in Fark flamewars on vegetarianism, which is that humans have canine teeth and other instruments of destruction which wouldn't be necessary if we didn't evolve to eat meat. Ergo eating meat is natural, ergo we should be doing it. You will note that not one of these points follows from the other. This is perfectly acceptable in a Fark flamewar and in fact adds to the fun because the opposing side gets to attack each assertion, rather than just the first one.

Anyway, usually at this point someone whines that the argument doesn't make any sense, and they are promptly ignored, having violated the unwritten Fark flamewar rule of not being boring. This time events played out differently and more interestingly: someone pointed out that "meat-capable teeth = carnivore" wasn't actually always true in nature, and even troubled themselves to give an example: gorillas have similar teeth to ours, but they are strict vegetarians.

This was much better Fark flamewar fare, because it accepted the cracked-out "natural = better" premise and ran with it. Adding to its appeal was the fact that it also happened to be wrong, if you took it literally: gorillas aren't strict vegetarians, since a small percentage of their diet consists of grubs. The "it's natural, so do it" poster gleefully pointed this out, and the game was on.

Multiple people replied that having to eat the occasional grub was unlikely to have imposed the sorts of evolutionary pressures that would have resulted in gorillas developing canine teeth, and they were promptly ignored, as per the "don't be boring" rule I outlined above. The "strictly vegetarian" poster insisted that gorillas were strict vegetarians in any reasonable sense of the word and if they ate grubs it was only because they couldn't be bothered cleaning them off the plants. The "it's natural" guy then took the fight to the next level:

You are wrong. Gorillas are OMNIVORES.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=gorilla+omnivore

Faced with this damning evidence (over 22 000 pages containing both the words "gorilla" and "omnivore") the opposition had to step up in response:

That will get you 22,400 matches.

Gorilla + vegetarian gets 283,000.

By this point the argument had completely devolved into Google fights. Someone pointed out that "gorilla + herbivore" got more results than "gorilla + vegetarian". Someone else pointed out that "gorilla + carnivore" returned more results than "gorilla + herbivore" and that therefore bananas were made of meat. Strangely, nobody pointed out that Google ignores plus signs, but I stopped reading after Farker "shadowself", to my mind at least, won the argument:

gorilla + sigourney + weaver = 31,500 results

gorilla + herbivore = 24,000 results

Therefore, gorillas are not herbivores. They are Sigourney Weaver.

This fits naturally with all my beliefs and expectations. Also, I will now have a far more interesting answer the next time someone asks me why I am vegetarian.

This is a question about ethics.

I really like donuts. A while ago, popular Australian chain Donut King ran a TV ad featuring right-wing politician and idiot Pauline Hanson. Since then I have been boycotting them.

Should I continue? This isn't really a question of satisfying my donut-lust because there are plenty of other chains. But I can't help feeling that, just in terms of reasonable behaviour, it might be better just to move on.

I just opened the microwave to find the salt grinder in it. Why would you do that?

I guess you might zap salt to dry it out so it grinds better, but surely you'd want to take it out of the grinder first?