PS3 yellow light of death - Fixable?

I was gifted (cheers Rachael!) a PS3 which has failed with the dreaded yellow light of death. The cause of the problem is usually due to overheating damaging solder points on the CPU/GPU. Switching in the PS3 results in a weird traffic light scenario, the LED starts off as green, then yellow and finally flashing red.

The problem can be resolved by a technique called reflow soldering. So off I trot to purchase a heat gun.

The galactic inquisitor - "Ignore me!" - KQ2A7ND23Q4C

KQ2A7ND23Q4C

KQ2A7ND23Q4C

Fail and Fail Often

Over the course of the last couple of weeks a lot of my time at work has been taken up with dealing with some problems our clients keep running into. There have been structural changes within their organisation, as a result their safe working practices seem to have been deteriorating for some time now.

Essentially, they're not learning from their mistakes, they're not listening to the advice they ask for. Making mistakes is an important part of the learning process, if you learn from your mistakes, make notes if required, and move on.

The current situation with out client sees none of this happening. It can be quite annoying when such problems get classed as 'high priority' (in this case, help with someone else's problems in addition to our own work load) and good advice, investigation/working practices suggested get ignored.

There may be a light at the end of the tunnel, with many failures they should have caught making their way into the production systems the problems have been escalated with the client, and a more senior (objective and level headed) manager assigned to the task. Perhaps he'll whip their team back into shape.

Signing off with 'Fail and fail often' by Jeri Ellsworth. Fantastic advice, applicable to more than electronics.

Open the pod bay doors HAL. Nasa loses International space station control codes

Yeah! Title. So Nasa lost (source) 5408 Laptops betwen 2010/2011 (they're not behind the couch, or on eBay, one of which contained the algorithms used to control the ISS, that's the International Space Station. How long before HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors and Sir Roger Moore is forced to blast off in a discontued space shuttle to defeat Sir (but not really) Hugo Drax? Wait, I'm confusing films again.

Sir Roger Moore, aged 52. Let's see if you look this good after so many years preparing quiche!

In reference to Stanley Kubrick's wee film 2001 I leave you with an IBM computer from 1961 singing "Daisy Bell" by Harry Dacre. It may sound synthetic but nowhere near as forced/false as Coldplay:

CyanogenMod - I miss you.

I've had my Samsung Galaxy S2 for a month now, it replaced my beloved HTC Magic as my daily phone. I am suffering buyers remorse.

When I first saw the HTC Magic available in the UK I decided it was the android device I had to have, I told my dad about the phone and Android, he managed to get one before I did. When I took deliver of mine, three of my friends were so impressed the ordered the exact same device. All well and good. Then came CyanogenMod, a replacement Android build which can be flashed (installed) to many devices (current devices list).

Cyanogen kicked my phone up a notch, it was faster than the Android build Vodafone (boo!) had installed, it didn't have any bundled apps which couldn't be removed (spunkware), I could tweak more settings, use features which the Vodafone build would never support (USB tethering, apps2sd etc).

Over the years the device naturally started to show it's age. My friends who had also bought an HTC Magic moved on to other devices (mostly the Galaxy S2). In November 2011 I was close to buying a replacement, Cyanogen had stopped supporting the old war horse, then I found Ginger Yoshi 1.5. Installing this gave my HTC Magic another, albeit not as hard, kick of life.  At this point my friends fancy Galaxy S2s were rocking Android 2.3.3, my trusty HTC Magic was running 2.3.5. 

Ginger Yoshi 1.5 - Squeezing as much into the HTC Magic as possible

For a while I struggled on, last month I took delivery of my Samsung Galaxy S2. As a long time user of 'after market' firmwares I'm less than impressed with the software. The hardware is great, don't get me wrong, O2 (my provider) have installed a lot of spunkware, ditto Samsung.

I'm currently holding off resolving the software stupidity until CyanogenMod 9 is released. I urge you to investigate CyanogenMod as an alternative to the Android build (and software) supplied by your vendor. It's cost free, though donations do go to a fund the ongoing development.

I still use the HTC Magic occasionally when the Samsung UI pissed me off.

I leave you with "The telephone call" From Electric Cafe by Kraftwerk

Pwnie Express - penetration testing pogo plug

So I just found out about the PwnPlug line of products. I remember reading about a couple of guys doing something like this (link) at Defcon ten years ago using a Sega Dreamcast, but this solution is more powerful, has more features and would look fairly innocuous plugged in to a socket in most offices.

Bringing a new meaning to the term 'Plug and play'

The main features listed on the site:

• Maintains a covert, encrypted, firewall-busting backdoor into your target network [Details]
• Includes "Plug UI" for simple web-based setup
• Tunnels through application-aware firewalls & IPS
• Sends an SMS message when SSH tunnel is activated
• Preloaded with Ubuntu, Metasploit, SET, Fasttrack, SSLstrip, nmap, dsniff, netcat, nikto, nbtscan, scapy, ettercap, JTR, medusa, & more!
• Unpingable and no listening ports in stealth mode
• Includes stealthy decal stickers

That's quite the payload, delivered in something compact and stealthy. 

Half-Life 3?

On the way to work I noticed a suspicious van, and a shady figure lurking in the forground.

Click for larger image

Is the figure encircled Dr Gordon Freeman? Is the Orange box getting an update? Are Valve about to release Half-Life 3?

No, of course not, but they had better get a move on.