Month: May 2011

Wii – Install HBC (Homebrew Channel) – and play games from USB HD

By Wii Talk

Nintendo Wii has proven to be a very nice console that keeps lots of people around the TV, jumping, hoping and struggling to keep up with the ‘electronic monsters’.

The thing is, doesn’t matter how much fun you have playing your games, it is always a new one out there that needs to be tried out. It is quite an expensive fun especially when you have to feed the needs of few ‘hungry’ kidz or maybe adults.
Wii games prices are UP and as long as we spend money buying them, at this high prices, they will stay up.

Why you can’t get freebies for Wii?
Now, freebies are in big demand for other hardware platforms as PCs or smartphones.
Markets are full of apps, games, tools for free and/or at low prices.
Big boys are making good money from Wii games and accessories and are not willing to stop.

There is a ‘movement’ called “The homebrew channel” that gives you access to free apps and games for Wii – all  developed and offered as freeware by good people.
Offer is not huge, but covers Utilities, Audio, Video, OS, Math.

OK, apps, games for free, but how can we install HBC (homebrew channel) to be able to play them?
And most important HBC offers the possibility of playing ‘back-up’ games stored on a USB hard-drive.


So, how do we install HBC?

First stop will be at https://hbc.hackmii.com/ , download page, here you find few hacks that will let you install the HBC.
The thing is all depends what WII IOS (Wii Operating System) version do you have. If is too new, the exploit won’t work or are not quite easy to apply.
You can get great help from Lifehacker site – they have posted installation methods/tutorials for each individual hack.

In my case – WII IOS 4.3xx –Bathaxx was the solution, and it worked smoothly.
About Bathaxx: Bathaxx is an exploit found in the game LEGO Batman. The exploit was made by Team Twiizers & lewurm.

Once you see this image on your Wii, you should celebrate the first victory.

Now, you have to install few more things on your Wii and then play from USB HD, save games on USB HD, download covers, cheats….lots of goodies.
What needs to be done?
Install  DOP-Mii v12
Install  cIOS
Install  USB Loader GX

The guys from Lifehacker have a spot on tutorial about this.

Install and enjoy playing Wii from USB HD.

Do you get a lot of SPAM lately?

By SPAM SPAM

I don’t know what happened, but in the last month or so I’ve got tons of SPAM. It has gone above my mild annoyance level and now it really piss me off.


In the past I just ignored it, or I marked some emails as SPAM, or I filtered out few email addresses, but in the last month or so I’ve been bombarded with spam emails,  content spam on forum and blogs and who knows how many dodgy robots harvested my email addresses and definitely I have been called on my published phone numbers by countless ‘cold calls marketers’ from +91 country.


Fine Print Note: The thing is, you publish you phone to get some business and end up getting ONLY SPAM – and ‘they’ say that AU has a good anti SPAM security…


I’ve studied the spammers tops and  stats for a while now and are pretty conclusive – lots of spammers from only a few countries.







































Source of the stats – Project Honey Pot


What can we do to stop the spammers?


Well, under SPAM acts or legislations, SPAM is illegal in many countries – and Australia is ranked as having a good law and good anti-spam security (imagine how bad could be in other countries).


In Australia, anti-spam legislation - the Spam Act 2003 - covers email, instant messaging, SMS (text messages) and MMS (image-based mobile phone messaging) messages of a commercial nature. It does not cover faxes, internet pop-ups or voice telemarketing. Telemarketing calls are covered by the Do Not Call Register.

ACMA – and   Spam Act 2003 – says that is illegal to send, or cause to be sent, unsolicited commercial electronic messages – email, instant messaging, SMS and MMS.
The ACMA is responsible for enforcing the Spam Act and actively works to fight spam in Australia.
ACMA has posted on their Site info about current SPAM activities and  and they bring down as many spammer as they could, I suppose.


They encourage anybody to report SPAM, SPAM emails by forwarding it to report@submit.spam.acma.gov.au, or Spam SMS, a service to allows you to quickly and easily report SMS you suspect may breach Australia’s spam laws.


What else can you do fighting international SPAM?


An interesting project is:


Project Honey Pot


“Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.”


They offer for FREE few nice features/services:

  • IP Data – a broad collection of malicious IPs, harvesters, spam servers, directory attackers, comment spammers – plus lookup IP
  • stats – per countries, useragents, usernames, spamvertised
  • HTTP blacklist, Monitor your IP Space
  • Plus they send real time their SPAM FEEDS to anti-spam filter developers and companies assessing reputation of IP addresses
  • the project organizers also help various law enforcement agencies combat private and commercial unsolicited bulk mailing offenses and overall work to help reduce the amount of spam being sent and received on the Internet
You can also install on your site a ‘Honey Pot’ scripts that will ‘entrap’ the spammers helping cleaning up the WEB.
They also thought about bloggers:
 
“Some people who want to participate in Project Honey Pot don’t have their own servers. To allow these folks to help out, we have created a QuickLinks program where they can drive harvester traffic to existing Honey Pots. Sharing your Honey Pot will increase the number of harvesters that it catches, allow more people to participate in the Project, and, we think, generally increase your karmic goodness”
 
Give them a try – it’s free, useful and with good intentions.

 









and you will get your own stats and tops:





Fight the SPAM – is annoying and makes the WEB insecure place. Plus, remember all these dodgy guys want to steal your money.


Cheers,
Nick





wderswcderasz

By Google Experiment

Another experiment to see how fast Google is finding wderswcderasz on the WEB.
wderswcderasz is on Blogspot that is a preferred spot for Google to crawl.

Go  wderswcderasz, fly wderswcderasz!

opmdcsdcpb

By Google Experiment

Well, this is not quite a real article, this is just another gyhwesaa like example. We just want to see how quick Google picks up this new word opmdcsdcpb and how we will rank in search results for this ‘word’.

As gyhwesaa, opmdcsdcpb is a perfect example of keyword with almost no competition and very low number of searches.
This original article will have to compete against few lots of copy-paste articles that will contain the same fabricated word opmdcsdcpb in them. Let’s see how they will rank against each oder.

Fly opmdcsdcpb, fly opmdcsdcpb!

Machines Monitoring

By Agilent In Circuit Test, HP In Circuit Test, HP3070, ICT, IFR In Circuit Test, IFR4220, Machines Monitoring, Machines Monitoring Systems

I have been working as an engineer in EMS (electronics manufacturing services) since 97 and always I had a special fascination for all kind of machines/robots used to DO our job from:

  • Screen Printers,
  • Chip Placers,
  • Fine Pitch Placers,
  • Reflow Ovens,
  • Was Soldering,
  • Conformal Coating,
  • In-Circuit Testers,
  • Functional Testers, etc.

Data, Data, Data…

All these machines are capable to follow a program/recipe and spit out log files containing tons of useful information.
Many times we rush through our daily duties and DO NOT pay enough attention to the data.
Many tried to prove that this behaviour is wrong, but at the end of the day – quantity prevails over quality big times and accountants rule the industry, and LLR countries are luring accountants.

I used to say – you as an engineer have to ‘explain’ any new idea in $ otherwise is absolutely dead – nobody will give a s**t on it and is absolutely dead. Yes, if you have a great revelation, engineering one – try put it plain and simple for money people: ROI (spend now, recover in x months…afterwards ++ profit), because nobody is excited by engineering facts – money talks.

Enough idle talk – I always liked to have a real-time ‘vision’ of what machines talk and interpret their chat and take advantage of this knowledge. SMT, Wave Soldering, ICT are in place since 30 years ago, but despite the huge transformation of the machine’s hardware, manufacturing is still mainly done using pen and paper – best case tons of EXCEL.
Excel you would say, it’s a good tool but requires lots of people getting data from archaic paper, filling out forms, copy paste formulas, do graphs and having the report done……MUCH TOO LATE.

Data is valuable if is FRESH and can make use of it….detect trends, identify root causes.

OEE – Overall Equipment Effectiveness

One of the simplest things that I would like to have and I have implemented, is to know the Overall Equipment Effectiveness – OEE – old concept – handy to know it.
It will give you a better understanding of your inefficiencies and uncover ways to overcome them.

OEE=A * P * Q

A – Availability – represents the time when machines are available for production percentage from total scheduled time.

P – Performance or at the other end Speed Loss – time lost with short stoppages – due to improper manning of the line, materials unavailability or machines re-loading (feeder change).

Q – Quality – it measures line yield – the percentage of good boards from total production.

What can you DO with this OEE?

Make the right decisions – if Availability is always an issue because machines are always breaking down you don’t need to buy more machines to make up for lost capacity – you just need to put together a better preventive maintenance plan and a better spare parts kits.

If you have problems with Performance, then machines are OK, but materials are not available JIT (Just In Time) or you don’t have enough people to cope with all changeovers and machines stops or it takes too long to change the feeders.

Quality – IT IS IMPORTANT – nobody will pay you for scrap products or let’s say non-working units and repair is hard work, require a lot of skills, is expensive and tedious. Put enough emphasis to minimise the faults – will reduce your costs.

What’s a good OEE?

I used to say 90% Availability, 90% Performance, 98% Quality will give you a nice and robust target OEE= 0.9*0.9*0.98=0.7938.
If you get it and are able to maintain it, then you are OK.

 

Machine’s Logs

All placement machines are capable to spit out log files with data about when a PCBA entered a machine when it went out and lots of info about errors on each board, each slot or each feeder. These data are an easy grab and knowing, real-time your output and calculating OEE will give you the power to change things…..otherwise….you just pray for the best and get the same s**t every day.

You don’t even know if people are not slowing down the line on purpose – if the Supervisor doesn’t want to tell you (of course he knows).

It is quite the same situation for TESTERS – In-Circuit Testers in special – right after you’ve tested a board you want to know your defects, top defects, machine utilisation, number of retests, access a debug database for more advise…..just looking at the failure ticket given by the machine you will not get all these.

Is quite a pity that big companies like HP, Genrad, IFR made awesome test machines, but so bloody dumb from data collection point of view. Log files generated are comprehensive, but all the work is left on Test ENG to figure out how to use them properly, wisely.

Just parsing all data from an HP3070 by example you could get – machine utilisation, real yield and shift throughput, number of the retest, top defects, SPC (Statistical Process Control) for any particular measurement you want.

Yes, I developed all these Machines Monitoring Solutions because I was sick and tired to be blind-folded and DO my job just based on subjective assumptions.

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT MACHINES MONITORING – drop us a line at:
customDB@nicks-software.com
or visit our site:
www.nicks-software.com – Products page has a comprehensive description of our HPDCA solution developed for ICT machines real-time monitoring.

All the best,
Nick – from Nick’s Software