How to Hack your PSP to 4.01 M33-2 (The Easy Way)

UPDATE (10-20-2008): 4.01 m33-2 is NO LONGER the latest hacked PSP Firmware. The newest one is 5.00 M33-3 and can be found HERE - How to hack the PSP. So if you just bought a PSP and want to get into custom firmware, this is the right place to be. If you already have custom firmware on your PSP and just want to upgrade to 4.01, skip below to the 4.01 section. Update: This works on the new blue Madden PSP as well! Requirements: 1. PSP Pandora Battery 2. Memory Stick Pro Duo (64mb to 8gb TESTED so far - any will do). 3. psp-grader-v005-lite-setup 4. Official PSP 3.90 Firmware. Steps: 1. Install PSP Grader on your computer. 2. Run PSP Grader and select the location of the 3.90 firmware and drive for your memory stick 3. Hit run and let the program create a “Magic Memory Stick” for you. 4. Your Memory stick is now ready, insert the Pandora’s Battery whilst holding the L should button on the PSP. Once the IPL has loaded on the PSP simply press the X button. Wait. After around 1 - 3 minutes the Flash shall be done, press X to shutdown the psp, it is now safe to remove the pandora battery. Its is very important to just wait and not switch off the PSP or remove the Memory Stick or Pandora’s Battery, it could result in a brick if you do not wait. 5. Once that is done, you can format the memory stick with your psp to use to load games. Games are normally loaded in the “ISO” folder. you need to hit select on the PSP to get the ISO mode correct. Use the “Sony NP9660″ one. This was the easiest way I could find to get the PSP to 3.90 m33-3, from there you are going to just run two more updates to reach 4.01-m33-2 Steps to finish the hack to Version 4.01…. If you already have custom firmware you can skip the steps above and jump directly here. 1. Download the following files:. a. 401-m33 (Hacked firmware v4.01 m33-1) b. 401m332 (Hacked firmware v4.01 m33-2) c. Offical PSP 4.01 Firmware. 2. Extract the 401-m33 files and the official 4.01 firmware update. Rename the 4.01 official update to 401.PBP and then copy it to the 401-m33’s extracted UPDATE folder. 3. Copy the UPDATE folder to the memory stick on your psp to the following location: “/PSP/GAME/” 4. In your PSP go to Games, and then run the update. This will take your PSP to version 4.01 m33-1 5. Delete the UPDATE folder you just created in “/PSP/GAME/”. 6. Extract the 401m332 file and copy the extracted UPDATE folder to your PSP memory stick under “/PSP/GAME/” 7. In your PSP go to Games, and then run the update. That’s it. You are all patched up to the latest version of the time of this posting! There is also an add-on pack to this firmware that gives the PSP additional features like Screenshots, video capture, etc. That can be found here: How to take Screen Shots of PSP Games and More Also if you are looking for a jump start to getting emulators to run on your PSP, you should check out: Capcom CPS2 Emulator for the PSP Slim and also Capcom CPS1 Emulator for the PSP Slim. Those two articles should atleast get you on your feet. Images/Code Retard

How to Download free MP3’s from using Google

To search for free mp3’s with google, all you have to do is modify the search query. All you have to do is search for this.. “Band or Artist name here” last modified mp3 “index of” -html -htm -php -asp For example i want to get some Snoop Dog’ song… “Snoop Dogs” last modified mp3 “index of” -html -htm -php -asp

Free Apple iPhone App Store Apps of the Day - 5/15/09

Get them now while they’re hot! These iPhone apps have been recently reduced to the recession friendly price of free! There’s no word when these app prices will shoot back up (usually these freebies are only good for a couple of days as app publishers try to get a little publicity) so make no delay and point your iTunes to the App Store and get to downloading! * Eric Thayne’s Eggs Away!: Accelerometer-based balancing game * Laminar Research’s X-Plane-Trainer: Flight simulation training * Aaron Marlin’s Trash Day: Trash pickup reminders * InnerFour’s iCopter 3D: FREE: Acceleromterer-based flight simulator * noidentity’s RadioAlarm: Internet radio alarm clock * ustwo’s Steppin: Touchscreen-based balance game * Peter Damen’s Pitch & Roll: Inclinometer

How-to: using the new Facebook stream API in a desktop app

Facebook launched a new set of APIs on Monday that allow third-party software to interact with the Facebook activity stream. Developers can use these new APIs to build sophisticated Facebook client applications that give users direct access to the stream from their desktop. Courtesy of these APIs, rich support for Facebook could soon arrive in your favorite Twitter client and other social networking programs. In this article, I'll give you an inside look at how I used the new APIs to add full support for the Facebook stream in Gwibber, my own open source microblogging client for Linux. The activity stream includes several kinds of content, including status updates, images, links, videos, and content that is imported from other services, such as Delicious bookmarks and Google Reader shared items. Users can post comments on stream items and can also indicate that they "like" a specific stream item. Facebook now provides programmatic access to all of this data through several different mechanisms. Developers can use a conventional REST method, a FQL query, or an Atom-based feed. Atom Activity Extensions The Atom-based feed is, perhaps, the most intriguing aspect of the new open streams system. Atom is a standardized XML-based format for simple syndication that is similar to RSS but is more robust and extensible. Rather than completely inventing its own dialect, Facebook wisely chose to put its weight behind Atom Activity Extensions, an emerging effort to build a standardized set of activity tags that can be used in Atom feeds. Atom Activity Extensions is still in the draft stage and is not yet a formal standard. The draft is authored by David Recordon and Martin Atkins of Six Apart under the aegis of the DiSo project, a collaborative effort to build open standards for data portability and social networking. Facebook has become one of the first major adopters of Atom Activity Extensions, a move that will significantly boost the visibility of the nascent standard and help it gain traction. MySpace is also committed to the format and working on an implementation, so it now has the backing of two of the most popular social networking websites. This is a major win for interoperability and it could eventually facilitate development of universal activity stream clients that function in much the same way that desktop news feed readers work today. Chris Messina, a leading figure in DiSo who is well-known for his work with OAuth and is closely involved with Atom Activity Streams, is enthusiastic about Facebook's adoption of the format. He commented on the implications in a message posted to DiSo's Activity Streams mailing list on Monday following Facebook's announcement. "This is indeed good news for Facebook and for this community effort," he wrote. "At the very least, I'm excited to see how similar we can get the feeds coming out of MySpace and Facebook and I'm also eager to start looking at how we can replace the current activities API in OpenSocial with the Activity Streams format." Facebook makes the stream available to third-party software through a URL. In order to access the feed, the program will need to be authenticated and will have to provide as parameters a session key and signature checksum. The following is the URL format: http://www.facebook.com/activitystreams/feed.php?source_id=&app_id=&session_key=&sig=&v=0.7&read&updated_time= The significance of each of those attributes is described in greater detail in the official documentation, but those values should all be relatively familiar to developers who have worked with the Facebook API. Although the Atom-based feed will be very useful for developers who are building generalized stream clients, Facebook's native APIs are more practical for client applications that will integrate tightly with the service. In Gwibber, I chose to use the new activity stream REST API methods. Implementing Facebook activity streams in Gwibber I originally created Gwibber in 2007 with the goal of building a social networking application for the GNOME desktop environment. It brings together comprehensive support for several popular microblogging services in a single program with a unified message stream. It is written in the Python programming language and is distributed under the terms of the General Public License (GPL). The actual content stream is drawn with an embedded WebKit HTML renderer and the rest of the user interface is built the GTK+ toolkit. Gwibber's current Facebook functionality is built on top of PyFacebook, a lightweight open source Python library that wraps the Facebook APIs. PyFacebook mitigates a lot of the pain of Facebook client development because it handles all of the authentication, session, and signature hash stuff. It hides those idiosyncrasies under a simple object-oriented interface that is easy for developers to use. PyFacebook is also very easy to extend when new Facebook API methods are introduced. Each Facebook API method is described in the PyFacebook library using a simple data structure that specifies the method's name and parameter types. PyFacebook does not appear to have been updated to work with the new stream API methods yet, but it was trivially easy for me to do it myself. You can see my simple PyFacebook modifications here. Note that I did not add all of the new methods, just the ones that I'm using in Gwibber. Each service that is supported in Gwibber is implemented in its own module which exposes its functionality through a set of methods and properties that is consistent across all of the service modules. This makes it possible to wrap the services with a generalized abstraction layer so that the rest of the client application doesn't have to understand the differences between the various services. This abstraction layer is what makes it possible for Gwibber to display a combined stream of the messages from all of the services. To implement support for the activity stream, I rewrote most of Gwibber's Facebook service module. Obtaining stream data To add the full Facebook stream to Gwibber, I had to process the stream and extract the values into standard Gwibber message classes. I started by adding support for reading the stream. With my modified version of PyFacebook, this is very easy. I call the stream.get method on a PyFacebook instance. When called, the stream.get method will return the contents of the stream in either XML or JSON, depending on what you have requested. The only parameter that is required by stream.get (besides the session key and others that are handled automatically by PyFacebook) is the UID of your application's user. There are several optional parameters that you can provide to customize the output. For example, you can provide start_time and end_time parameters which will display stream content that was published between the specified times. This is sort of Facebook's equivalent of Twitter's since_id and max_id values. There is also a limit parameter (similar to Twitter's count) which allows you to specify how many messages you would like to download. The default if no limit value is explicitly specified is 30 posts. The maximum number that can be retrieved at once isn't documented, so I did some experimentation to see if I could figure it out. I tried pulling down 400 but only got 312, with the oldest messages dating back seven days. This leads me to believe that there is probably not a numerical maximum but that it will only give you access to a week of messages. Unlike Twitter, Facebook's stream API doesn't support the concept of paging, so you can't go back any further than that or iteratively download your entire history.

Number of confirmed H1N1 cases worldwide soars

GENEVA, Switzerland (CNN) -- Confirmed cases of swine flu jumped by more than 65 percent Saturday with the World Health Organization reporting 615 people in 15 countries infected with the virus commonly known as swine flu. A policeman guards a Hong Kong hotel where 300 people are under quarantine. A policeman guards a Hong Kong hotel where 300 people are under quarantine. Click to view previous image 1 of 2 Click to view next image more photos » The organization had reported 367 cases on Friday. The jump in cases was due to ongoing testing of a backlog of specimens in Mexico, the WHO said. The most cases were in Mexico, where 397 people were infected and 16 deaths were attributed to the virus, according to the WHO. Next was the United States, which has 141 cases and one death. "What the increase reflects is that we are moving forward in confirming many of the cases that have been left untested for some time, so in an way that's reassuring," said WHO spokesman Paul Garwood. "We know that these cases are being dealt with, these specimens are being looked at and assessed, and we're getting more and more info about this virus. Video Watch latest developments as swine flu sweeps world » "So we haven't seen, say, a spike in new cases or new influenza cases appearing in Mexico City, for example," Garwood continued. "It's just the fact that this reporting backlog is bearing fruit and we're seeing the results of that." The latest developments come as parts of Asia discovered they were not immune to the spread of the virus. Learn about the virus » Hundreds of guests and staff were under quarantine in China on Saturday after health officials determined that a hotel guest had contracted the H1N1 virus. Nearly 200 hotel guests and 100 staff members were ordered to stay in Metro Park Hotel in Hong Kong for seven days to stop the spread of the H1N1 virus, a government spokesman said. Read more about quarantined hotel guests The quarantine was ordered after a 25 -year-old Mexican man stayed in the hotel and became sick, according to the spokesman. It is the first confirmed case of the virus in Hong Kong, local medical officials said. Don't Miss * Hundreds isolated in Hong Kong hotel * Mexico trip costs students graduation * Dr. Sanjay Gupta 'tweets' on swine flu South Korean officials on Saturday confirmed their first case -- a 51-year-old nun who recently traveled to Mexico for volunteer work. The other countries with confirmed cases are Canada, with 34; Spain and the United Kingdom, which each have 13; Germany and New Zealand, which each have four; Israel, with two; and Austria, China, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Switzerland, which each have one. See where cases have been confirmed » As the number of swine flu cases across the globe is expected to rise, scientists are racing to develop a vaccine to confront the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, hopes to have a vaccine for the virus available to manufacturers within a month, said Michael Shaw, the U.S. agency's lab team leader for the virus response. "We're doing the best we can as fast as we can," he said. Still, it would take four to six months from the time the appropriate strain is identified before the first doses become available, said Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO director of the Initiative for Vaccine Research. "Of course, we would like to have a vaccine tomorrow. We would have wanted to have it yesterday," she said. "It's a long journey." Kieny said there is "no doubt" that a vaccine can be made "in a relatively short period of time." Producing a vaccine involves isolating a strain of the virus, which has already been done, and tweaking it so manufacturers can make a vaccine, Kieny said. Video Go behind the scenes at the CDC » As researchers work, the mayor of Mexico City expressed optimism Friday. Authorities in Mexico are "beginning to see evidence that the (virus) might be letting up, and the number of people who have been hospitalized has leveled out in regards to people who are contagious, at least as of yesterday," Mayor Marcelo Ebrard told reporters. "I do not say this so that we lower our guard or so that we think that we do not have a problem anymore," he said. "We do have a problem, but I say this so that we know where we are as a city after we have done all we have done, and in what direction we are heading and how much we have progressed. And what I can say is that we are heading in the right direction." One death in the United States has been attributed to swine flu -- a toddler from Mexico whose family brought him to Texas for medical treatment. At a Cabinet meeting Friday, President Barack Obama praised the "extraordinary" government response to the virus but emphasized that "we also need to prepare for the long term." advertisement "Since we know that these kinds of threats can emerge at any moment, even if it turns out that the H1N1 is relatively mild on the front end, it could come back in a more virulent form during the actual flu season, and that's why we are investing in our public health infrastructure."

Freedom of the media declines worldwide, report says

"Global declines in press freedom" persisted last year, with setbacks highlighted in Israel, Italy, Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere across the world, an annual survey said Friday. Media freedom campaigners don gags during a news conference in Hong Kong in April 2008. Media freedom campaigners don gags during a news conference in Hong Kong in April 2008. Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization that supports democracy and freedom of the media, said in its annual press freedom survey that "negative trends" outweighed "positive movements in every region, particularly in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and North Africa." "This marked the seventh straight year of overall deterioration. Improvements in a small number of countries -- including bright spots in parts of South Asia and Africa -- were overshadowed by a continued, relentless assault on independent news media by a wide range of actions, in both authoritarian states and countries with very open media environments." Israel -- once the only country to be consistently rated free by the group in the Middle East and North Africa -- was ranked as "partly free" because of the Gaza conflict. The report cited "increased travel restrictions on both Israeli and foreign reporters; official attempts to influence media coverage of the conflict within Israel; and greater self-censorship and biased reporting, particularly during the outbreak of open war in late December." Elsewhere in the Middle East, there are concerns about harassment of journalists and bloggers in Libya, Iran, Syria, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. The drop in violence in war-torn Iraq helped journalists move around the country, and a new law in the Kurdish region gave journalists "unprecedented freedoms." Hong Kong, which is part of China, also dropped in rankings from free to partly free, a reflection of "the growing influence of Beijing over media and free expression in the territory." Don't Miss * Journalist jailed in Iran may seek pardon * U.S. journalists to be tried in North Korea * Journalists freed in Azerbaijan * Read the report (PDF) "Of particular concern were the appointment of 10 owners of Hong Kong media outlets to a mainland Chinese political advisory body, increased restrictions on film releases in the period surrounding the Olympics, and reports that critics of Beijing encountered growing difficulty in gaining access to Hong Kong media platforms." The report cited deterioration of of freedoms in Taiwan, which has been characterized as East Asia's freest media environment. That's because of "legal pressures and attempts to control broadcast media outlets." Italy dropped from free to partly free because of the "increased use of courts and libel laws to limit free speech, heightened physical and extralegal intimidation by both organized crime and far-right groups, and concerns over media ownership and influence," the report said. It cited fears about media magnate Silvio Berlusconi becoming prime minister again. There are concerns about "the concentration of state-owned and private outlets under a single leader." In the former Soviet Union, "legal pressure and attempts to control broadcast media outlets" were cited in Russia, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. The report noted other problems in Russia, saying "reporters suffer from a high level of personal insecurity, and impunity for past murders or physical attacks against journalists is the norm." Across Africa, there were "some improvements," citing developments in Comoros, Sierra Leone, Angola, and Liberia. But there were continued problems in places like Zimbabwe and Eritrea. "Senegal took a significant step backward due to a dramatic increase in both legal and extralegal action against journalists and media houses, accompanied by overtly hostile rhetoric from the president and other officials," the report said. The report cited strides in South Asian nations, ranking the once "not free" Maldives to "partly free." It mentioned a "new constitution protecting freedom of expression, the opening of additional private radio and television stations, the release of a prominent journalist from life imprisonment, and a general loosening of restrictions after the country's first democratic presidential election in October." It said Bangladesh and Pakistan reversed declines in freedom of the media. But there were setbacks in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, two countries racked by warfare. In some countries in the Americas, such as Mexico, Bolivia and Ecuador, "attacks and official rhetoric against the media escalated." Venezuela and Cuba were ranked as not free, and there were "high levels of intimidation and self-censorship" in Colombia and Guatemala. Positive developments were noted in Guyana, Haiti and Uruguay. The worst-rated countries in the world are Myanmar, Cuba, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea and Turkmenistan. "Given the current economic climate, which is certain to place a further strain on media sustainability and diversity in rich and poor countries alike, pressures on media freedom are now looming from all angles and are increasingly threatening the considerable gains of the past quarter-century," the report said.