Sadly, this isn’t a joke or just being paranoid. The politicians are going a bit overboard with internet censorship right now (elections this year). They are currently trying to pass a law, allowing the BKA (the German FBI) to block sites on the internet and monitor people trying to access the blocked sites. The BKA can freely decide which sites to block, and no one except for the BKA officially  knows which sites are on the list.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGD2q2vewzQ

You are a Terrorist! A Campaign against Terrorists.
United for a safer Germany. The Campaign „Du bist Deutschland“ (You are Germany) in 2005 was the beginning of a wave of positive spirit in the whole country. This combined energy has turned backwards in 2009, because now you are a potencial Terrorist and you have to be watched closely.

If you are having problems getting Windows 7 RC networking to work in vmware, try this little trick:

• shutdown the vmware guest
• edit the .vmx and insert/edit the following line:
  ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000”

That was it, boot up the guest and enjoy your working network again.

I accidentally stumbled across a linksys link today with all the web interfaces for their devices: http://ui.linksys.com/. Very useful for checking out the possibilities of a device before buying it, or for making screenshots for internal manuals if you don’t have access to a certain device.

Yesterday and today I went and got my Wii controller linked up to my htpc in the living room. No more boring old standard infrared remote control for me, now I can control the pc with my Wii controller. The first solution I found was MythPyWii which worked pretty well, but was nonetheless useless (due to some restrictions in the way myth works, and the way MythPyWii sends it’s data to myth) because Wii input was not forwarded to myth plugins (e.g. Myth Video or Myth Games).  Next I had a look at the inner working of MythPyWii and had a better look at wminput from the cwiid project.  Anyone who want’s to do this stuff: the packages bundeled with varios distributions kinda suck. Go ahead and pull the lastest codebase from their SVN and compile it yourself. If you want to go into serious FPS you are going to have to do it anyway to get some additional plugins compiled. I then set up the controls to work fine with mythtv and my video players (mplayer, vlc). With that done, I could (more or less) replace me traditional remote with a wii remote, now it was time for the fun stuff.

Next on my list was google earth (since controlling google earth with a Wii Remote just has to count as cool), easy to download and install. somewhat more challenging getting it into mythtv (Myth Games), don’t worry too much, plenty of helpful site around the internet, various ways to do it. The key mapping Wii->Keyboard was somewhat more difficult, since wminput currently doesn’t support different profiles, and I wasn’t in the mood of actually coding that functionality in. So I did a dirty hack: the script that calls google earth, switches the wminput config and then restarts wminput. The downside to this is that the controller has to reconnect. oh well.

I did the same with ScummVM, and now can play “point and click” adventures with my Wii Remote on the TV in the living room. Now that definatly counts as cool. As with google earth, the scummvm got it’s own key bindings.

I’d recommend using the acc_led plugin for wminput. I use it to signal which profile the controller it is currently in (or if it is in a profile at all). Without this plugin, you can’t tell if the controller is linked to the pc or not (you can’t even see if it is on or off).