Archive for the 'Hacks' Category

Page 4 of 4

ProjectDeck / Xi-Fi

Published on September 16, 2007 in Electronics, Hacks and Video Games. 0 Comments

A group of Xbox case modders from Xbox-Scene set out to design and build a case that delivered on the failed promises of a high level case called “XDeck” The XDeck was a case that would house extra hard drives or DVD drive, integrate a DVD dongle and allow switching between devices. All XDeck ever delivered was a few concept images done in photoshop.

XDeck v2 XDeck v3 Pro

In January of 2003 some “team” proposed that they were going to build the ultimate Xbox modder’s accessory. A device that would manage multiple hard drives and enclose them all into a OEM looking case as well. They talked a big show for months and eventually released “concept images” which were clearly just Photoshoped pictures of an Xbox. After not delivering any solid evidence that they had actually developed what they said they had, or even had any groundwork laid out to produce said product they actually had the audacity to start collecting donations and pre-orders from people. Of course like all good scams once they had milked as many donations and pre-orders as they could they vanished off of the face of the earth.

To prove that the ingenuity of “the scene” was just as good if not better than these schmucks; in May of 2004 HSDEMONZ from Xbox-Scene decided to round up some of the best case modders in the forums to succeed where the XDeck had failed, this group was aptly named ProjectDeck.

ProjectDeck Banner

I was not originally a member of the team but shortly after things had started moving I expressed interest in the project to Palmore, the current project leader, who invited me to join the team. I’m a very opinionated person, coupled with the fact that I’m blunt verbose and slightly abrasive, as a result I often find myself getting put in leadership positions. In some cases it’s nice but a lot of times it’s a job I don’t really want. It didn’t take long before I ended up as project leader.

I don’t remember the exact sequence of events but we had devised a large questionnaire to find out what the Xbox-Scene population wanted in a case. A member by the name of DeAdGuy created a survey for us and it worked out great. Having the support of Xbox-Scene in the hay day of Xbox 1 modding produced thousands of members providing us with feedback. In addition to questions we had added a few photoshopped images of layouts that people could vote on which ones they liked the best.

We took the feedback to heart and produced some 3D concept images and started working on a prototype.

ProjectDeck Model 1

SMF Commenter

Published on August 31, 2007 in Hacks and Software. 6 Comments

The SMF Commenter is a WordPress Plugin that allows you to use a Simple Machine Forums (SMF) installation for comments.

What it Does:
When you publish a post in WordPress it will create a new topic in the forums with the same title and body. The SMF user and the board in which the topic is created are determined before hand on an options screen. In addition to creating a topic a Link to the topic is automatically added to the appropriate WordPress post, and a link back to the wordpress post is automatically added to the end of the SMF topic. The comment counter inWordPress is also updated to reflect the number of replies to the SMF topic.

What it does not do:
This system does not integrate users between the two system, nor does it display the replies from the SMF topic on the WordPress page, nor does it allow users to leave SMF comments from the WordPress page. You should use this Plugin with the WordPress comment system completely deactivated as it’s meant as a complete replacement. It doesn’t do anything special above and beyond what has been listed above.

Known Bugs:
There are a few known bugs with the system, nothing major and they might get fixed eventually. If you have a solution let me know and I’ll implement it.

  • After publishing a post in WordPress you will see a header error on the screen for a brief moment before being forwarded to the newly created SMF topic, I have no idea how to prevent or suppress this error. It doesn’t hurt anything though.
  • Some Special HTML Characters don’t convert properly and wind up looking VERY special once they appear in the SMF Topic.
  • Line breaks are carried over as line breaks in the code as opposed to <br /> because of this 1 out of every 10 posts or so will have all of the line breaks collapsed in the SMF Topic.

Features for Future Versions:

  • Integration with Post Processing elements such as viper’s video quicktags so that the special post formatting from the final displayed WordPress post appears in the SMF topic instead of the raw formatting from the database.
  • A Drop down or base intelligence to determine which board within SMF the topic should be created.
  • Modify the # Comments link to take you to the SMF Topic
  • Display SMF Comments on the WordPress page
  • File Attachment Integration

Features that wont ever be added:

Stuff you ask for. I wrote this plugin for my friends at Nintendo-Scene where it gets used daily. I could care less of anyone else uses it or needs feature X or doesn’t like how it does Y. This plugin wasn’t written for you. Honestly you’ll be lucky of any of the proposed feature updates ever make it into the plugin because I’ve got better things to do.

Why Is this Plugin Here:

You may be asking yourself “If he doesn’t care about other people using his plugin why did he even post it here?” The simple truth is this: I didn’t want to write this plugin, but I needed this function and in searching for something that already did it I found nothing but lots of other people complaining that there was no plugin available. I found ONE guy who had something like this up and running, he went out of his way to brag about it and then when I asked for the code it vanished, so f*ck him, I wrote my own.

To prevent that from happening to someone else I’m making this plugin available to everyone. You can use it as is, or you can tweak it out to your own needs, or you can use it as a starting point to build a much better integration between the two platforms. Honestly I don’t care what you do with it. But since I was nice enough to share it at least be nice enough to let me know if you’re using it or if you’ve made any improvements.

Support:
Also part of it that I don’t really have time to support this plugin like many of the other plugin authors do. If you need some help setting it up post here or something and I’ll see if I can lend a hand but no support expressed or implied so don’t get mad if I don’t have the time to help you out.

Installation Instructions:

  1. Copy all files to your wordpress plugin folder including the “wp_smf_commenter” folder
  2. Edit the line include_once(‘/forums/Sources/Subs-Post.php’); in the “wp_smf_commenter.php” file to reflect the absolute server path of the Subs-Post.php file in SMF. In most cases this includes low level folders that are not visible from the web.
  3. Go into the WordPress Admin page and activate the plugin from the Plugins screen and then set the SMF Commenter options from the Options screen
    in the SMF Commenter options page.

Download:

SMF Commenter .41