Haven't done a whole lot of programming lately. My head has hurt on and off, and my stomach was acting weird. But I did work on loading meshes from .X files, from scratch, in DirectX7. It's just so boring to write all that stuff, I just never want to work on it, especially when I'm not feeling great. So far I can load a mesh, but only simple ones. And I can't load materials (basically colors) for them yet either. I'll do it all eventually. When that's finished, maybe I'll start getting some real work done. Stuff like this tempts me to just use DirectX8, which will do all this for me (and with which I started a very basic 3d engine to learn how it all worked originally), but I want the support of older hardware, so I'm trying to stay in DX7.
Lately I've been reading up on hardware hacks and stuff. Not for computers though. Or at least, not PC's. Stuff for my Avigo organizer(which I've also tinkered around programming for lately), and the Cidco Mailstation I got my hands on. It's a cool little thing... nice keyboard, easy to read screen, good battery life. Certain models(like the one I have) let you use any pop3 mail provider instead of paying for their email service... though people have found ways to do the same on the other models. You can't read email bigger than 8k though. While that's fine for just talking, a lot of junk I get is bigger, and I could't read it to see what it was before I dump it. The account I was using to play with it though is riddled with spam, so it didn't matter. And I can't use my main Juno account with it, so it won't really serve any important purpose to me in regards to email. Though you could use it to type in various stuff... notes, a journal, etc, then just email it to yourself so you'd have it on your PC. There are also ways to rig it to talk directly to your PC, and setup your own little mail server to send/receive stuff for it, without needing a real email account. But somehow it's possibe to replace the software the thing uses. I would love to have a CP/M port on the thing. Or even just simple text web browsing.. or an IRC client. The modem built into it would give you lots of possibilities. And it uses a Z80 processor. People that know what I'm talking about realize that it means the thing could do plenty. It's just a matter of being able to change the OS. But I can't find out any info, other than the printer port on it is possibly used also to write to the flash memory in it at the factory. I have no rs-422 to rs-232 converter though, so there's no way for me to tinker with it. Surely there are ways to do it through one of it's special MIME email commands... Anyone out there know anything I don't?
The other project I've wanted to try, is making this old Tivo work. The hard drive died, and I don't have a 20 gig replacement for it. And if I did happen to have a 20 gig drive laying around, it would be in my computer right now! I have a backup file of the hard drive for the particular model I have, so I thought I could restore it to a smaller drive. But nope.. even though the backup file is a little over 100 megs, it requires the full 20 gig drive to restore to. Because of all the partition information sizes and stuff I guess. But, I was wondering, since it just uses a PowerPC processor (like a Mac), and runs on Linux, if I could just put the Linux kernel(the standard PPC one, or the one you can download from Tivo) and basic apps on a smaller drive, and run it that way. It has a serial port, so even if I couldn't output to the screen, I could run a null modem connection to it. It's gotta be possible somehow or another. But since everyone else out there actually replaces the drives in theirs, nobody has tried I don't guess. I'm just tired of it sitting here being dead.
Well it's a lot later than I planned, so I'm gonna go to bed. If anyone has any ideas or knows what I might possibly be able to do with either of those things (and where I could get more detailed info on how to make, or get, an OS replacement for Avigo), then I'd love to hear from ya.
posted at 3:08 AM
