Where’s the peanut butter?!

Here’s an interesting perspective on our economic recovery. Over the
last two years, the US Dollar has lost about…

• 25% against the Canadian dollar
• 25% against the Euro
• 13% against the Japanese Yen
• 15% against the English Pound
• and, lest I forget, 17% against the Polish Zlotych

The news south of the border is even worse - the Mexican peso has lost
about 12% against the dollar. The only other currency I looked at is the Chinese
Yuan, against which the exchange rate has been pretty static.

The dollar devaluation trend doesn’t appear to be reversing right now
(in spite of the enthusiastic claims from people who want people to
believe otherwise), so it’ll be interesting to what effect the
President’s tax cuts have over the next four years.

last night (a while ago, now) I tried out something I’d heard about last week - an xbox softmod. modding a game device basically means bypassing the regular security functons and booting into (in the case of the xbox) a dashboard that allows functions not normally available to owners of the system. ftp access, ability to run pirated copies of games etc. since the number one application of most modded game devices is to run pirated games it is traditionally hard to do and shrouded in some mystery about whether it is legal. as far as I know, simply modding any device has never been illegal (but under dcma that may be challenged soon) but it certainly opens the door to doing illegal things.

to cut to the chase - go look at xbox media center for something cool and legal that you can do with a modded xbox

so back to the xbox. I have wanted to mod mine for a while but was discouraged by the process (typically soldering a mod chip onto your xbox board) and the barrier to acquiring a mod chip (which online retailer who sells mod chips to kids who want to play pirated video games should I give my credit card information to?) that’s where the softmod comes in. evdently there is a security exploit in mechassault, splinter cell, and 007 such that I you have a special saved game, you can launch that saved game, get booted into a mini linux and replace the xbox dashboard with one of your choosing. this dashboard may offer an ftp server and then the world is your oyster. no solder and it seems very low risk of breakin anything (at least the exploit I tried).

its worth pointing out that moddin your xbox does void your warranty, connecting to xbox online with a modded box will permanently ban you from that system and there is a good chancw not everybody will be as lucky as I was the first time.