I need to figure out which of the 15 pins I need to connect to my USB adapter, but so far I’ve found four pinouts for the connector – and all four are different. Here’s my best-guess pinout:

1 – Ground
2 – Sound Out
3 – IRQ
4 – Port 1, Data 4
5 – Port 1, Data 3
6 – Port 1, Data 2
7 – Port 1, Data 1
8 – Port 1, Data 0
9 – Port 1, Data Clock
10 – Latch 2
11 – Latch 1
12 – Latch 0
13 – Port 0, Data 1
14 – Port 0, Clock
15 – +5V

In theory, that should be what I need to match up to my RetroGlove USB adapter:

The only question is – have I picked the right Famicom pinout to trust, or will I blow my PowerGlove? Any suggestions, Famicom experts?

I recently installed a new theme on the site – Magzimus – which I pulled from a site promising free WordPress themes. It’s pretty, it has a neat JavaScript slider, and it was a simple install.  What’s not to like?

Well, the fact that searching for my blog on various search engines now shows an affiliation with popular ‘adult entertainment’ site LiveJasmin, for a start.

It seems that the ‘free’ theme has an interesting business model: a hidden bit of PHP code in the admin.php file that checks to see if traffic is coming from a search engine crawler, and if so adding a hidden span at the bottom of the page containing affiliate links to the aforementioned webcam site – and a variety of keywords that are likely to get me significantly different traffic to normal.

I’ve excised the code, and am now waiting for Google et al to update my listing and remove the spurious keywords.

Next time you snag a WordPress theme from somewhere, do what I failed to do: check the code to see exactly what it’s doing to your site.

Anyone who has ever hacked around in their PC will have been hit with an urge to take their tinkering to the next level and create a custom-built device, but few actually try – believing such things to be far too complicated. At least, until the Arduino appeared on the scene.

Originally developed in Italy in 2005 as a tool for students building interactive design projects, the Arduino is a microcontroller-based prototyping board – but one that pretty much removes the barriers to entry that previous electronic prototyping systems had.

The idea behind the Arduino is simple: to create a system that allows electronic circuits to be created, modified, and tested in minutes – complete with a programmable chip in the centre to take control of everything.

What are you still doing here? Go! GO!

In the case of my handset, a Motorola Milestone, app memory is at a premium: with just 196MiB of user-accessible storage on-board, larger apps can often mean having to remove something that’s already installed.  Thankfully, there’s a cheater’s way of freeing up some much-needed space: turn your optional apps into pre-installed versions.

First things first: you’re going to need a rooted handset.  If it’s not rooted, this tutorial will get you nowhere.  If you’re new to rooting, try the Easy Root Compatibility Test which offers certain ‘phones a one-stop solution.  If your handset isn’t supported, try one of the many guides on-line.

Once you’re rooted, you’re going to need a terminal emulator.  Install that, and you can get access to a shell – which is where the fun begins.

Step one – find out what’s mounted where with the command

 mount

You’ll see that we have a bunch of devices mounted in a bunch of locations, but the one we care about is /dev/mtdblock6, mounted as /system.  It’s in this special directory that Android stores all its internal gubbins – and to stop you from fiddling around with it, Google has very sensibly made it read-only.

Sadly, that also stops us from moving apps from the very limited user memory into the otherwise wasted system memory – and from deleting unwanted pre-installed apps, such as the Motorola-branded sat nav package that comes with the Milestone or the Facebook app that arrived unexpectedly as part of Android 2.1.

So, what can we do?  Easy: we re-mount the device as read-write.  You’ll need to become root using su, after which you can remount the block device.  Just type the following commands in to the terminal:

su -
mount -o remount,rw /dev/mdtblock6 /system

Now we have full read-write access to the /system file system. Bring up a directory listing of /system/app/ with:

ls -l /system/app/

You’ll notice that all the .apk files for the pre-installed apps are here.  Delete any .apk with rm and it’s gone for good – so for goodness’ sake be careful.

We can use the same command to take  a look at the .apk files for the apps we’ve got installed in user memory, too:

ls -l /data/app/

To move a package from user memory to system memory, making it ‘pre-installed’ and freeing up useful user memory, just do the following:

cp -f /data/app/com.publisher.packagename.apk

The file will be automatically removed from user memory and appear to vanish – but when you restart your ‘phone, it will re-appear as a pre-installed ‘system’ application.  Do this with a larger app, and you can free up a lot of valuable space.

A note about updating: because /system is mounted as read-only, the Android Market can’t write to it in order to update packages.  Instead, if an update for a pre-installed package is available, it will write the data back into user memory.  So, if you’ve saved 4MiB by moving Google Maps into /system, you’ll lose it all again the next time Google releases an update.

While it’s possible to get the space back – simply repeat the method of moving the file to /system again – it’s probably better to move applications that don’t get updated all that often.

That’s it: you can now enjoy significantly more space for apps!

• To Do: Support for larger LCDs
• To Improve: Better UTF-8 character handling
• To Do: Multiple RSS feed support

For now, however, it’s a pretty neat hack – and an alternative back-end allows it to display Twitter @ replies instead, with the person’s username on the top line of the display and the message below.

The aRSSduino relies on a USB connection between the Arduino and the host PC – it’s not a stand-alone project.  Currently, the Python back-end is written to run on a Linux-based host – although it should be relatively simple to port to Windows, I have no plans to do so at present.

You can download the project source code – both for the Arduino sketch and for the Python-based back-end here.  If you improve upon it, let me know!

This week culminates in the launch of Amazon’s latest Kindle eReader,which means that thousands of gadget fanciers and avid readers alike will be getting their hands on a pretty special piece of kit – only to find that the surprisingly cheap price belies an expensive habit: electronic books can cost.

You should read it. It’s good. Honest.

The Toshiba Libretto W100 was launched as part of the company’s 25th anniversary celebrations – its first laptop, the Toshiba T1100 was launched back in 1985 – with the company’s Phil Osaki quoted by VentureBeat as stating that the company is aiming for the back-to-school season in the US.

Demonstrated over on Tech-On, the displays are based around Shinodo’s Plasma Tube Array technology, which allows the display to be created in a smooth curve rather than the more traditional flat plane.

Using the pre-curved display panels, the pair were able to come up with a single display – made from a pair of 1m x 1m panels – which fit around a pillar of 1m diameter, capable of showing full-colour full-motion video.

The companies admit that the the displays are still in the early stages of production – with the demonstration models, showcased at the Fujitsu Forum early last week, being produced merely to gauge market response prior to mass-production – but explain that “we expect that [the displays] will be used at railroad stations and public facilities” to provide advertising and informational displays around pre-existing support pillars.