Apparently I have a thing for doing homebrew stuff in April: almost exactly two years after softmodding my Wii so I could load my games from a USB hard drive instead of discs, I found myself wondering if I could do the same for Virtual Console and WiiWare content. Well, of course you can! The path can be confusing and frustrating, but the destination … well, it’s a cool destination.

I’ve been very happy with my USBLoader GX setup, but it occurred to me that since my Wii always boots directly into the loader (thanks to Priiloader), I was neglecting my VC and WiiWare games! A quick Google search later and I found this WiiHacks guide for creating ISO forwarders to run that content like a disc-based game. While the guide itself is very clear and detailed, it still took me a few hours to wrap my head around the process and get everything functional.

Since it’d been a while since I last touched my homebrew setup, I first:

• upgraded to the latest version of HBC
• upgraded to the latest version of BootMii
• upgraded to the new d2x cIOSX rev21

Then I followed the steps in the guide to make a backup of my Wii’s NAND, extracted it, and put it on a separate partition of my USB hard drive. Next I created the ISO forwarders for my Virtual Console and WiiWare games, and added them to the loader. The snags I ran into were:

• In addition to the WBFS partition on my USB hard drive that contains all of my games, I had an exFAT partition created by Windows 7 that I was using for extra storage. I had to reformat that as FAT32 (using EASEUS Partition Manager) in order for the extracted NAND folders to be accessible to the Wii.
• I also had to put the NandGames folder on the root of my SD card (instead of the hard drive), otherwise I kept getting the “Loader.dol not found” error when trying to launch a VC/WW title.
• I also ran into the SD card lock switch problem again. With all the back-and-forth I was doing moving the SD card between the Wii and my PC, the lock switch moved ever so slightly down. It wasn’t enough to make the SD card read-only on my PC (which is why I didn’t notice at first) but it was enough to cause strange problems with certain homebrew apps like the d2x cIOS Installer to freeze. I thought I had really screwed something up until I happened to notice the lock switch and that solved the problem.

After all of that, though, check it out!

(I had to create that 3D box art for Magician Lord on the far right by myself … the others were automatically downloaded by USBLoader GX)

Just having the game icons in the loader doesn’t mean they will actually run, however, so next I had to test each one. Only two of my games didn’t work right away: Magician Lord and Target Toss Pro: Bags.

Magician Lord, my only Neo-Geo VC game, would load but not show any video. The game was still running, I could hear the background music and even start and “play” the game, I just couldn’t see anything. If I pressed the Home button on my Wii remote, the video would appear behind the Wii system buttons. The issue turned out to be the need for interlaced mode. I followed the instructions in this video, presssing Z+A+2 while in the Operations Guide for the game and that fixed it!

But getting Bags to work is when the rabbit hole appeared … and I fell in. After hours of messing around with different IOS base version and slot combinations, loader settings, and reading forum threads, I could not (and still can’t) get this game to run from the extracted NAND through the loader. I’d get the health and safety screen, and then the Incredible Technologies and N-Space “loading” screens, and then just a black screen and the Wii would hang. I even tried Mighty Channels and Triiforce, but the game wouldn’t work through those either. It didn’t help that Bags is apparently not a very popular WiiWare title: I could only find one mention of it with regards to running through a loader with no details. Finally I just gave up before I screwed up the other 99.9% of my games that do work. If anyone has gotten this game to work through a loader with an ISO forwarder, please drop me a line in the comments!

As with my prior upgrades, the ‘do release-upgrade’ process itself was painless but I had a few post-installation issues:

• calibre wouldn’t start with a “ImportError: cannot import name detect_xml_encoding” error. Deleting /usr/lib/calibre/calibre/ebooks/chardet fixed this.
• zoneminder was completely messed up and wouldn’t run. After going down a seemingly unending (and increasingly frustrating) rabbit hole of package dependencies and missing libraries, I gave up trying to re-build it from source and just installed the package via ‘apt-get install zoneminder’. Even after that I had to clean up some of the mess left over by my previous from-source install, but I finally got it working again.

Coming this October: Quantal Quetzal!

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine. His friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

Today I finished Stephen King’s “11/22/63.” I’m always a sucker for a good time travel story and while this one doesn’t break any new ground in the genre I enjoyed it.

Jake Epping is shown the “rabbit hole” by his friend Al, the owner of a local diner that connects to September 1958 through the storeroom. Al has been using the rabbit hole for years to buy supplies for the diner at 1958 prices, keeping his own costs down. Every trip into the past is a “reset” … it’s always the same day when you arrive, and when you get back to the present only two minutes has passed.

After a brief trip to experience the “Land of Ago” for himself, Jake is convinced the rabbit hole is what Al says it is. That’s when Al lays out his plan: to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating President Kennedy on November 22, 1963 … a watershed moment that changed the world forever. Al was going to attempt this himself and had already lived a few years in the past himself, tracking Oswald and making notes, but got cancer and had to abort his mission early (returning to 2011 only two minutes after he left, but a few years older and much sicker). He asks Jake to carry out his plan instead and stop Oswald.

Like other time travel stories, “11/22/63″ deals with things like the butterfly effect, paradoxes, and knowledge of the future. Since it involves JFK there’s also a healthy dose of history and conspiracy theory as well. The twist here is that the rabbit hole leads always leads to September 1958, four years before the assassination, and each trip through is a reset. After Jake spends a few months in 1958 to save the (2011) high school janitor from a childhood event to see if the past can indeed be changed, he has to do it all over again (with some modifications based on prior experience) the next time  he goes through. He knows that if he fails to prevent Oswald from killing JFK he can just go through the rabbit hole again and start over, but after four years in the past will he be ready and willing to do all of that over again?

The book reminded me a lot of the first two episodes of season 5 of “Quantum Leap” which addressed the same issue when Sam leaped into Lee Harvey Oswald (although in the afterword King mentions he tried to write “11/22/63″ back in 1972 but shelved it). As King is wont to do, there are quite a few references to his other books: Jake spends some time in Derry, Maine, where he meets Bev and Richie shortly after the events in “IT” (my favorite King novel) and I could be wrong but I think the recurring red and white Plymouth Fury was a nod to “Christine.” And in a real-life example of how the past harmonizes, on April 10 I was reading about Jake attempting to confirm if Oswald was behind the assassination attempt on General Edwin Walker, 49 years to the day after the real thing.

Considering how much Stephen King I’ve read in the past, it’s hard to believe that it’s been at least four years (when I started WIJFR posts on my blog) since I last read one. With yet another Dark Tower novel just released, it might be time to finally finish that series. First, though, I think I’ll go “Under the Dome.”

Like any movie adaptation of a book, some things were changed, some were left out, and others were added, but for the most part it follows the book faithfully. I could have done without some of the jittery handy-cam cinematography (thank goodness we didn’t see it in IMAX) but understand how it contributed to the feel of the film. I’m not sure how confused I would have been if I hadn’t read it first, but the increased presence of TV commentators and the behind-the-scenes Gamesmakers filled in the details from Katniss’ first-person narrative in the book. I did feel, though, that the whole arena wasn’t brutal enough (no one seemed to be starving, everyone found water, and almost seemed to be having a good time except for the fact that they were hunting each other). The casting was pretty good (Stanley Tucci was great as Claudius Templesmith, as was Donald Sutherland as President Snow) although I didn’t think Woody Harrelson’s Haymitch was cranky, crusty, or bumbling enough (not his fault, but the script’s).

Overall, my daughter loved the movie, which I guess is good since she’s the target audience, not me. “Catching Fire” is scheduled to start shooting in the fall, possibly without director Gary Ross.

5:10am (MST): rise and shine!

5:30am: we’re on the road to the airport.

6:00am: I dropped off my brother and sister-in-law at the United/Continental terminal for their flight back to Cleveland, and then my sister at the USAirways terminal for her flight to Chicago. Then my daughter and I turned in the rental car and took the shuttle back to the airport.

7:00am: amazingly, we’re already through security and at our gate two hours early! As an added bonus, my sister’s flight to Chicago is the flight before ours at the same gate, so we got to see her again before she boarded.

4:15pm (EDT):  despite taking off almost 30 minutes late (waiting in line for the runway in Phoenix) we landed back in Tampa only 10 minutes past our scheduled arrival time. And with that, our trip comes to a close. This was my daughter’s first trip out west with me to spring training and I think she had a great time. She attended three baseball games in three days, climbed to the top of Camelback Mountain, got six separate Indians autographs, and of course spent a lot of quality time with her dad.

After we got home, unpacked, and settled in (I have to go back to work tomorrow, but at least it’s Friday!) I found an e-mail in my Inbox from Ticketmaster informing me of the Indians upcoming visit to Tampa in July … so of course I bought tickets. Already looking forward to more baseball … except this time my daughter will be rooting for the Rays.

GO TRIBE!

P.S. If you’d like to see more photos from our trip, in Lego form, check out the LegoUs tumblr!

8:30am: we all got to sleep in a bit this morning (except my daughter, who seems to be stuck on Eastern time). Housekeeping never came last night so I went over to the front desk and complained again about the toilet. Finally someone came to fix it.

9:30am: not impressed with the hotel breakfast, we went over the 5 & Diner this morning instead.

If you look closely above the neon clock in the background, you can see a black-and-white Wi-Fi Zone sign. Who knew they had Wi-Fi in the 50s? I also introduced my daughter to the 1950s iPod known as a jukebox.

11:30am: we’ve arrived at Hohokam Stadium, spring home of the Chicago Cubs since 1952! Our seats are in the shade and looks like they will be for the whole game, sweet!

And you can see Four Peaks in the distance behind left field.

Before the game, my brother took my daughter over the Indians dugout side down the third base line. He was actually able to call Russ Canzler (1B/LF, #79) over to sign the ball he had tossed to my daughter at yesterday’s game (she’s the one in pink).

3:30pm: ugh, another Indians loss, 2-0 to the Cubbies. The Tribe has lost 8 straight and 9 out of their last 10. This was the most crowded game of the week for us, though, with 8,911 in attendance. We couldn’t argue with being in the shade for the whole game though! Two foul balls landed in our immediate area during the game. We weren’t able to snag either one, but that’s the closest we’ve come this week.

4:30pm: we had to hang out in the parking lot at Hohokam for a while to let the traffic thin out, but now we’re back at our hotel packing and preparing to go home tomorrow. I went to the hotel’s “business center” (I use that term loosely) to check in for our flight and found the print queue stuck and jammed with other people’s forgotten printouts. So I spent a few minutes troubleshooting the old PC running Windows Vista and got everything working again so I could print my own boarding passes. I was appalled by the confidential information people had left on that machine (mostly forgotten documents on the desktop).

6:30pm: time for our annual last-night-in-Arizona tradition: dinner at Rustler’s Rooste. This year I made reservations early and remembered to confirm them last week, so despite the 30-minute wait for everyone else when we arrived, we were seated immediately. We weren’t near the windows but could still watch the sunset over the valley as we drank our wine, ate our steaks, and enjoyed the great food and each other’s company. My daughter loved going down the slide, even though she kept pointing out a group of boys who were breaking just about all of the rules.

My brother and I went down the slide too, but we couldn’t convince the ladies to do likewise.

9:11pm:  full and satisfied, we went back to the hotel and dipped our aching legs in the spa while my daughter attempted to “swim” in the pool (the water was a bit chilly). Now it’s time to finish packing and get ready to fly home tomorrow. We’ve got early flights which means a really early start.

7:15am: we’re up early to go hiking so we grabbed a quick breakfast at the hotel, which wasn’t anything to really write about. The front desk clerk promised that our suite would be the first room cleaned once those people checked out so we could move into it.

8:20am: we’re at the head of the Echo Canyon summit trail at Camelback Mountain. We totally lucked out and got a parking spot as soon as we arrived so no crazy hunt for parking like two years ago.

9:40am: we reached the summit! My sister had to turn around at about 1/4 mile mark due to her knee, but the rest of us, including my daughter, all made it to the top. The views of the valley are incredible.

After resting and taking some photos, we start our way back down.

11:30am: we’re back at the trailhead. What a workout! My sister-in-law actually met some old college friends on the way down. They live in Wisconsin but are out here for spring training too. Weird! Here’s the map of our hike from my brother’s Garmin watch.

1:05pm: after a quick turnaround at the hotel, my brother, daughter, and I headed out to the game, leaving the ladies for an afternoon of shopping. We’re at Camelback Ranch this afternoon, spring home of the Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers.

We’re on the Indians dugout side of the park, close to the front, so I’m hoping my daughter might be able to get a ball from one of the players between innings. Right before the game, she managed to get Sandy Alomar’s autograph!

4:00pm: we’re back at our hotel. The Indians lost again, 7-1 to the White Sox, ugh. But my daughter did get a ball, thrown to her by former Tampa Bay Ray Russ Canzler (1B/LF, #79), at the bottom of the 8th inning. We tried to hail him after the game to get him to sign it, but were unable to so we’ll try tomorrow. Like yesterday, it was very uncrowded … maybe coming Monday through Thursday isn’t a bad idea after all, even though it requires taking more vacation days from work.

While we were at the game, the ladies went shopping at the mall across the street and also took care of switching hotel rooms, so we’re finally in the suite we were originally supposed to have.

8:00pm: after trying to decide between indoor go-karting, mini-golf, and a variety of other evening activities, we drove over to the Tempe Marketplace where we had dinner at Lucille’s Smokehouse Bar-B-Que, another great choice on our part.

Now we’re heading over to Dave and Buster’s for some entertainment.

10:30pm: we’re back at our hotel. No plans tomorrow morning, so we can relax and sleep in. We discovered the toilet in the bathroom is broken, however, so we’re waiting for someone from housekeeping to come and fix it.

The tech arsenal for this trip is pretty much the same as past years: my iPhone (the new 4S instead of the old 3GS), iPad (no Bluetooth keyboard this time), Garmin nüvi (loaded with pertinent waypoints), and new camera. I also ditched the iPad camera connection kit since I now have the Eye-Fi card to wirelessly offload photos from my camera to the iPad.

Anyway, it’s time to see some Cactus League baseball!

5:50am (EDT): my daughter and I are at the airport, checking our bag at the ticket counter.

6:15: we’re through security and waiting at our gate. Even had time to grab a cup of coffee at Starbucks. No problems with crowds or lines so far, considering it’s a Monday morning.

8:30am (MST): no problems with the flight and we’ve landed 30 minutes early at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport!

9:15am: ugh, we’re still sitting on the tarmac waiting to deplane! Apparently we arrived at “rush hour” and there are no open gates for us.

9:30am: we’re finally off the plane and in the terminal. So we landed 30 minutes early and then spent an hour sitting on the ground and ended up being 25 minutes late! We still have to wait for the rest of our party to arrive on their own flights, though, so it’s not a big deal, except for the inconvenience.

10:20am: we met up with my sister in the terminal (she was stuck on her plane for an hour too!), retrieved our luggage at baggage claim, and are now on the rental car shuttle. My brother and sister-in-law came into a different terminal and will meet us at the rental car center.

11:30am: we’re at Goodyear Ballpark, spring home of our Cleveland Indians.

1:05pm: My daughter got autographs from Luke Carlin (C, #45) and Matt LaPorta (1B/LF, #7) outside the team shop then we grabbed some food and are in our seats behind home plate (in the sun). The weather is fantastic, let’s play ball!

3:30pm: they tried to stage a comeback near the end but the Indians lost to the visiting Milwaukee Brewers by a score of 6-5. Being here on a Monday is definitely different … the stadium was almost empty, not crowded at all.

4:45pm: we’re finally checked into our hotel in Tempe, across from the Arizona Mills outlet mall. We’ve had our first real problem of the trip. Upon arriving, the front desk clerk told us that the room type we reserved (a two queen-bed suite) wasn’t available for our first night so they would put us into a standard two queen-bed room and then move us into the proper room tomorrow. We have 5 people, though, and needed the two beds plus the sofabed in the suite, which the standard room didn’t have and there was no room for a rollaway. After some finagling, the clerk agreed to give us a second room for the first night. One of the rooms was terrible: it was on the first floor near the pool (so it was loud), no alarm clock, the smoke detector was missing (just a hole in the ceiling), and it would always take several tries with the key to get the door open (“our key machine is just janky, we’re getting a new one tomorrow” was the excuse). At least we’re only sleeping here … and we can get complimentary rags at the front desk!

6:00pm: for dinner we drove out to the Mill Avenue District in Tempe and went to ZTejas, which was great.

7:30pm: after dinner we walked around the area for a bit checking out the other shops and restaurants.

8:50pm: back at the hotel, it’s time for bed! It’s midnight back home and we’ve been up since 4:45am EDT.

My in-store upgrade with AT&T was actually pretty painless (for once). I was in and out in about 20 minutes with my new phone. Then, within 15 minutes of getting it home, I had successfully completed the jailbreak with Absinthe.

Fantastic. Then I started the slow process of setting everything up again just like I did back in January when I foolishly did a clean restore of iOS 5.01 before jailbreaking it on my 3GS. At least this time I had my old phone still so I could easily put them side-by-side and get my apps installed and my springboard icons arranged just so. I was able to use DataDeposit to transfer some of my save data across via Dropbox, but for the most part I had to re-sign in and set everything up again. The end result, after some effort, was the same exact setup as before, just on my new iPhone.

Other than the obvious performance increase thanks to the A5 processor I’m enjoying the 8MP camera (which I believe Apple is now calling the iSight camera), high resolution retina display, and, of course beta testing Siri.

Playing around with Siri right now is a novelty because it’s new but I don’t really see myself using it (her?) all the time. I ran into a problem defining relationships (i.e., so-and-so is my brother) which turned out to be a problem with using Exchange for my contacts (the workaround is to create a local contact for yourself and use it for Siri so it the proper relationships (father, mother, spouse, etc.) can be created). I did install Assistant Extension which lets me do extra things like switch SBSettings toggles on and off, run apps, or even get sports info via the Siri interface so that’s some nice added functionality. We’ll see how my “relationship” with Siri progresses.

The only other problem I’ve had so far is with my Belkin TuneBase FM in the car. The dock still charges the 4S and the FM transmitter portion works fine, but the multi-function button for play/pause doesn’t work at all (it still works fine when my 3GS is docked). I’ve opened a support ticket with Belkin on this but am not optimistic that it’s something that can be fixed without buying something new.

In two weeks I’ll be heading out to Arizona for my annual spring training trip so that’ll be the first time I really put my new phone to the test on the road. Looking forward to it …

First off, the big one which everyone has heard about by now: the removal of the Start button. Instead, the Start menu has been replaced with Metro-style tiles as you can see in the above screenshot.

The Windows key on your keyboard works the same way it used to in previous versions, except instead of opening the Start menu it takes you to the Metro Start screen and also toggles between open Metro apps. There are also a few new combination keys I quickly started using:

• Win+I: opens the Info screen where you can get into the Settings, Network, or Shutdown options
• Win+C: opens the new “Charms” sidebar
• Win+Q: jumps to the All Applications view
• Win+X: opens an advanced Start menu replacement

(see the gallery below for screenshots of those menus)

After a few days I found myself not really using the tiles at all run applications, Instead I would just press the Windows key and then start typing the name of the application and run it directly from the search results.

Windows 8 really has a split personality: the Metro side that runs full screen apps like Weather, Photos, Mail, etc. (apps you would find on a mobile device like a phone or tablet) and the classic Desktop side where you run Word, Excel, and your other traditional Windows software. I played with the Metro apps a little, but they stopped working (after I completely disabled UAC) so I never bothered again, and didn’t really care for (or miss) them. In the workplace, I suspect Metro will be unused (and hopefully an option to disable it completely will be part of the released version). Check out this video of a “regular user” using Windows 8 for the first time and you’ll see why.

One thing notably missing (for me, anyway) from Windows 8 is XP Mode, a feature of Windows 7 that let you run older XP apps in a virtual machine. I use some older software at work that won’t install on Windows 7 that I instead run in XP Mode. With that removed from Windows 8, I had to jump through some hoops to convert my virtual hard disk file to a format usable by the third-party VMWare Player instead.

Safe Mode is also not turned on by default in Windows 8 (something I learned the hard way when I got stuck in a reboot loop from sysplant.sys after installing Symantec Endpoint Protection). I found this article on how to enable it and recommend you do so as well.

Overall, my first week of using Windows 8 as my primary OS at work has gone relatively smoothly. I’m still learning my way around and run into the occasional UI quirk or usability bug but it seems relatively stable. I’ve been reading up on various tips and tricks which have definitely helped (that’s how I found all the new Windows key combinations) and haven’t found anything I can’t do or get done with it. Let’s see how week #2 goes.