“The Shack” Gets Free Press from HLN

I made a post the other day about RadioShack changing their image to “The Shack”.  I really find the whole affair rather ridiculous and quite humorous.  This morning, while performing the early morning ritual of watching the national news (if you can call it that), imagine my laughter when I see that “The Shack” is getting some free press from HLN.  The most disturbing item in the “news story” is the fact that “The Shack” is spending $200,000,000 to perform this image modification.  WTF?  Have you been in their stores?  Why don’t they keep the 90+% name recognition brand name and use that $200 Million to get some actual up to date and cuttin edge technology into their stores like they claim to have now.  Hello RadioShack, or excuse me, “The Shack” corporate offices and C-level employees, almost nothing you have can NOT be found at Wal-Mart for cheaper!  Sure you may have some parts and what not that I can’t get at Wal-Mart, but most of the time, the actual parts I need, you don’t have.  This leaves me ordering on-line and while I’m there I go ahead and pick up those few items that you do have, but for less money.

Bottom line, quit trying to compete with Wal-Mart and get to tech that blows the pants off of Best Buy.  Otherwise, “The Shack” is floundering, if not dead in the water.  Get back to your “hacker” roots.  Have any of you even cracked open a copy of “Make” magazine?  People want to make stuff and buy things that they can make do things they were not necessarily intended to do.

2600 Book

When I was listening to the latest episode of “Off the Hook” this morning, they said that they were going to be releasing a book in July.  It is a collection of articles from the magazine plus commentary.  The book is evidently quite large, they mentioned 900 pages.  It sounds like an interesting read for anyone into this type of material.  You are basically going to read about the evolution of telephones, computers, computer laws, and political agendas.

Wii Streaming Media Update

I have not had much luck with making the Wii play streamed media.  I can get it to play media from an SD card, but playing the same media from a stream does not work.  I have not given up on this challenge, but I think that the previous attempts by others may have been broken by the update to the Media Channel on the Wii.  Oh well.  Maybe I will have to make some physical modifications to the Wii in order for it to do what I want.  The real question is why it wasn’t built in in the first place.  Anyone, with any ideas, comment away.

Wii Hack

I picked this up over at grc.com.  It was posted by Steve Gibson himself.  This is a great hardware hack of the Nintendo Wii.  This video even shows that the hack can be used with a regular computer.  I wonder if my wife will let me hack this out Christmas morning when the Wii shows up.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0awjPUkBXOU