A prayer partner from North America recently toured a town in northeastern Turkey. A spa attendant at one hotel called her aside and quietly said "I'm a believer in Jesus." The young woman told our friend she learned about Christ through Christian satellite broadcasts. In speaking of her faith she said, "The people here are all Muslims, and no one else knows." Pray that she and other potential followers of the Lord in this extensive area will soon have opportunities to join in Christian worship.
In mid-January a Turkish believer in a city near Istanbul was stabbed multiple times by a cousin and suffered damage to one of his kidneys. His uncle had threatened to kill the young man because of his conversion to Christianity, and the cousin was probably acting on his behalf. The believer's own father agreed with this action and says he hopes his son dies. Pray that the young man will completely recover physically and emotionally, and that his family members will experience dramatic encounters with the Lord.
(from a Christian prayer letter, March 2011)
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Sunday, March 27, 2011
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Dinosaur Addiction can have Awful Consequences
(for more, see Henry M. Morris, Dragons in Paradise, Acts & Facts, March 2011, Institute for Creation Research)
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How to unbrick a PSP (Huh? what does that mean...)
Recently I bought my son a used Sony PSP 2000 for $50 from a friend as a birthday present. The next day he went to Gamestop, tried out Rapala Pro Bass Fishing, and the PSP stopped working. He brought it home to yours truly, a 50-something IT expert.
I know nothing about PSPs. Four hours of hard work, and this is what I figured out. The PSP was fully bricked!!!!
Huh? The verb "to brick" was not in my vocabulary two days ago. What does it mean, you ask? "When used in reference to consumer electronics, 'brick' describes a device that cannot function in any capacity (such as a device with damaged firmware). This usage derives from the fact that some electronic devices (and their detachable power supplies) are vaguely brick-shaped, and so those which do not function are useful only as actual bricks." This is according to Wikipedia.
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What happened? What did we do wrong? Well, looking back in hindsight, what we should have done first with the used PSP (or any such game device) was to update the firmware to the latest version. For a PSP, the instructions for doing this are at the Sony website here. (It wasn't easy to find the instructions, and they aren't so simple to follow, but that is another topic.)
Since we didn't know to do this ... when the Gamestop employee gave my son the Rapala Pro Bass Fishing game to try out, she should have asked whether his PSP firmware was up to date (of course she didn't). My son should have known not too, but he inserted the UMD disk for Rapala Pro Bass Fishing at Gamestop to try it out, it detected that the firmware on the PSP was an old version, 3.50. It said that it needed to upgrade to 4.0 or higher. I don't know if my son clicked OK (he should have known not too), or if it just went ahead and tried to do the upgrade. It tried looking for the upgrade on the memory card, on the UMD disk, and by way of connecting to the Internet (which wasn't enabled), and it couldn't find it. Meanwhile, it gave the helpful message:
"Updating. Do not turn off the system, remove the memory stick or remove the ac adapter."
There was nothing he could do. He turned off the system. By doing so the PSP got bricked @$^& meaning that the boot firmware is corrupted and does not respond at all when you turn power on, so the display stays completely blank.
Enter the IT expert (me). After 2 hours I figured out what happened. I then figured out that 95% of PSP's (and other similar systems) can be unbricked!! There are dozens of youtube videos with suggestions how to do it, but the only method that really works is to shell out $32 and purchase a Pandora Battery and Magic Memory Stick. The PSP battery is not just a dumb battery, but has some electronics in it that somehow safeguards the firmware from being hacked. But when you are fully bricked you have to get around this anti-hack system. The Pandora Battery is a modified PSP battery that allows the system to boot from a memory stick instead of from the firmware. The Magic Memory Stick has custom code that downgrades your corrupted firmware to an older version. So when you go back to your old battery and memory stick and turn your PSP back on, the firmware will boot. This is called "unbricking" your system.
But I didn't want to pay $32 to see if this would actually work. So I tried the procedure in 3 or 4 of the more unusual youtube videos, I was downloading weird software onto my PC, trying to construct my own Magic Memory Stick, learned about how to open up your PSP battery and convert it into a homestyle Pandora Battery.
Two hours later, I finally figured out that we did not fit the 95% of users that could be unbricked. We were in the bad 5%!! The failed youtube videos plus another hour of google searches proved this - I figured out that part of that 5% are Piano Black PSP 2000 Slim with BARCODE starting with AB02. They cannot have custom firmware, because it has the TA88v3 motherboard. You cannot unbrick such a system. It is virtually hackproof. If you insist on trying to fix it, you will have to replace the motherboard, yeah, right!!
We're going to throw the PSP away, $50 down the tube. But this IT expert sure got an education....
I know nothing about PSPs. Four hours of hard work, and this is what I figured out. The PSP was fully bricked!!!!
Huh? The verb "to brick" was not in my vocabulary two days ago. What does it mean, you ask? "When used in reference to consumer electronics, 'brick' describes a device that cannot function in any capacity (such as a device with damaged firmware). This usage derives from the fact that some electronic devices (and their detachable power supplies) are vaguely brick-shaped, and so those which do not function are useful only as actual bricks." This is according to Wikipedia.
(On Twitter: FOLLOW uMarko or http://www.twitter.com/uMarko)
What happened? What did we do wrong? Well, looking back in hindsight, what we should have done first with the used PSP (or any such game device) was to update the firmware to the latest version. For a PSP, the instructions for doing this are at the Sony website here. (It wasn't easy to find the instructions, and they aren't so simple to follow, but that is another topic.)
Since we didn't know to do this ... when the Gamestop employee gave my son the Rapala Pro Bass Fishing game to try out, she should have asked whether his PSP firmware was up to date (of course she didn't). My son should have known not too, but he inserted the UMD disk for Rapala Pro Bass Fishing at Gamestop to try it out, it detected that the firmware on the PSP was an old version, 3.50. It said that it needed to upgrade to 4.0 or higher. I don't know if my son clicked OK (he should have known not too), or if it just went ahead and tried to do the upgrade. It tried looking for the upgrade on the memory card, on the UMD disk, and by way of connecting to the Internet (which wasn't enabled), and it couldn't find it. Meanwhile, it gave the helpful message:
"Updating. Do not turn off the system, remove the memory stick or remove the ac adapter."
There was nothing he could do. He turned off the system. By doing so the PSP got bricked @$^& meaning that the boot firmware is corrupted and does not respond at all when you turn power on, so the display stays completely blank.
But I didn't want to pay $32 to see if this would actually work. So I tried the procedure in 3 or 4 of the more unusual youtube videos, I was downloading weird software onto my PC, trying to construct my own Magic Memory Stick, learned about how to open up your PSP battery and convert it into a homestyle Pandora Battery.
Two hours later, I finally figured out that we did not fit the 95% of users that could be unbricked. We were in the bad 5%!! The failed youtube videos plus another hour of google searches proved this - I figured out that part of that 5% are Piano Black PSP 2000 Slim with BARCODE starting with AB02. They cannot have custom firmware, because it has the TA88v3 motherboard. You cannot unbrick such a system. It is virtually hackproof. If you insist on trying to fix it, you will have to replace the motherboard, yeah, right!!
We're going to throw the PSP away, $50 down the tube. But this IT expert sure got an education....
Friday, March 25, 2011
Evolution: A can of worms
So, are we descended from worms? Evolutionists have recently engaged in a pitched battle over where worms are found in their "tree of life". Another missing link has apparently appeared (or disappeared, depending on your point of view perhaps). A much better explanation is that God created all living creatures during the six days of creation as recorded in Genesis, and that he created them to have certain similarities. After all, how could any group of creatures be completely dissimilar one from another?
(excerpted from Amy Maxmen, “Evolution: A can of worms” Nature 470, 161-162 (2011), cited in "Evolution Running Backwards", Creation-Evolution Headlines, February 2011), also cited in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 1, January/February 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2010/CM15%2006%20low%20res.pdf)
Accoels are tiny worms peppercorn-sized worms found in sea-bottom muck. They represent a crucial stage in animal evolution — the transition some 560 million years ago from simple anemone-like organisms to the zoo of complex creatures that populate the world today.
But a recent report published in Nature is causing scientists to rethink the storyline. It is titled Acoelomorph flatworms are deuterostomes related to Xenoturbella . The study by an international team of researchers, who used new analytical techniques and data, removes acoel worms from their position near the trunk of animal evolution and instead places them closer to vertebrates.
The rearrangement of the tree of life has triggered protests from evolutionary biologists, who are alarmed that they may lose their key example of that crucial intermediate stage of animal evolution.
If acoels do fit within the deuterostomes, the worms must have evolved from an ancestor with a central nervous system, a body cavity and a through-going gut that connected an anus and mouth. So researchers would need to explain how acoels and Xenoturbella lost those and other characteristics. They would also be left to search for another primitive-looking lineage that represents the evolutionary step between jellyfish-like animals and bilaterians. If one even exists.
"I will say, diplomatically, this is the most politically fraught paper I've ever written," says Max Telford, a zoologist at University College London and last author on the paper. "This means that we have no living representative of this stage of evolution: the missing link has gone missing."
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(excerpted from Amy Maxmen, “Evolution: A can of worms” Nature 470, 161-162 (2011), cited in "Evolution Running Backwards", Creation-Evolution Headlines, February 2011), also cited in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 1, January/February 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2010/CM15%2006%20low%20res.pdf)
 |
| A marine worm in the phylum Acoelomorpha. |
But a recent report published in Nature is causing scientists to rethink the storyline. It is titled Acoelomorph flatworms are deuterostomes related to Xenoturbella . The study by an international team of researchers, who used new analytical techniques and data, removes acoel worms from their position near the trunk of animal evolution and instead places them closer to vertebrates.
If acoels do fit within the deuterostomes, the worms must have evolved from an ancestor with a central nervous system, a body cavity and a through-going gut that connected an anus and mouth. So researchers would need to explain how acoels and Xenoturbella lost those and other characteristics. They would also be left to search for another primitive-looking lineage that represents the evolutionary step between jellyfish-like animals and bilaterians. If one even exists.
"I will say, diplomatically, this is the most politically fraught paper I've ever written," says Max Telford, a zoologist at University College London and last author on the paper. "This means that we have no living representative of this stage of evolution: the missing link has gone missing."
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Wednesday, March 23, 2011
The Christian religion is very gentle - Identify and utilize its weakness
 |
| Myanmar's High Command. |
Starting in 2009, the government has banned house churches, a popular way of meeting for new Christian converts. In addition, the military junta that rules Burma has targeted the majority Christian Chin, Karen, Naga, Kachin, Shan and Karenni people groups, by destroying Christian schools, hospitals and churches, as well as raping and killing Christians, according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
"The government wants this country to be one religion," said a Christian contact in Burma. "If there is a way to stop all kinds of religious activities other than Buddhism, they will. They will always try to stop our work."
(from Voice of the Martyrs, March 2011)
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