Hasta La Gadget!

You don’t need to know my name. I was just a lowly salesman at Circuit City. But know that these people losing their jobs are not just my coworkers. They are my friends.

[The following words are quotes from the tales of over a dozen real CC sales folks, managers, liquidators, and corporate workers. I’ve used them to create a insider’s look at what it felt like to be inside the country’s number 2 electronics retailer as it fell to economic hardship. May all Circuit City workers, like everyone losing their jobs these days, find meaningful, honest work in the near future. Special thanks goes to those who contributed to this story. ]

We’ve all known the closing was probably going to come sooner than later. It has been so frustrating doing sales for the past 3-4 months having to persuade customers to make purchases because of the company’s problems. I’ve never pushed anyone into a sale I didn’t think was worth their time…I have no real reason to anyways due to my lack of commission.

Being an active member of the Circuit City Associate Forum community, an online message board which Circuit City associates could post to using their employee logins, I constantly read through the things which get posted within the forums. On January 9th I remember hitting that F5 button to refresh the page and reading the news that announced the company’s intention to sell itself. I was the first to find out at my location and broke the news to the managers and supervisors, we stood in silence for a moment around our firedog counter in shock and then began to wonder what to do. Our future was an uncertainty.

On January 16th we all woke up and went to work. We didn’t expect the speed of the judgment, at about 10:22am a TV in the break room had been tuned to CNBC and were reporting their breaking news about Circuit City beginning the liquidation process and closing its stores nationwide. Four of us watched the announcement; thirty-four thousand associates were now going to become a part of the unemployment statistic. Corporate made an official announcement to our associates 20 minutes after that news segment.

On the day the liquidation was announced a few employees spent most of the day crying, these were mostly people who had worked there for most of their adult life.

Once the sales started on Saturday morning, a sick feeling crept over my stomach. Every weekend up to this, we’ve been pretty dead. We’d stand around for the first hour doing almost nothing, except help the 1-2 customers that came in at this time. Saturday felt like Black Friday, only in this year’s case, busier

All over 10-30%, when we had much better deals weeks ago; when our store actually cared about the customer. It’s very depressing seeing these customers, in which I nicknamed “vultures”, not even giving a crap at how we are losing our jobs, but wanting only a deeper discount.

Liquidation beings out the best and worst in some people. I’m not patting myself on the back here, but standing at the CSA counter, I get to see almost everything. The first day of the announcement, we received a fair number of phone calls from people expressing their condolences before going about their usual business. Those calls were nice and a bit heartwarming. Inversely, we got plenty of phone calls from people that wanted to know when our going out of business sales started and how much they would save. It was sickening to say the least. Plenty of people have bad things to say about Circuit City, just like any other retailer. Personally, I always felt this was one of the good stores.

But these past 2/3 weeks have been CRAZY. We lost our manager a few weeks ago because he needed to be closer to home because of his kid on the way. We then got a new manager who JUST left a few days ago. We’ve since got some new guy who I’ve only met once….couldn’t even tell you his name. Keeping track of who’s in charge has been hell.

So have policies. When we first started liquidation, we stopped all installs. Then we got the ok to keep doing them. We’ve since been told to stop. Our uniform changes daily from fully dressed, to casual, to half-way, to undies and tin foil hats. The biggest problem that I just found out about from a friend of mine involves bonuses. The liquidation company gives bonuses to Circuit City employees depending on how their stores sell after liquidation is over. There have been mixed messages over who is supposed to receive a bonus, but I’ve since heard tonight that only the salaried managers will be receiving bonuses so I expect there will be some commotion coming up in the next few days.

Never mind bonuses. One of the main gripes associates currently have is the complete loss of any accrued Paid Time Off, some associates had as many as 140 hours of it that had accrued from never taking a vacation in a year, which has now disappeared into a puff of smoke

All employees are pretty much security guards nowadays…that is only when we’re not putting up liquidations signs for 9 bucks an hour. Instead of having to greet every customer, now we just have to patrol the store. Good luck getting help though…most of us really would not like to hassle the manager for his key to grab that camera for you. The mindset hasn’t always been this, but liquidation has changed the attitude of most for the worse.

I’ve really become close to the people I work with over my time at the store, and this closing has only brought us even more together. Every day I walk in, and I feel like I’m saying a premptive goodbye to my extended family. Circuit City was my first “real” job, besides some basic part time work before. I’ve seen managers come and go, and I honestly think I work for one of the greatest management staffs one could ask for. These are not just my coworkers or bosses, they are my friends.

While we all try to make the best of a terrible situation, some customers are there to send us back to careless land. 90% of all customers that walk into the store approach me and ask when they’ll be having “all the good deals” to which I always say “I HAVE NO FRIGGIN IDEA”. Circuit City did not exist anymore. The liquidators were in control of the prices and we had no control of anything. We don’t even know when they were going to lower the prices. It’s for this reason most of us have hid some type of item we’ve been eying throughout the store so we can buy them later when the prices are lower (haha). We’ve already had the cops over a few times and I expect them to keep visiting due to the continuation of violent shoppers with nasty attitudes.

We’ve had our share of customers come in yelling that they’ve been screwed over by us in some fashion. This may sound like rhetoric, but 30,000+ associates are about to lose their jobs- how do you think we feel? I’ve had customer say they are glad that we’re going out of business, all because we can’t return their XBox game that they bought, opened, and didn’t like. I’m sorry, but how does losing $30 on a game compare to someone that is about to lose their livelihood? I’m not looking to make this a topic of money, but some associates here live paycheck to paycheck, and the thought of not having a job is scary. Some associates here just bought a new house, a new car, just got married, or just had a child. Impending job loss is devastating to them. I’m seeing it first hand. The normally happy-go-lucky attitude of some people is just gone altogether. It’s sad. I’ve always joked that I hope Best Buy went under before us (somehow) or that when CompUSA went under that I saw it coming. Now…I regret saying those things. Watching your store, your second home, your second family, go away in front of you is depressing. I’m not going to place blame on anyone. It would be so easy to fault the liquidators, the customers, the executives, etc. However, pointing fingers won’t take the pain away. Anyone that has every had to go through a liquidation or lose their job I’m sure feels the same way.

We had to take things the best we could. We tried to laugh and joke and talk about what stuff we may buy when it gets low enough…things to enjoy the last few weeks here. We still helped customers when and how we can, but our power was so limited. I used to have the ability to do practically anything in the store, but that was taken away. I couldn’t do anything but ring up.

We also had signs that said “PLEASE DO NOT OPEN CARTONS” and apparently that meant open whatever you want. Which creates a chain reaction of people wanting to open boxes and check to make sure that everything is in there. Which then absolutely destroys the box and then customers demand discounts on those boxes.

Now this all got worse as the sales went on. I mean cursing, threatening, and just plain flipping a shit. We had one customer buy something only to return 20 min. later from Best Buy saying that he got ripped off and it was cheaper at Best Buy. Now while that was true, there are signs that say no returns ALL OVER THE STORE.

Had some more reports of customers being really degrading to employees, to the tune of “Can’t you knock off another $200 on this, it’s not like your job matters”, and others just being generally inconsiderate, the only bonus to those situations is that we technically no longer have to bend over backwards to please them, so if they upset us or do something stupid we can let them know and not get into trouble. For anyone who’s worked in retail a store closing liquidation sale is probably one of the best times to do it, primarily because if a customer complains about your attitude, or your level of service it doesn’t matter, hell we kinda joke about it to be honest, “What, he was rude to you, well we just have to let him go. Mr. Employee on March 31st I’m going to let you go!”, in some stores that conversation happens in front of customers, which has frustrated them further because it’s the complete opposite reaction of what customers are used to, traditionally you complain to a manager and they scold the employee, now some stores will just mock the customers, sure it’s wrong, but honestly they had it coming for some of the idiot demands they have, especially in our time of loss.

We act the same way our customers do (if they get angry, we get angry, if they are nice, we are), though before my store would bend over backwards to treat the customer right, unlike the Circuit City horror stories I read on Consumerist, which motivated me to do the right thing for the customer which included telling the customer that all HDMI cables under a certain feet were the same for one. Our store was great at treating customers, and such. It’s like just because your brother is a bad egg, doesn’t mean you are.

Still, the rules were gone as far as customer care went.

See, for some reason some folks seem to love bragging about God, being one of the folks who have to call people you’d be amazed how many voice mail boxes you get with people going “God is good all the time, and all the time God is good”, or “God loves you!”, or and I shit you not, the voice mailbox plays some Christian style music, used to drive me nuts! So, on one of my last day at the store I decide to work the front register and this one lady calls up the store and I happily pickup the phone

Me: “Thank you for calling Circuit City, how can I help you today?”
Her: “Yeah, I wanted to know what the discounts were at now on laptops?”
M: “They’re 10%”
H: “But the sign says 30% outside?”
M: “Up to 30%, laptops are still 10%”
H: “Oh, is it true you guys are going out of business?”
M: “Yes man”
H: “Wow, you guys have been around for ever
M: “Yeah, #2 consumer electronics retail store and we’re forced to close our doors because the economy failed us and now 34,000 employees are without jobs, all because people didn’t wanna go out and spend money to we could keep operating.”
H: “Wow, that’s terrible what’s your name?
M: “Ted”
H: “Well Ted, are you a Christian?”

Now, like I said above, it’s not so much a bad customer, so much as an example of policies going out the window. There I am on the phone with a lady who, while polite and all, was about to do something I did not want to deal with on my last day. She was about to preach to me about how God does things for a reason, and God has a plan, blah, blah, I have no interest in listening to this, customer like this drive me nuts. Really, God made Circuit City fail so that 34,000 other people could lose their jobs, among other companies doing lay offs and such. While I am Christian, I was not in the mood for this. I hung up on her. Wow, that was rude of me, probably one of the worst things I’ve done in retail, especially to a customer who was trying to be polite and caring and what not, I just had no interest in hearing it. So I stand at the register for a couple moments and the phone rings again, so I decide to try something slightly different, so in as thick a Russian accent as I can put on I answer the phone.

M: “Zank you for callink Zirkuit Zity, how kan I help you?”
H: “Hi, I was just talking to Ted a moment ago”
M: “Zorry ma’am but Ted valked avay, how kan I help you?
H: “I wanted to know if Toshibas were on sale?”
M: “Yez ma’am, Toshibas are all 10% off, as are all laptops”
H: “Ok, well I know it’s you Ted and I just wanted to mention that you’re an asshole”

Uh oh, the gig is up

M: “Alright, thanks ma’am buh bye!”

And hang up again. For a christian about to preach to me she sure didn’t mind calling me an asshole, while probably not the story you were expecting I want you to play that out in your head and tell me that’s not hilarious. The way she said it “I know it’d you Ted”, man it was awesome. Prime example of the rule book being tossed. I actually used the name Ted too, every person I talk to finds the story funny cause she was like “I know it’s you Ted”.

In another store, our associates are coming to work and the moral is NOT rock bottom. This is mainly because this stores general manager who has been with two other companies as they liquidated. He is providing great support to all the associates. They also happen to be lucky enough to have a great “consultant” aka the guy calling all the shots now. The liquidation consultant, Phil, has bought everyone in the store pizza for lunch/dinner and often comes in the morning with a few big boxes of coffee and donuts.

There was a lot of stolen stuff from the store. Mostly empty game cases and the biggest section with loss was….. Spanish music. I would find tons of CD cases just open with nothing in them.

The biggest problem our store has faced is internal theft from those who no longer respect their work place. These are some quotes from some emails the director of asset protection sent out in regards to a private firm hired to conduct all AP tasks…

“”Team,

As Debbie shared, we have experienced significant shrink issues pushing us to over 160 internal theft cases and nearly $400K in case value in just 6 days. I would prefer not to spend the money and yet we have members of the team, (including management), that have resorted to theft and fraud over the past 6 days.

This engagement by Protiviti is to ensure the integrity of the inventory as we close down the stores in the company. I also want to make it clear that this is not the liquidators initiative or project, but is a CC project that we are driving with the liquidators as partners. This is just one component of the Asset Protection Plan, and we need all of your help as we close the stores remaining vigilant on inventory management and holding yourselves and others to a standard of integrity.

Like you, we are all impacted by this close down. The first inclination might be to throw up our hands and not show the concern that is warranted to these issues. I on the other hand subscribe to the idea that most of our people are honest and show integrity. Unfortunately, there are those that don’t make good decisions, which require us to take the appropriate actions to limit the exposure. I sincerely wish all of you well and welcome your feedback.”

The biggest let down that I personally experienced was the fact that thousands of people who shopped with us this week could have saved the company by shopping a few weeks ago. The prices are higher than a month ago, yet we are selling much more than ever before just because there is a big “going out of business sign” above our door. People are just stupid… I haven’t bought a single thing since the announement (then again they did take away our decent employee discount).

Now here it was the final day. We opened and were immediately rushed with people. I mean it was crazy. Now we still had some software and ink, plenty of cables, plenty of media, along with other random stuff. At 1 PM a manager came on the loud speaker. “For the next 20 minutes only take and additional 50% off of everything.” So that continued for two hours. At 3 he started naming stuff that we had plenty of (like ink and cables) and said that the stuff is $1. So I grabbed a PlayNC card for $1. And back to work. By 4 PM most of the stuff had died down, but we still had plenty of cables and ink. The liquidator just grabbed a cart, filled it with random shit and said ” WHOLE CART FOR $1″. So everything else went out the door fast. But a buddy of mine did come up with gold. He got a lens (which was in plain sight and wasn’t stashed) and a flash for $10. Now the lens was a $400 lens and the flash was $200. So I’m sure he ebayed that for some pocket.

I looked in a shelving unit to see if anyone had stashed anything for the final days ( we searched the entire store and found tons of stuff. Lucky for the people who came the next morning to find GTA IV for $2). I had found an entire stash of acc. such as remotes and instructions for iPod docks and various stereos, including an Apple product with the remote and every dock adapter made. So logically I ask my manager what do do with all this stuff. “Trash it.” Well can I have the iPod thing? “No, trash it.” Awesome. So i proceed to throw away all this stuff.

So now the customers were out, we were closed and the cleaning started. Mostly taking down all the signs and getting all the fixtures to the front (they continued to be open until the end of Dec. for selling those). We would all come back the next day to face our final day as CCity employees.

We walked in and talked at the front for a little bit, then started the rest of the clean up. That took a good 4 hours. Then we got a treat I didn’t expect. We were told we were going to watch a tape of one of my managers on Divorce Court. Wow. That was gold. After that we all stepped into the store managers office for the final time as he clicked on the termination button. Most employees stayed for a little while and played football in the store and talked. Later we left and parted ways.

Some of our skilled associates in the company who’ve developed good working friendships with their co-workers are planning on opening their own shops based around their skill, TV installs, PC repairs, or car installs, it’s kinda neat, but overall all sad at the same time.

All I can say, from the perspective of a closing store associate is this: Remember next time you walk in any other retailer/store that is closing- this company is made up of people, just like you and me. We’re just ordinary individuals trying to make our way in the world. It’s one thing to hate the company because of a bad experience, but a majority of us are good people, and it’s heartbreaking to see how some people just don’t care. I’m not asking anyone to pull a 180 on their views of the company. All I ask is that if you have negative, malicious thoughts, please keep them to yourselves. Life is going to be hard enough for some of us as is once we are gone, it doesn’t help to have someone scream in your face “I’m glad you’re going out of business”

This company gave me a lot, and I’m slowly seeing it fade away.

For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to come up with ways to use technology to fix our economy. I’m not sure how practical these solutions are, but they sure are fun.

First Place — Aaron Langeland
Second Place — Cobra Commander
Third Place — Down Jones

I get a text message from a guy saying to meet him at the Outback Steakhouse at the Discovery Park in Tsuen. Ordinarily I might have passed, only this guy was Brando. Yes, that Brando.

The last time I’d traveled to Hong Kong, I’d narrowly missed meeting Brando thanks to hectic scheduling on all sides. But this time, nothing could stop me from my rendezvous with the legendary USB-gadget maven.

Except maybe… me having no clue where he was. I looked down at the text and blanked. Outback Steakhouse? Where? I consider myself pretty knowledgeable of Hong Kong geography, having traveled there at least a dozen times, but I had never heard of Tsuen before. Turns out this is why:

I don’t think I ever thought of Hong Kong as big until that moment.

I was a good twenty minutes late. Red and huffy, I paused outside Outback and glanced around, trying to look for someone whose face matched the one blurry picture I had of Brando.

Maybe it’s because the only things I knew about him involved his online store—a treasure trove of gadgets both useful (like the 7-in-1 USB charging orgy) and ridiculous (the choke-able chicken)—but he wasn’t what I had imagined. My mental image was that of either a giant nerd, complete with dark suspenders and eyeglass frames taped in the middle, or one of those slick entrepreneurs with oiled back hair. Maybe, like most Hong Kong businessmen, a mixture of both.

Or perhaps, I gleefully envisioned, he’d be an amalgamation of his entire online store, a living embodiment of all things fanciful and useless, be-sprocketed and USB-ports-a-plenty. He’d come fully decked in Workshop regalia, sporting one of those laser pointing bluetooth headsets, his arms wrapped in data bands and possibly one of those tiny camera recorders slung around his neck (though truthfully, I wouldn’t mind if that were left out of the ensemble. I’m uncomfortable in front of cameras).

Two boyish looking men, both decked out in hoodies and worn-in jeans, shyly approached me.

“Are you Elaine?” the shorter of the two asked. He waved, in his hand an iPhone. “I am Brando. Nice to meet you.”

To be honest, Brando kinda looked like a blogger.

His friend, a tall shaggy-haired fellow with square-rimmed glasses, was called Lawrence and worked with him at his company. I’m still not sure why he was there, but I assume it was for support. There, as he sat across from me, munching on salad and telling me his life story, I couldn’t help wondering, Did I make Brando nervous?

“I read a lot of Gizmodo,” he told me. “I don’t comment because my English isn’t good, but I’m always happy to see our goods on there.”

After a quick lunch (the first meal he’d eaten that day), we went to see Brando’s Workshop.

The place looked like what would happen if a garage hobbyist, comp-sci college student, and nerdy teen mashed all their stuff together and exploded it into an otherwise sterile office. It was, in short, geek heaven.

Boxes, filled with USB cords, wacky flash drives, keychain laser pointers and who knows what else, were stacked on top of each other everywhere.

By one wall, they made a precarious citadel that towered over our heads like some gadgety sword of Damocles. According to Brando, a good chunk of these were being shipped out to other stores, including ThinkGeek. Now you know where they get some of their oddball products too.

Employees stepped gingerly around, avoiding the open containers the best they could. On several people’s desks were even more boxes—full of stuff they were still testing, had just tested, were mailing out or were receiving back. Brando wasn’t always sure which it was, but he assured me his employees knew.

The more I spoke with him, the more I realized Brando and Giz staffers have a lot in common.

Back in 1998, fresh out of university, Brando started a Palm enthusiasts’ site. It became popular among Chinese Palm users and several accessory manufacturers started asking him to promote their products. That turned into a part-time job selling Palm peripherals.

In 2000, he quit his engineering job and went full time, founding Brando’s Workshop in his apartment. Four months later, it was big enough to warrant an actual office.

In the beginning, all the Workshop sold was Palm accessories. But by the end of the year, he decided it was worth getting into other products as well.

Fast forward eight years: Brando now lords over 19 employees and takes up an entire floor of the building. He’s expanded into USB trinkets, mobile peripherals, watches, toys, random electronics and most recently (and bizarrely) ladies accessories. Like blender brushes and nail stickers—serious ladies accessories.

Brando’s “office” wasn’t really an office at all, just a corner of the main floor, an alcove set slightly apart from the rest. Arrayed on the cabinet behind his desk were a slew of devices, including a big professional HD camera and a stack of laptops. I could see both a Macbook Air and a Toshiba R500.

“I don’t use either of them,” Brando admitted. “I just like to collect things I find beautiful.”

In that vein, he told me some of the favorite gadgets he sold were the prettier ones, such as the spy camera and MP4 watch. In fact, he seemed especially hung up on the spy gadgets, pointing to a bunch that we hadn’t covered and wondering aloud why not.

Despite being surrounded by the latest and greatest, Brando said his favorite and most memorable gadget of all time was still the Palm V. Back in 1999, when he used to ride an hour on Hong Kong’s subway—the MTR—every morning, that’s what kept him company.

“It was thinner than the iPhone but the battery lasted for very long. I would read novels and news on the train ride over. It’s still very memorable for me,” he said.

“Palm didn’t integrate with cellphones very well. The Palm OS is a very good OS, not like Windows Mobile. But they stopped making their own and switched to Windows Mobile… and so I switched to an iPhone,” he explained.

This was before news of the Palm Pre came out. When it got shown at CES, I sent him an email asking what he thought of it.

“I can’t comment, because I haven’t tested it,” he replied cautiously, sounding like a lover burnt. “I hope it has a nice open SDK for developers, then it can have a better future. If it is only a closed OS, no hope.”

Before I left, he insisted I see the storage room—the area where they keep everything they sell.

Inside, I felt like I was at a Lilliputian version of Costco: Metal shelves spilled forth a haphazardly categorized assortment of stuff. To my right was a set of tiny remote control cars. To my left was a motley of Bluetooth doodads. I turned a corner and was met by a collection of ladybug-themed fingernail clippers.

Being in there was a strange feeling—exhilarating and claustrophobic at the same time. We blog about millions of things, and the room felt like an aggregation of everything I’d ever written about in one windowless vault.

“Here are our best selling items… our hot items,” he told me, pointing at a particular bracket that, quite honestly, was hard to differentiate from others. I nodded, smiled, and scrambled to get out of there before something fell on me.

And then it was over. Brando thanked me again for coming, and as he walked me to the subway station for my hour long journey back downtown, he told me he was elated that anyone would be interested in visiting his tiny part of Hong Kong. I told him that was really sweet of him, and maybe caught a glimpse of a little blush around his ears.

The most interesting thing about Brando’s Workshop, I thought, was how much his work sounded like ours.

Brando doesn’t actually make the things he sells. Rather, he’s more of a gadget hunter.

Brando said most of his early years at the Workshop were spent in conventions all over Asia, looking for vendors from which to source the weird and wonderful. Now that he has employees to do the grunt work, he spends a lot of time reading magazines and blogs, always on the search for new products that would be good for their company. He claims that ten new products are added to various sections of Brando’s Workshop each day.

His only real criteria, he said, “I want it to be interesting. I want it to be fun.”

So do we, Brando. So do we.

It’s easy to forget that the PS3 is a fully-equipped PC in your living room attached to your house’s best monitor. Installing Ubuntu can help you remember, and play SNES games in the process.

It still kind of surprises me (in a good way) that Sony was, from the start, very OK with PS3 owners tinkering with Linux on their PS3s. A modified release of Yellow Dog Linux was available from the very beginning, and some very handy hard drive partitioning and dual-boot utilities are baked right into the PS3’s XMB; Ubuntu gets installed on an entirely separate partition of your PS3’s hard disk, so your default system doesn’t get touched and switching between Ubuntu and the XMB is a piece of cake.

There is a flipside to this coin, however. Since the PS3’s Cell Processor is PowerPC based, you won’t be able to use any Linux software that’s compiled for x86, which is, unfortunately, most of it. However, Ubuntu has always had a PPC distro, and most of the basic stuff will work just fine. You can even load up a PPC-compiled Super Nintendo Emulator, SNES9X, and play some classic games pretty easily on your Sixaxis controller paired via Bluetooth. Also, doing web browsing and other basic computing is a lot more natural and elegant on Ubuntu running on your TV than in the PS3’s somewhat gimped browser.

Another downside is performance—the PS3 obviously has a lot of hardware muscle, but there are no Linux drivers to take full advantage of the Cell processor’s multi-core architecture, or the PS3’s hardware graphics acceleration. Plus, Ubuntu can only see and use 221.7 MB of the PS3’s 512MB of RAM for some reason. So it won’t be a speed demon (and you won’t be able to play HD videos or anything), but it’s definitely functional for the basics.

And, even over two years into the PS3’s life, doing all of this still requires a fair amount of Linux geek forum sifting, which I have humbly take upon myself to do so you don’t have to. And believe me, you don’t. So let’s get started!

What You’ll Need:
• Ubuntu 8.10 PS3 Install Disc Image
• Blank CD
• USB hard drive formated to FAT32 to backup your PS3 data
• USB keyboard and mouse (wireless if possible)

Install Ubuntu 8.10
1. Installing an alternate OS requires you to wipe the hard disk completely, so you’ll want to back up your PS3 data—this includes game saves, downloaded games and the hard drive installs many games require. For this, you’ll need a FAT32-formatted USB disc (Mac HFS+ volumes won’t work). This won’t save your trophies, so if losing them will be a tragedy for you, go to Game -> Trophy Collection, press triangle and choose “Sync with Server.”

2. Plug in your disc and go to Settings -> System Settings -> Backup Utility in your XMB. Choose Back Up and select your USB disk. The data will be saved at /PS3/EXPORT/BACKUP. It took about 25 minutes for me. When you’re done installing Ubuntu, the first time you switch back to the XMB you’ll want to use the Backup Utility to restore your backup.

3. Now you’re ready to install Ubuntu. This Ubuntu help page can assist, but like it says at the top, it was written for Ubuntu 7.10, so some things may change. Our guide here is using 8.10. I would use the alternate install disc, because some folks say the graphical Live CD install can give them some problems. The alternate install disc is the exact same thing, only with old-school DOS-y graphics. Grab that (I recommend the torrent, which will blaze down as fast as your connection will let it) and burn the ISO file to a CD.

4. Drop that CD into your PS3, and go to Settings -> System Settings -> Install Other OS. This will install the dual-boot loader kboot in a matter of seconds, and ask you if you want to restart into the the Other OS’s install disc. Make sure your PS3 is connected to the web via ethernet (wi-fi could possibly work, but it might confuse the Ubuntu instllaer), plug in your USB keyboard, which you’ll need, and say yes.

5. With the keyboard, follow the fugly text-only instructions for the Ubuntu 8.10 installer to install the system. Everything is self explanatory, and at almost every turn, you should be able to select the default option. The installer will look like it’s hung up at several points, but it’s not, so let it do its thing. Install will take about 45 minutes, and when it’s done, remove the install disc, and you’ll boot into a good ol’ Ubuntu desktop.

Pair Your Sixaxis or Dual Shock via Bluetooth
One advantage of using Ubuntu over, say, the PS3-specific Yellow Dog distro is that it’s easier to wirelessly pair your PS3 controller with a little downloadable utility. For these steps, you should switch to your PS3 running Ubuntu.

A wireless USB keyboard and mouse here are essential, but stick with wireless USB over Bluetooth. Logitech’s MX1100 mouse worked immediately with Ubuntu without any futzing, but the Logitech DiNovo Edge BT keyboard I had was a different story—Ubuntu’s Bluetooth utility found it and paired with it, but I couldn’t get it to actually type. I’m sure there’s a way, but that’s some forum sifting you’ll have to do on your own. Instead I used an old Apple keyboard I had laying around with the USB extension cord.

1. This thread spells out most of the process, and it’s the source of the software you’ll need to download. Grab Sixaxis Bluetooth Package.tar.gz and unzip it on your Ubuntu desktop.

2. Double click to install the packages inside, first the “bluez-sixaxis-bin_powerpc.deb” package and then the one named “bluez-sixaxis_rc1.1_all.deb.”

3. Now, with your controller turned off, go to Applications -> Accessories -> Sixaxis-gui in Ubuntu and start the app. Choose “Setup Menu” and then “Setup first connection” and follow the instructions. Don’t press the PS button until it tells you to. The lights will keep blinking even after it’s connected.

4. After that’s done, you can connect this or any of your other controllers by simply going to “Connect Sixaxis to PC” under “Task menu.” But to use it with the SNES emulator you’re about to install, you have to do one more thing:

5. Under “Task menu” choose “Enable Keyboard and Mouse” and then pick “Fake Joystick.” This will pair your controller as a Linux joystick. After that, you’ll have to disconnect (with “Turn Off Sixaxis”) and re-connect your controller.

Install SNES9X Emulator
SNES9X works fairly well on the PS3, with a few minor caveats, which we’ll get to below.

1. Open up a terminal window in Ubuntu and type the following command:

sudo apt-get install snes9express snes9x-x

This will install the emulator.

2. When it’s done, “snes9express” will appear under Games in Ubuntu’s application launcher. Fire that up.

3. To configure it properly, do the following: under the ROM tab, select the folder that houses all your SNES ROMs (for games you already owned as a kid, of course!); under Sound, make sure “Thread Sound” is selected, or else everything will sound horribly garbled; under Video, check “Scale,” “Hi-Res” and “Full Screen.”

4. Getting SNES9X to recognize your Sixaxis takes a little bit more juju, but even then, there is still some weirdness. To config, go to the Controllers tab and press “Devices.” Change the entries of “Pad 1” (and “Pad 2” if you’re using two) from “/dev/js0” to “/dev/input/js0” and hit close. Don’t try to Configure Button Maps… for the joysticks.

5. Go back to ROM, choose your game, and hit Power, and it should start up.

Here, though, are the aforementioned caveats: the PPC version of SNES9X on the PS3 chokes hard when you try to use an alternate button configuration for your controller (it will take the configuration, but just won’t play any games). But it’s default configuration, while wacky, is still playable. You’ll just have to find where each SNES button is mapped for each game. You’ll have trouble with something like Street Fighter 2, but simpler games like F-Zero, Pilotwings and RPGs like Earthbound (!!!) are totally playable.

And, less damaging, total full-screen does not appear to work (or at least I couldn’t get it to work) on the PS3. But you can still drag the window as big as it will get and get the same effect, just with your Ubuntu desktop visible behind.

So, all in all, this won’t be as elegant as dusting off your old SNES and plugging it in, but it’s fun to squeeze all of the potential out of your PS3 and see it play some vintage classics.

Tips
If Ubuntu locks up on you at any time, don’t trip the main power switch on the back: all you have to do is hold down the regular power button on the front for five seconds to force a shutdown.

And, theoretically, all you have to do to get back to the XMB is type “boot-game-os” at the kboot prompt. This has yet to work for me. Instead, power down the PS3 (so the power light is red), and then hold down the power button for 5-10 seconds until it beeps a few times, then let go. This will boot back into XMB by default (you may have to re-select your TV resolution, but don’t worry, all the rest of your configurations should be saved). If you’re done playing around with Linux for a while, you can simply set the PlayStation OS as the default in your XMB System settings.

Further Tinkering
A couple of things that are possible, but I have not fully tested:

Setting Ubuntu to Your Exact TV Resolution
This thread will help there—in my default installation on my Samsung 720p LCD, Ubuntu was sufficiently high-res, but with a black border an inch or two thick around the edges. If you’re experienced with Linux config files though, you can dive into the xorg.conf (which is blank by default in Ubuntu 8.10, much to my initial confusion) and calibrate it to the exact resolution of your TV.

Using the Sixaxis as a Mouse
I don’t think this works by default, but if you want to ditch the USB mouse and use the PS3 controllers analog stick, see this thread for more guided xorg.conf config file tweaking. I tried it but the buttons were oddly mapped, so I gave up. Many have gotten it to work though.

Oh, and I think you guys will enjoy this: while researching this article and diagnosing some problems with using the Sixaxis with SNES9X, I found perhaps the greatest moment in geek troubleshooting forum history. But thanks to this guy, I was able to get it working, so mad props to him and his Olive-Garden-fueled troubleshooting.

As of JAN/06/2008 @ 11:43AM EST – For some reason, SNES9EXPRESS does not like it if i turn JOYSTICK on, i have to go to JOYSTICK tab and turn it off for the Emulator to run without an error code 1. I will look further into this and see if i can make sense of it.

*(UPDATE)* Going to Olive Garden for lunch, going to let a few ideas rattle around in my brain before i take another stab at this.

And that’s about it. Enjoy Ubuntu on your PS3, and if you come up with any more fun uses for it, please let me know in the comments. And if there are any other topics you’d love to see covered by a weekend how-to, speak up! Have a good Saturday tweaking everyone.

The iPhone’s multitouch patents are the equivalent of a cold war nuclear arsenal—dormant for now, but Palm’s Pre is looking for a fight. Here’s why we think Apple’s multitouch monopoly won’t last.

To help guide us through, machete in hand, what is one of the more confusing jungles of U.S. law, we talked to R. Polk Wagner, a professor of patents law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He specializes in patents and intellectual property as it relates to technology, and teaches hundreds of Penn Law students every year how to decipher the Enigma-level encrypted language of patent filings. We couldn’t have done it without him.

As others have thoroughly and eloquently explained this week, it’s impossible to identify a single patent that has a lock on the iPhone’s multitouch magic as we know it. That patent probably does not exist. But here’s the key—patent wars are intrinsically cold wars. They entail both sides jacking up their arsenals (reams of legalese replacing megaton warheads) with as many patents as possible, with hopes of scaring their adversaries out of even attempting to try something. These cold wars, thankfully, rarely turn hot, but under our legal system, lack of courtroom action means there’s almost no way to determine whose armada of patents actually cover what.

The meat of every patent is a list of claims, and it is the claims and only the claims that spell out exactly what can get you sued and what can’t. Unfortunately for us, but very fortunately for the thousands of patent lawyers hoping to feed their families, claims are written in a language not comprehensible to normal humans. The goal is to be both incredibly vague and legally specific at the same time

“Patent claims are an attempt to use words to describe things and ideas, an imperfect way of operating. In an ideal world we’d have patent claims that look like a title record you get for your house [your property starts exactly 200 feet from this road walking in exactly this direction, etc]. But it is incredibly difficult to predict exactly what a patent will or won’t cover,” Prof. Wagner says.

But the old patent-law adage Prof. Wagner likes to use in class is true—”the claims are the name of the game”—and it is their vagueness in this instance that would make it easy for Palm, if their lawyers and engineers know how to talk to each other, to design itself out of a hole and bring true multitouch to the Pre.

The patent we’re referring to is #7,479,949, awarded on January 20 of this year. It has a list of 20 claims but as Prof. Wagner showed us, out of the 20, 17 are “dependent,” which means they drill down more specifically into features of the invention/interface/device described in their parent claim. In our quick Patent Law 101 with Professor Wagner, we learned that to legally infringe upon a patent, you need to violate an entire independent claim, which means, if you rip off one of its dependents, you’re OK, you just can’t rip off all of them all together.

As Engadget’s legal eagle, Nilay Patel, sagely identified in his piece, considerable chunks of this patent deal with not multitouch as a whole, but one very specific use case: the iPhone’s ability to lock itself into a one-dimensional scroll (vertical or horizontal) on, say, a webpage. It’s based upon the first movement of your finger: move it straight up and down, and you’ll only be able to scroll vertically. But just as it’s hard enough to divine exactly what’s going on in patents to begin with, Professor Wagner—a man with considerably more experience than I do at doing doing exactly that—says it’s tough to assume that an entire patent can be distilled down to a single behavior. Here’s the legalese for the scrolling behavior in claim #1, which is an independent claim with 9 sub-claims:

…A vertical screen scrolling heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command rather than a two-dimensional screen translation command based on an angle of initial movement of a finger contact with respect to the touch screen display

But there’s more to it. Claim # 1 is a pretty beefy paragraph, with three more important specific behaviors listed within, each of which must be ripped off to infringe on that claim. The first one sounds like the ability to know the difference between a one-dimensional scroll and a two-dimensional scroll, which unlocks both vertical and horizontal scrolling:

…A two-dimensional screen translation heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to the two-dimensional screen translation command rather than the one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command based on the angle of initial movement of the finger contact with respect to the touch screen display

And the third and most interesting one, which tacks on the seemingly unrelated behavior of side-scrolling through a list of things, like Cover Flow albums:

…And a next item heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.

What’s interesting is that the only other phones on the market technically capable of multitouch—RIM’s BlackBerry Storm and T-Mobile’s Google Android G1—have web browsers that scroll in exactly the same manner described in the patent. But, if they don’t also feature a Cover Flow-like interface for side scrolling (the G1’s photo gallery uses next/prev buttons, for instance), they’re legally safe from infringing on this particular claim. Even more interesting is that the Storm’s photo gallery app does indeed use a Coverflow-like swipe to navigate through photos, so from where we’re sitting, they could be in trouble. But as you can see, it gets that specific.

So, patent mumbo-jumbo aside, here are the keys:

1. What Apple can and most certainly is doing is patenting all of the special ways it makes multitouch magical—like the Cover Flow scrolling lists, or using two fingers to rotate an image by pivoting one around the other (which doesn’t appear to be singled out in the patent in question here). Still, it’s hard to assume that Apple has a patent lock on the concept of multitouch as a whole—multitouch has been around in theory for too long and it’s probably too general of an idea for Apple to claim an absolute lock. Exhibit A here is Microsoft’s Surface table, which is currently on sale and has plenty of iPhone-like multitouch zoom and scrolling features built right in. But Apple may just be steering clear of Microsoft, the one behemoth that can match Apple’s legal might.

2. Regardless of legal defensibility, Apple’s multitouch cold war is working against everyone but Microsoft. Google didn’t even tempt the Cupertino warheads (I mean lawyers) with multitouch on Android, and HP gets visibly nervous even when we simply ask whether their TouchSmart PCs will support multitouch some day. Keep in mind, though, that unofficial multitouch applications exist for both Android and HP’s TouchSmarts.

As Prof. Wagner points out, Apple is great at protecting their innovations. Look at the click wheel—it’s without a doubt the most elegant way to navigate an MP3 player’s interface, and no one has been able to mimic it exactly. Others have clickable buttons, and touch-sensitive controllers, some of which are shaped like wheels, but Apple has been able to protect the specifics of the clickwheel—all of these elements combined—that make it special.

3. Palm, however, could be the perfect North Korea in our little war metaphor—crazed enough by desperation to be the first to just go for it. Also, they’ve been making phone software far longer than Apple, and insinuate that they have some patent warheads of their own to train on Cupertino.

4. The truth of the matter remains, that Individual patents (and, even more so, individual claims inside of individual patents) are easy to design around if you’re careful (and have good patent lawyers working with your engineers), since all it takes is one deviation from one of a patent’s claims specifics to put you in the clear. But this recent filing, clearly, is not Apple’s only multitouch-related patent. Many more exist, and many more are surely pending. That’s where Palm’s patent lawyers come in. As long as Palm (or anyone else) can walk the tightrope with Petit-worthy grace, implementing multitouch features without infringing on the exact specifics of any one Apple patent claim, they’ll be OK.

But beyond that, Palm may actually use the chance to take multitouch to places we’ve never seen before. “Designing around patents requires innovation,” said Prof. Wagner, “and a lot of times, the end result turns out better than the what was being imitated.” All of this, of course, is completely up in the air for Palm. We were reminded many times that what we saw at CES was far from a production model, and a lot could change about the specifics of the Pre’s multitouch when the finished product makes itself known.

From the looks of things, Apple is the Gipper, the Ronald Reagan of tech. When they don’t fight, they often find a way to win (or look like they have won). And when they do fight, it takes an equally massive superpower to give them any competition.

We’re rooting for Palm though, and Google and RIM too. More multitouch cellphones = more competition = happier consumers. Détente, people, détente!