Video: The Unholy Saga of Phoenix Hyperspace

https://youtu.be/q5M0TwnkWUM

Well, this is it. This is not the last episode of Quick Start (oh man, not by far; we aren't even at the halfway point) but it is the reason I started the series.

I began investigating instant-on OSes because of Asus Expressgate, but I'm not sure I actually would have made a video about it. On its own, it just didn't really rate a narrative - I mean, I ended up dragging a good solid one out of it, IMO, but only because I got fired up to depict this whole phenomenon. And the reason I got so fired up is because of all the other stuff I'd discovered after Expressgate, and particularly this specific product. Up until I cracked this code, the instant-on phenomenon was all a curiosity to me, and then once I did, it became extremely important that I tell you all what I had seen.

The experience of learning how Hyperspace's boot-time trickery worked felt like discovering a new particle, mixed with uncovering evidence of the extinction of a species. As I wrote the initial article on my website about it - which I had to do, in order to just figure out how to tell the story - I had to grapple with the fact that, of everyone on this planet, I was probably one of a hundred people, total, who knew you could Do This with a PC.

This video will be responsible for the number of people worldwide who know about this horrendous trick ballooning by literally four or five orders of magnitude. It will probably make it to all the hacker news sites again (it has already been there once.) It's incredible to me that this technique has flown under the radar, except insofar as I don't think anyone could successfully pull it off unless they were a BIOS vendor.

On top of that, the design of the Hyperspace OS itself is actually quite clever. I almost feel bad that I had to bury the lede, if you will, behind a tour of the OS. It wouldn't have made sense to do it the other way around, but at the same time, I do feel a bit concerned that people won't stick it out long enough to find out what the horrifying secret is. I'm hoping the oddness of Hyperspace itself will keep folks interested, but it's moot; I gotta tell every story my way.

Anyway, like I said, there are a half dozen more eps in the pipeline, if not more. I don't know that I'll try to get them all done in a row, I've been planning on taking a break and addressing other topics for a couple videos so I don't burn out, but either way, you have a lot more crappy Linuxes to look forward to.

Here's a sneak peek of what's on the docket (order not guaranteed):

- Dell Latitude-On

- Asus Express Gate Cloud

- Vaio P Instant Mode

- Asus Transformer Trio (Android/Windows hybrid)

- HTC Shift x9500 (Windows/WinCE hybrid)

- Windows Sideshow

- HP QuickLook/DayStarter

- Toshiba Qosmio A/V mode

- MSI Winki

I have specimens of all of nearly all of this, but if anyone out there has a known working MSI Winki board - especially one of the Winki Edition motherboards with the dedicated module - please get in touch.

On a final note: I have not had anything like the time and energy to reply to everyone's messages individually, and I figure you all know the score anyway, but I just want to say: Thank you all so, so, so much, again, for supporting me in going fulltime. My mental health is already tremendously improved, and honestly I think you'll detect it immediately as soon as you start the video. I feel more alive than I have in months.

While I have a few more days (at the end of the month) before I'm done with my old day job for good, I haven't been back there all this week, and it's been like finally getting my head above water. I feel like I can breathe for the first time in as long as I can remember. I've been getting out of bed before 8 o'clock. I think it's been... four, five years since I had the energy to do that, instead of just laying there feeling crushing dread until I finally drug myself onto my feet so I could stumble to my desk in time to not get nailed for lateness.

There's actually a shot in this video already, that I legitimately would never have been able to get before now because I had to get up before sunrise to stage it. I'm only able to do that because of the freedom you've given me. I hope to deliver on a lot more of the ideas I see in my head from now on.