Psp-hacks.com , PSPupdates.qj.net and psp-news.dcemu.co.uk will have everything you need.

As for bricking, even a bricked system is easily recoverable now, thanks to the pandora's battery hack and the fact that all custom firmwares have a built in recovery menu if you power on the system while holding R Trigger.

Oh, and Picodrive is an awesome sega CD emulator. You can really shrink down the size of sega cd games by about 70% if you compress them to .CSO files with UMDGen 4