Category: electronics

I normally keep fairly up to date with releases of Xbox Media Center (xbmc), but lately I haven’t been because I found a version (the build released on January 5th) that was stable, and did everything I wanted to.  All I can say, is, DAMN!  I downloaded the latest release as of 2 days ago (the May 9th release I believe).

First of all, they’ve gotten rid of the same skin they’ve been using as the default for a long time.  It’s not that I wasn’t a fan of the old skin, but this new one is so much more polished. 

Second of all, the smb streaming is absolutely perfect for me.  However, that may be because of the new router that actually doesn’t reduce the speeds to the xbox to 1Mbps.  I’ll talk about my new router a little later though, because I don’t want to give it intensely glowing reviews, and then have something stupid happen a day later 🙂

And finally, the greatest feature I think they ever could’ve added, is the addition of an http server.  Now, you may be thinking, why the hell would they do that?  Well, all I can say is, this http server allows you to control whatever xbmc is playing.  Yes, that’s right, you could essentially hook up your xbox to a reciever, speakers, and a network connection.  Granted, not all features are currently supported via the website, but you can easily add things to your queue, etc. 

Now, the reason I think this is so damn cool, is that in my office, ever since we moved out the noisy rack, we contemplated getting some sort of jukebox setup that we could all connect to and add tracks to, etc.  This way we don’t all have to wear headphones, or have 5 different songs playing in the background.  A modded xbox is now a possible solution to our problem.  We could all add whatever songs you want to listen to to the playlist.  There are still a few things that would need to be tweaked (like deleting stuff that’s currently in the playlist, etc).  This is the exact sort of solution that I was thinking about for the office.  In fact, I had seen a similar thing at a party I had gone to a few years back at Presidential Towers.  I can’t remember the name of the company that was having the party, but they do a lot of training, and web developement.  Needless to say, they had a webapp that you could browse their music collection, and then add to the current playlist.  It was one of the cooler ideas I’ve seen for a small business/office.

And now that xbox’s are $150, this means you can get a awesome little media center for around $200 (if you mod it yourself).  To all those with xbox’s, I say go for it because it’s so easy, and you can get so much more out of your black and green box.

So I got James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing from gamefly this week, and I must say, DAMN!  This is how video games should be!  Now, I’m not referring to the media check that makes making backups a pain, but instead “movie” feel of the game.  Instead of making a new Bond movie, they decided to do a video game.  They have voice overs from all the people in the bond movies: Pierce Brosnan, Heidi Klum, etc, etc.  From the little bit I’ve played, I’m more than impressed.  The controls make sense, and I’m not getting overwhelmed by the amount of buttons on the controller in such a small area (something that has a tendency of happening with me, since I’m a computer gamer all the way).

Yay! I got the xbox working yesterday. It actually wasn’t that bad, I was just quite pissed about it on Wednesday when it happened. So, I’m going to make a great drawing representation for you, in paint! So, there’s the round area, that brings the trace down to a lower level, and the trace itself that’s supposed to connect to it. Needless to say, as you can see from the drawing, here, that the trace wasn’t connecting to it. Now, you’re supposed to solder a wire onto the round area, but since mine got so messed up, I ended up messing up the trace. So all I had to do was use the wire I needed to solder on to also connect the trace to the round area. Needless to say, after I made the hypothesis that that would fix it, it took about 5 mins to actually fix it. It’s a relief, that’s for sure.

In other news, having Thursday as a holiday, and not Friday, is just asking for nothing not be accomplished on Friday. Needless to say, that is exactly what happened yesterday. However, we DID get the laptops that have been on order from HP for the last 2 months. I’m sure the people that actually ordered them will be happy.

And one more thing, I just bought the Damien Rice – O album last night, and WOW. Talk about a great album. You should take a listen. No, really!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Well, I think I borked my xbox yesterday. Joy. It was just going to be a simple day copying stuff. However, Aaron Binford, a student worker at DIA, got a 250GB harddrive. However, we couldn’t simply get his bios to reflash enabling his xbox to see over 137GB. Well, we since mine has a 200GB drive in it, we decided to swap out my chip, and see if it works, etc. Well, needless to say, we finally got his working, but after I got mine all back together, it didn’t boot. So, I took it back apart and worked on it for quite awhile. Right now, it’s completely in pieces. With none of the modchip pieces hooked up, it STILL doesn’t work. So, I haven’t touched it since yesterday. I hope I can get it fixed. If not, at least I’ll know exactly how to get it working right the next time. I may try to return it to ebgames, since I did get the “no questions asked” warranty. I just feel kinda sleezy for doing that.

Well, I must report that the dancepad works. It’s not quite as good as at the arcade, because it has a tendency to move under you when you “dance,” but other than that it works well. Phew, you also definitely get a workout just for screwing around on it. It gets your heart pounding, and the sweat was starting to roll. All in all, not bad, for what amounted to $7 out of my pocket. I just wish you could add your own music and it would auto-detect the beats so you could dance to it. Maybe in the next version…

So, instead of renting movies from blockbuster, family video, or any other local establishment, I’ve started renting them from gamefly. It works pretty well. They have an INSANELY larger collection and they seem to have most of the games in stock. The basis of it is similar to netflix, where you set up a queue for the games you want, they send them to you in the mail, and then you send them back. You can only have 2 games at a time, and you just send the games back whenever you want. The games are shipped USPS one day, or something like that, so turn around is fast. It’s still not as fast as going someplace in town, but I can handle it. Amazingly enough, most of their games are available too without having to wait. That was one of the reasons I never got into netflix (I had heard they were horrible about having stuff in stock). So far, pretty much every game I’ve wanted (be it, it’s only been 4) have been in. It works really well when 2 of the guys in the office also signed up for it. We should be flying through games now. And all for $22 a month. I figure, as long as I rent more than 4 games a month, it’s a better deal than going to blockbuster.

Ok, why does fedex think that my wireless xbox adapter needs to spend the WHOLE day in chicago? It got there at 6am this morning, and didn’t leave till after 5pm. Grrrr…

Oh, and for those of you that have a modded xbox, and don’t really want to pay for xbox live, I’ve found a nice free alternative here. You can even use it if you don’t have a modded xbox, but it then requires you to start games for an PC. Whereas, if you have a modded xbox, you can start games right from your tv! Plus there’s a messenger client (for the PC) and you can use games that are saved to your xbox harddrive. I think I’m in heaven! Also, voice comm works, and it works with all 37 xbox live games. How can you go wrong?

It’s almost time for Turkey Day, so if I don’t get around to updating it before then, Happy Turkey Day from all of us here at rebelpeon.com (and by that, I mean me).

Well, if you don’t have HALO for PC yet, go get it. It’s the most fun I’ve had in a video game, I think ever. And I’m just talking about the multiplayer aspect. I haven’t even bothered playing the single player part because it’s exactly the same as on the xbox. All I can say is stickie ‘nades and vehicles. Ahhh, a match made in heaven.

In other news, I finally got paid. I don’t know if I mentioned that before, but apparantly the secretaries upstairs don’t know where the mailroom is and instead keep the paychecks up there. So, it had been sitting up there for quite some time. Oh well, at least now I get paid again in 10 days 🙂 It all works out in the end.

Lets see…anything else? Oh, Colleen and I went to my parent’s place for the weekend. It was nice, we did lots of shopping (it’s a little better in the suburbs of detroit than in champaign-urbana). It was good to get away for a little bit. Lets see, what else…oh, I got my hands on Exchange 2003 final, so my email server won’t be beta anymore (always a good thing). Hmmm…I can’t really think of anything else right now…

Wow, it’s been awhile since I updated. Lots of fun (and not so fun things) have happened these last couple of weeks. Where to begin, where to begin… Well, I’ll start with why I haven’t been updating the site. Just the pure fact that I’ve been busy both with work and playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on the xbox. Definitely one of the best games I’ve ever played. If you own an xbox, go get it. Don’t even bother renting it, just go buy it. Now that I’m looking at ebgames, I see that it’ll be released for the PC too. I’ve got about 30 hours into the game, and I can’t put it down.

So, from the above, it’s obvious that I have my xbox up and running…with the modchip. It took a little fighting with to do it, but overall not too painfull. Just had to open the xbox up, solder a row of pin headers on, then solder one other tiny wire (the hardest part) on. The nice thing is that if I ever get xbox live, it has a switch to disable the modchip, so Microsoft doesn’t block me from using it. I just need to put a bigger harddrive in it, and get a wireless network going in my apartment that I can connect the xbox to.

Work has been crazy busy. Three weekends ago, the first homegame we had, the gameday server went down, which is what they use to print of credentials for the staff working the games. Needless to say, I got called at 6:30am. Thankfully, since I’m not a student (aka partier) anymore, it wasn’t that big of a deal. We knew the server was having problems because it had been doing funny things, but we (and hp) had diagnosed it to being the ram. We replaced the ram, and thought, “Great, we’re all set now.” Yeah, it wasn’t. After awhile we couldn’t even get it to post bios without screaming beep-codes at us. Nick and I pretty much narrowed it down to the motherboard, so we gave HP a call. The guy we had went through a few basic tests with us, and also narrowed it down to the motherboard. So, HP sent us a new one. Talk about easy to replace. All it was, was 1 thumbscrew holding it down. And sure enough, it seems to be working.

On other side notes, I have STILL yet to be paid. I was supposed to be paid on the 16th (with everybody else). However, for some unknown reason (even the the HR dept), I wasn’t. Apparantly my pay has been bumped back to the 24th now. I’m very looking forward to the paycheck, since if i don’t get it, rent’s going to be difficult to pay (I’ve already paid all the bills I need to worry about for a month).

Sorry about the laziness on my part, I’ll be sure to attempt to update the site a ‘lil more often than 2x a month 🙂