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FEBRUARY 2004 |
15th February 2004
Had a fun day today. I was on the way to meet Jon in London and found £4.70 in the change box for the ticket machine in the underground. While I was waiting around for him there was a lady in a bright multicoloured dress at one of the ticket machines pressing every button in sequence over and over again. Maybe she was hacking the mainframe. We headed over to Oxford St where we had a man telling us that Jesus is the way through his megaphone and I bought a nice new pair of very comfy Sketchers and also got myself a kick-ass beard trimmer. Went over to Bella Italia for roast vegetable, olive and goats cheese pizza. It was nice in the extreme. Back over at my house we played around with the Xbox for a little while and laughed a lot at this before Jon went home and I got an early night to start the week. I found out later that my sister has an almost identical pair of trainers as me (I hadn't noticed they were the same as hers when I bought mine). I say almost identical, since hers are like half the size of mine. Obviously she has good taste :) I put the £4.70 into the collection box we have at my dads shop for the RNIB.
Track of the day: Incubus - Talk Shows On Mute (Live from DVD @ Bridge School Benefit)
9th February 2004
Upgraded the hard drive in the Xbox from 8GB to 80GB (which took all of about 10mins), installed Xbox Media Center (XBMC) and ran a cable from the Xbox to my switch. I can now copy games to the hard drive and run them from there. The media player is a really fantastic dashboard, I really can't wait to get a later snapshot with more features working. Now that the Xbox is part of my network, I decided to call it Puffy, seeing as its a big heavy beast of a console and all.
Track of the day: Jamiroquai - Return Of The Space Cowboy
8th February 2004
Got up early this morning and got the screwdrivers out for the Xbox again. I was pretty determined to make it work, and after an hour or two it all came together. I tried a couple of things, managed to get my computer to read the Xbox drive, got the cracked savegame on there... ah I could go through all the details here, but I won't just yet. I think I'll write a howto based on my experiences for my projects page. Yea, so w00t, I've now got an Xbox with the EvoX M7 BIOS so it'll now boot Linux (Xebian!) from CD. All the hard stuff is done, and its now plain sailing. All so exciting! I am really geeky sometimes.
To celebrate, I bought two more small controllers (a green one and a blue US import one, so I've got all the colours) a DVD remote and a copy of Micromachines. Micromachines is pretty good fun, but I don't think its quite as great as Micromachines V3 on the Playstation. For a start, there are no tanks! This is just wrong. There is no Snooker Table track either - this also sucks bigtime. Its still pretty cool to play multiplayer, but its no classic. I bought the remote control so I don't have to get the Xbox controllers out when I want to play with the Media Player, and it has to be said that the Xbox remote is the worst remote control I have ever seen in my whole life. The shape is ok, but the plastics are really thin making the remote feel lightweight and unsubstantial. The buttons are nasty rubber ones with no feedback and a garish colour scheme. The lid for the battery keeps falling off and the batteries rattle about inside. And it cost 20 quid. It almost couldn't be worse. Enough with the ranting though, this Xbox stuff is such great fun.
Track of the day: Travis - Flowers In The Window
5th February 2004
Hehe, I only just noticed that there was a typo in my log generating perl script which means that I'd spelt February wrong for the past 3 years on these pages. Anyway, I fixed that. The Xbox modding is going OK. Got myself some silver conductive paint and bridged a few points on the board so I can flash the TSOP. Now all I've got to do is try and get the 007 game save with Raincoat and the EvoX M7 BIOS onto the hard drive... which is not as easy as it sounds. I'll leave that until tomorrow I think. Also been playing the 007 game a couple of times, and the driving mission in the Z8 is a fun diversion. There is quite an unacceptable amount of slowdown when there is action though. The framerate really sucks, but I'm not sure whether it because I'm running it in PAL60, I may try it in PAL50 sometime to see whether that helps. I hope this xbox hack works out, else I won't be able to play Project Gothem Racing 2, Colin McRae Rally 4 or Micromachines - and that would really suck.
Track of the day: Incubus - Southern Girl
1st February 2004
Bought my new toy today. A prisine (not a single bit of dust or a scratch) September 2003 (week 35) Xbox. Its got a Samsung DVD drive (woot! as opposed to all the others which have issues with CD-Rs), and came with a Controller-S and an RGB/Optical scart cable. Got a copy of 007 Agent Under Fire as well. Dunno what version board it is yet, but can't wait to crack it open tomorrow.
Track of the day: Incubus - Agoraphobia
