XBox woot! bah! [drdave]

Decided I needed a bigger hard drive for my xbox over the weekend.
So with a little rearrangement, I liberated an 80Gb drive from my desktop. Ripped the xbox apart, replaced the hard drive (very easy operation), put it back together (very difficult operation) and turned on. Everything seemed to be working fine... went to the mod chip dashboard, could still ftp to it, would do all the mod chip stuff, like play emus, movies, nicked games.
Anyway, after watching a movie, I decided to check that the legit stuff was still working. Put a DVD in the drive, tried to boot...
Was greeted by a screen that said 'Error 5: Your Xbox Needs Servicing'.
Bugger. Couldn't get to the MS dashboard no matter what I did, couldn't get onto Live. So I had a scoot around on the net. Error 5 means that the hard drive isn't locked. See, apparently, the MS bios requires that the IDE drive is in a locked state - which is a function that most new IDE drives have, that they require a unique password to unlock and be read. If the drive is not locked, the xbox assumes its been tampered with and won't do bugger all.
No problem I thought, I'll just lock the drive... seems there are tools to do it. When I try to lock the drive, it tells me that the drive does not support locking. Arse. This old Maxtor is apparently one of the only Maxtors that doesn't.
So now I have three choices:
1) Leave as is. The only thing I lose is Live. I can still do most everything else, including playing original games - albeit through the mod chip bios;
2) Put the old drive back - ugh, 8Gb...;
3) Buy a new IDE drive that supports locking.

At the moment, I'm sticking with option 1)... to be honest, I haven't used Live in ages. In fact, before I got the ability to play Outrun in arcade perfect style, I never used my Xbox for ages! And I don't really fancy shelling out for another 50 quid drive.
So woot! for the extra storage. Bah! for the loss of features!

Text editors [brit]

Just a quicky this.
We probably all use text editors for one reason or another; whether it's tinkering with config files or writing code.
Anyway, if you're looking for a new editor (for years I swore by EditPlus) then have a look at JEdit
It's amazing. Truly amazing.
It's Java, so theoretically it should run on anything, but it's the features in there too that are very cool. Plugins galore and a really well thought out way of approaching programming especially.
And of course, it has built in dockable IRC :)
W00t!

What u watchin' ? [brit]

TV. A billion channels, and not a right lot worth watching...
What series or programmes do you watch regularly that you reckon are worth the time? For me, it's Navy NCIS (Ch. 289 Sky), Have I Got News For You (Ch. 109 Sky) and Las Vegas (Ch. 106 Sky).
3 things - and I pay some £38 a month for my SKY sub - hardly seems worth it eh?
So come on, let me into the secrets of what else is worth a watch...

Water cooling madness [lurks]

When I was at the CTS show earlier in the year, I saw this insane water cooling system called the Zalman Reserator 1. There's quite a lot of reviews on the net. It is, to put it frankly, the most insane thing you have ever seen. Well, I just had to try it so I put in a request to their PR firm and grabbed a review one. Here it is, next to my own PC.
What is it? It's basically a water cooling system with no fan. There's a tiny and silent pump in the bottom of that huge column thing. The column is hollow and you stuff 2.5L of water in it. It pumps water through those rather thick pipes onto your CPU and back in. The process of convection in the huge water reservoir spreads the heat through the truly bloody massive surface area of the aluminium fins.
Like a few of us, I'm running a P4 2.8GHz at about the 3.15GHz mark. That with a Vantec aeroflow fan, a pretty big ass mad air cooler and despite having a nifty TIP fan, is monstrously noisy, even with the automatic fan speed controller in use from the Asus motherboard. Under load, my CPU temp flies up to about 59C with that configuration and it does so inside of a minute. The case warms up to about 40C after a couple of hours.
Fitting the Reserator was amazingly easy and unlike my last comedy foray into water cooling (back when the manufacturers didn't understand the concept of galvanic corrosion), this thing is build very well indeed. The water block is insane and comes with a universal CPU clip. The pipes are a really thick gauge and a couple of joiners are provided which you basically slot into a blank PCI slot, so if you transport you can remove the pipes to the cooler without having to remove them from the water block in your case. Fitting took me about 20 minutes and I mean, it really was easy. Am could probably do it.
So then I just poured a few jugs of filtered water into the reserator and switched it on. It gurgled a bit as it pumped the air out of the pipes and bosh, that was it. There's an inline flow indicator which is quite handy. I chuck the PC into Xvid encoding to test. CPU temp started sub 20 and rose, over the period of several hours, up to 38C. Massively cooler than it was before and the thing that really got me was... the lack of that bloody CPU fan noise. Absolute bliss!
Buggered if I know how they've got such a tiny little pump to shovel so much water and without any noise, it's dead impressive. So all set and done, it worked ace which is good right? But would you pay £194 quid for it? Of course you wouldn't. Unless you really liked the idea of the look of that mad tower. It's kinda cute the way it sits there just gently warm. I like it. I wouldn't pay full monty for it though, if only because it's the cleanest looking thing in my lair but a poser type bloke (like Jay) would love it to bits.
Anyhow, since it's running so cool I thought I'd crank it. It ran for an hour before crashing at 3.4GHz so I backed it off to 3.3GHz and it's absolutely fine. Even with the boosted voltage and speed, it sits on 40C comfortably and, of course, that's at a particularly hot time of year as well.
If I was a bit of a nutter for this stuff, I'd use this thing as the basis for a hybrid of the idea I did last time. You can remove the little pump from it and use an external. One of those nice centrifugal fishtank pumps and big lengths of that thick hose, out the window sill, just leaving the passive tower out on the sill. That would be highly effective and it'd make your neighbours think you were conducting nuclear research or something. Until it gets nicked, anyway.
Monday I'm going to ask them what they want for it. I wont pay full whack but it's nice enough now and I can use it with whatever future system I use. Really I just can't bare the thought of going back to that noise and I dare say another couple of hundred MHz wont go astray either.

XBMC v1 [shedir]

Well it's been a long time coming. From XBMP,which I still keep on the xbox HD, to today has seen shitloads of development from a very dedicated bunch.
XBMC v1.0 is without a doubt what you're looking for!
A bit big on the install side, with zillions of files in the visualisation section which I haven't investigated yet. But by christ it works fantastically well.
SMB just worked. Same line I put in other versions which didn't, but it works. It does say 'access denied' the first time I connect the to PC, but works straight after that. Anyways.
Interface is clean and sleek.
The real treat though is within the movies. Open the menu and you can adjust the gamma, brightness and contrast.
I don't remember seeing that in any of the previous XBMC version. Perfect for those camcorders which just overdo the brightness ;)
In short, for the enlightened with chipped xboxes get it installed now.
The 120gb HD I put in my xbox is a little noisy when running, nothing major. XMBC has a spindown which you can set. Set to 1min and bosh, things silent as it streams over the network.
Black screensaver is perfect for selecting a shitload of mp3s and set em off. You'll forget your TV is on.
Not tried comics over it but I think that'd be a fuckup as most of mine are zipped rather than jpgs. Still we'll see.
It's now exactly the sort of home entertainment manager you're after. I'm already dreading the day mine breaks.

Star Wars Galaxies Does Indeed Suck Urine [vagga]

So I had been feeling guilty a few months back that I was not playing any games to speak of. As I did not want to spend money in the real world, due to an expensive July coming up. So what I did was I went to Fileplanet and as a fileplanet subscriber there is a page with betas and demos to download. I downloaded Planetside, as I remember some of the lads playing it when it came out first. I played it and loved it. But in true EED style, I got pissed off with it for a number of reasons and ditched the account after two months of solid playing.
So I returned to the land of sitting in front of the PC randomly doing nothing. I play a bit of the excellent Rise of Nations expansion “Thrones and Patriots” but I only really enjoy it in multiplayer, and the only two people I know who play it wont play me anymore as I kick their ass now I have some sort of build order figured out. You know the story with these things, get the cool shit first and you should win no matter what you do! Finding someone to play online is interesting as when you randomly pick someone from the internet they are either a 11 year old who has no idea, or an 12 year old expert who can beat you in 12 moves, so that’s not much fun either! I found myself sitting at home thinking “maybe I will go to my el dodgy local internet café where I saw people playing games overnight like Shinji, Teeth, suds and myself used to do in Dublin, having mammoth 6 hour games of Starcraft and AOE2!
But I woke up to reality, I have a 2 Meg line at home that I don’t pay for, why the fuck should I pay to use some dodgy net café’s 1 meg line! So I came to the much-maligned land of massively multiplayer role playing game in search of something to play. I know I don’t want to play Everquest or a game like that, as the “Dungeons and Dragons” style of game play just sends me to sleep. The whole “cast a level 2 spell to defeat a level 1.5 shield” aspect just sucks urine to me. I don’t care if FPS games work off the same principal. I’m a child of CM and Quake, I want to do something on impulse, and don’t really care of the consequences. Planetside got around this, as it mixed both quite well, its like playing UT or Half Life, and the more you play the better you get and the better shit you can buy. I think a game like CS would work well like this, instead of getting the cool guns after 2 rounds, imagine if you needed 3 or 4 months of ‘credits’ to ! get the cool guns or the best Kevlar!
So I got a revelation in the pub one Thursday after footie training. I like the Star Wars moves as much as the next man, and since the Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) forums had been reopened to the public a while ago I presumed that SWG was in a fit state to play. What I did was I swapped my level 12 Planeside character (characters go from level 1 to 20, 12 is the second last step really, as it’s the first time you can get access to anything you want really!) with a bloke on the footie club who had a Star Wars Galaxies character he did not use anymore, who was quite close to being a ‘Master Artisan’ (somewhat the same level, in the grand scheme of things).
So I downloaded the demo of the game from fileplanet (best money I ever spent BTW, great value for money having any game file of any type on a fast ftp waiting for you at any time) and installed it to make sure it ran ok, and that I thought I could get into it. It looked interesting so I got the physical game for a tenner on ebay. I also took the plunge and re-activated the character, $15 a month.
This is the big issue with MMORPG’s, in my opinion, it’s their high cost, in the grand scheme of things. A cost for SWG or Planetside of over $200 a year for a game seems a bit rich (even if you pay for a whole year in advance, its $150), and I’m expecting the earth, moon and stars. We sell our football games for £25, and support them for just as long as these fella’s, and people get as much game play from them. I got a free copy of Sega’s ESPN American Football (but would have paid £40 for it, as I did for last years version) and play it all the time, must have put up 100 hours on it, playing it here and there 4 or 5 days a week. Charging the price of 4 or 5 other full games per year means you have to deliver quality, all the time. A lot of companies can’t do this. On the flip side, one of the things that fecked up planetside for me was the dev team changing things for the sake of it, as they had to release a patch every month or people complained about va! lue for money – so where do you get a balance.
So I went into SWG, the first few nights I was just walking about, going from building to building, and talking to people and that kind of thing. But beyond that, I could not see anything that would keep me coming back. What kept me coming back to planetside was the search to get to the next level, and that my ‘group’ were always defending or attacking some island. You can check this on the website, so you see that were down to one base, and you can jump one, and its all action keeping the other guys away from your generator, or getting a new foothold somewhere else. I just could not see that in SWG. When I logged on, there was not much to do. I need to get experience surveying to move to the next level, a master Artisan, which meant I could move on to being a person who made weapons. What I could not get used it was the idea that you logged onto this virtual world and to do a real life job. I have a real life job. I very much on purpose made the choice not to be ! a carpenter or a plumber, not cos they are not good jobs, but cos I would have been crap at them! So why would I do them in a game! Maybe I should have realised that before I signed up, but it took an evening or two inside the game to realised that. If you don’t have weapons experience, you can’t get good guns, and can’t fire straight with crap one you have. I died one evening from a bloke standing still shooting me when I was dancing about. Now I’m not amazing at FPS type games, but I have been playing long enough to be able to shoot, and hit, a bloke standing still. But even though I had some kind of rifle shooting ‘laazzzzeerrr beeeeeeems’ and I did zero damage to him, and he killed me, even with my ‘uber’ armour. That’s just not fun, even if I’m at fault!
So I began the process of hooking up with the group of people whom teeth plays with, ‘The Knights of the Darkside’. His guild if you will. I got accepted for member ship, which was great, so they send me the ‘members manual’. I’m sorry, but that was the funniest document I have ever seen. It was full of, “if you see a person of a higher rank, in or out of game, you must stand to attention and salute them” and that kind of stuff. I just thought of Lurks walking into the Dickens and everyone at our table standing and saluting him as he walked in, like he was Colin Powel or something, and I have a good laugh to myself! They sounded like they really thought they were a real life army, stationed in downtown Iraq. I just don’t need that, even if its not serious, its clear a sizable number of group members feel like that, and indeed a lot of people playing the game who I met in game were like that, and that’s just not my bag, baby!
So for the last few nights I have been playing Rez again on my PS2, and believe it or not, testing bugs in CM0304 at home. Please god let Doom3 or Half Life 2 be fun, and have some kinda good group of people playing it.

Gmail [slim]

Whens the last time you changed your email habbits? It's been a while for me, probably when I installed the old rebecca mail client, which was the first I've ever seen with folder filtering. Filtering caused a small revolution in my email practice, but nothing much has changed since. Gmail, googles webmail service, might change that. There's two things that you've probably heard about gmail through the hype machine. First, it's got a 1gig capacity per user, so they say you don't have to worry about deleting shit. Second, it looks at your mail and links adverts to what you said, similar to the way the google search engine displays adds based on your search text. I'll take the second one first, as it's recieved the most bleating, but this isn't really a big deal. Sure, it has to read your mail to do that shit, but so does a spam blocker, and an email filter, so what? Second, as with google, the ads are very descreet text based things, and more often than not they're ! actually useful. I've picked up some links to bbc sites with background info to what I was discussing in email, and that's pretty cool.
It's the 1gb thing, which is gmails usp, that threatens to revolutionise email. That much storage is sweet, but won't it become a complete fuckaround to manage? Well, no, because they've written this very smart interface to make sense of it. What you do is create filters, kind of like you did with your old email client, but insead of sorting the emails, it just indexes it. Then when you click on your filters, you only view the mail that's been tagged as that type. Pretty smart, but then won't that take fucking ages? Well, I'd have thought so, but this is supposedly built with the quantum assmaster tech that google uses to search teh interweb, so they've probably got that sorted. Seems nippy enough so far, but I've only a few kb of email so far.
Next, and the really fucking smart bit is the way emails are displayed. They're chucked at you in threaded view, by subject. Big deal, even outlook does that right? Well no, this shows them all in sequence in one page, kind of like a forum, but it hides the ones you've already read. You can also nip into the thread and reply at any point, then it'll actually bung your reply in the correct place in the thread (not stuck away in the sent mail folder). It's really made reading mailing lists a fucking dream.
Oh, it's also got anti spam, a mail checker, and a typically google clean, fast and simple interface. The only shame of it all is that you've got to use google, and it's webmail only. You can't secure your mail yourself, or download it all to read offline, or back it all up. I'd love to be able to buy or download this software and run it against my own imap server, but I'm guessing it all needs some very evil shit running underneath it and isn't limited by shitty old mail protocols. Hopefully though developers will nob some of the ideas for implementation in existing webmail clients!