Xbox 360

So as many of you know, I acquired an Xbox 360 last Friday (tax returns don't ya' know?). I thought it might be appropriate to  jot down some of my impressions and thoughts. So, here's my 4 day review of the 360.

It's a nice piece of hardware. The dashboard and new Live services are particularly slick. I did something a bit odd, but I might recommend people try this out. I knew I was going to attempt to find one so earlier in the week I bought several games through Gamefly. Kameo, PGR3, and Dead or Alive 4 to be specific. So I didn't buy any games with the console. When I brought it home I had just the console. I hooked it up and logged into Live. I was able to download demos, a new trailer for Pixars Cars (in high definition, no less!), and buy a couple of Live Arcade games, all from the box. All told I had the console for about six hours before I even put a disc inside it. That's just plain cool.

The new mandatory Live support is very nice. You can always see your friends list, you can create a chat session with a friend that survives switching games, downloading stuff from the Arcade and so forth. The best feature of an Xbox 360 is custom soundtracks though. In any game you can punch the guide button, the game pauses and the dashboard comes up. There's some buttons there for friends and the like, but there's also media controls. You can pick out music and the game's music is mercifully shut off. I chortled with glee when I started the Burnout Revenge demo and the hated, awful EA Trax bullet came up telling me what crap it was going to start playing. I hit the Guide button and fired up some Beastie Boys instead. I win! Take that EA and your stupid music seletions!

But it gets better. There's some connection to Media Center or a Windows XP machine. I haven't gotten it to work on XP yet, but I did find some Mac software that emulates the features. It's called Connect360 and it's awesome. I installed it on my Mac and now my 360 can see all my iTunes playlists, and it can display iPhoto albums as a slideshow. So on my Mac I created a Playlist called "Racing Tunes" and I can select that from any 360 game and stream the audio from my Mac. Connect360 can't share the tracks from my iPod, but that's a minor grump. In theory I should be able to connect my iPod directly, but my iPod cables are firewire and I need to buy a USB cable.

I thought the launch lineup was sort of weak, but a bunch of stuff has come out for it recently, and the Live support seems to be everything I had hoped Xbox 1 would be. Of course, they were also impossible to find until recently, but apparently the supply lines have opened up. All in all I'm happy with the purchase and I expect to get a lot of enjoyment from it over the next few years.

I might write more about specific games in a future post - let me know if people have any interest. I also have rented Full Auto and intend to pick up Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter tomorrow.

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PSA

Hazard: The battery charger’s circuit board can overheat and cause its plastic cover to melt which poses a fire and burn hazard to consumers.

Power Brick Recall

If you own one of those external batteries for the PSP (the Pelican Power Brick) they are being recalled, apparently they can catch fire. The crummy thing is that there is no replacement battery, so you get to send it back and get other accessories, like a carrying case or the like.

 

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Fixing RSS Feeds

I've had a minor gripe that has been growing for quite some time. I don't like reading blogs via a web browser anymore - RSS is where it's at. I have a small collection of blogs that I didn't have a RSS feed for and I tossed those links into a Bookmark folder called Blogs. Every day or so I'd do an "open in tabs" on the Blogs folder and get as slew of tabs with these archaic blogs in them. However, lately it had been growing and Firefox got slower and slower to handle this operation. Today I declared I was going to "fix" it once and for all. I did so mostly - although I have a handful of blogs that simply don't HAVE a RSS feed. I suspect those are going to wither away though lack of caring on my part.

So, there were three main categories that were a problem.

1) Blogs that had RSS feeds but no visible link to them. In the html of the page they list a feed and Firefox finds that and gives me a cute little "Live Bookmark" icon in the address bar. The thing is I don't read RSS feeds in Firefox, I read them in NetNewsWire. Blogger.com sites seem to do this often. (I should not this is not the feed's fault - it's a design flaw in Firefox.)

SOLUTION: The Firefox Feed Your Reader extension. Now when I click that icon it tosses the feed over to my registered feedreader and life is good.

2) NetNewsWire doesn't like some Atom feeds (particularly only from Blogger.com or LiveJournal). I don't know why, they seem OK when I open them manually in a browser.

SOLUTION: If the url is in the format http://username.blogservice.com/atom try manually editing it to http://username.blogservice.com/rss - seems to work in every case.

3) I have friends who use LiveJournal to "lock" entries so their blog is only visible to authorized friends. I understand the motivation, but it's annoying because now to see them I have to open a web page and log into LiveJournal (which I don't use personally).

SOLUTION: Loosely based on the information here but slightly modified. The mechanism as  described is kinda cruddy, because you have to store your LJ password in a URL, presumably plaintext. In the case of NetNewsWire you can do better. Enter the following URL for the subscription http://www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/rss?auth=digest and obviously replace username with the LJ account you want to read. The first time NetNewsWire tries to access the feed it will pop up a dialog for a username and password. Give it your LJ account and it stores the password in the Apple keychain, where it is safely encrypted.

Those three tricks deleted 8 links from my "Blogs" folder - cutting it from 13 to 5 links. One of the cut links was the LJ "friends" page which was 5 other pages rolled together meaning I moved 12 blogs that  annoyed me a little every time I read them into RSS where they belong.

BONUS TIP: I have my feeds organized by topic mainly. So there's a folder for "Writing" a folder for "Games", a folder for "Tech Blogs" and so forth. I realized that this was slowing me down because there are several blogs that I only lightly skim. They are prolific (many entries per day) and low interest (in that I only read a small percentage of the entries on any given day). They still have value to check but I tend to blow through them much quicker than blogs where I want to read each entry. I realized today that this trips me up because one of those skimming blogs is in the Tech Blogs folder and gets mixed in with the other tech blogs so I have to shift back and forth between reading and skimming as I review entries.

No more! I moved all the "Skimmable" feeds into their own group at the bottom of the list. So Tech Blogs now contains tech feeds that I probably want to at least process the subject. Slashdot, Version Tracker, Netflix New Releases and other feeds that I only glance out quickly all go at the bottom and I can review dozens of entries just by scrolling the titles quickly. 

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BSG Season Finale - The Spoiler Talk

The comments on the last entry are turning into a mishmash of discussion of the show in general while trying to avoid spoilers and some tiptoing around the actual season finale discussion. I sent Weezie an email last night with more discussion but after some thought I want to have it as a blog discussion so others can participate. So I'm going to use a cut here and post my email after the cut. Consider this entire post and comment thread to be spoiler marked if haven't watched all of both seasons of Galactica. (Reminder, this was all originally written as an email to Weezie. It's basically a response to Weezie's second comment - about expecting one of the character changes. I also edited a character name misspelling that I didn't catch in my original email) So I'm guessing you're talking about Callie hooking up with Chief Tyrol as the change you'd been waiting for? I was fine with that, was expecting it to happen for a while as well. Ever since Tyrol hashed things out with Helo it's been time for Callie to make a move. Now, it would have been MUCH more interesting to see Tyrol decide whether take a chance on Callie under military hierarchy - after he got busted for messing with a superior officer he would switch gears to a direct report. So in that sense I'm a little disappointed at a missed opportunity, but no big deal. So as for changes I thought were unsupported the absolute biggest one is Starbuck becoming some sort of Russian tent-wife character. It's out of character for her to muster out and become a civilian, it's out of character for her to just tool around the surface, seeming idle except for trying to take care of her man. Ugh. There was some sort of implied fight between her and Apollo, so perhaps they will later explain that, but I generally won't buy it. She wouldn't have gone groundside until forced to, and even if she pissed Lee off, she should be stationed on Galactica. Having her lead the resistance will be interesting - but they could have gotten the exact same thing by having her visiting the surface on leave, and not had any dissonance on her character. I don't think it's in character for Tyrol to be a union organizer. I don't have a major issue with him being on-planet although I'd contend he should be part of Adama's skeleton staff. He's already escaped punishment once because he was too critical to replace, why wasn't that true now? But perhaps Callie's pregnancy forced him dirtside . . . I'd give them benefit of the doubt on this if he was my worst objection. Much of the same is true of Gaeta turning civilian and working for Baltar (he's what - some sort of Chief of Staff now?) He had seemed to be disillusioned with Baltar over recent episodes, and seemed fiercely loyal to Adama. OTOH, he had expressed some dislike of being in the military, so maybe he'd take the out. I think it's impossible that Baltar wouldn't have taken a more substantial revenge on Rosslyn. In general I think they had built a FASCINATING crisis point up with the Rosslyn rigging the election and being caught by Gaeta & Adama. Rosslyn was in the wrong, but at the same time knew the survival of the Fleet was at stake. Dualla and Tigh were both guilty of complicity and betraying everything they fight for - it was a very charged complex situation. Which they then threw away to jump ahead a year. Dualla seemed to escape any sort of censure. That post I linked to described Season 2 BSG as "a show that constantly walks right up to the line, looks at it, looks at the viewer, and backs away again." I think the election is exactly that. They walked up to the line, looked at it, and backed away from addressing what happened in any meaningful way. Exactly the same way they backed away from the line after setting Cain and Adama at each other's throats. Even if they go back and revisit the aftermath next season it won't be as powerful. I like the resistance idea somewhat (although it seems a lot like a rehash of the Caprica storyline), but I think they rushed through a powerful and unique plot to set up boilerplate Sci-Fi plot trope #38 - human resistance versus alien occupation. Hang on, I think Tom Cruise and the Scientologist are on line one with that story. Oh, and don't forget it's fused with pulp boilerplate #15 - Mars Needs Women!
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