Craig's Musings

I was pretty excited at first about Feed Digest - it looked like a cool way to add access to my blogs easily to different web pages. But then the woes set in: if you delete a blog entry, FeedDigest remembers it. For the life of me, I can't figure out how/why - they must be keeping around historical data, because the atom.xml file doesn't have the deleted entries. And if you update an entry for any reason, it pops up as the most recent entry - again, I can't figure out how/why. And so I gave up.

My old profession to the rescue: I wrote some PHP that did exactly what I wanted - you can download the code if you can't help yourself. And I'm now inspired as to how to write a web based RSS/ATOM xhtml reader so that I can get at my favorite blogs via my phone's browser (I've been underwhelmed by the native & java apps I've found). More on that later, I hope.

Posted by Craig at 6:02 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

Okay, someone had to do it, and these folks did - they completely dissected a brand new Xbox. They have 11 or 12 pages of great pictures & info. Turns out the external harddrive has a standard 2.5" laptop drive inside, so I'll be upgrading mine to 120gb shortly :-). Hopefully the emulation goo that is sitting on the 20gb drive is easy to move over.

Posted by Craig at 12:08 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

Comments

Okay, I SWORE I wouldn't do it - I swore I wouldn't fall into the frenzy and buy one. As a testament to my success at not falling victim to the frenzy, I didn’t have one until the 23rd – I waited a whole day. I admit it, I was one of the idiots who waited until the end and then had to pay too much on eBay. The cool thing is that I won my bid at 4:10pm on the 22nd, and it was at my house at 10:50am the next day. The person that sold it to me should get a customer service medal.

The Xbox 360 really 3 devices in one – a gaming machine, a full fledged media extender and DVD player. So my media extender and DVD player were summarily dismissed from my home theater. Pretty cool, I add gaming to my setup and get to have one less device stacked up.

The wireless joysticks are great. I didn’t try to run them on AA batteries, I went straight for the rechargeable kit that also allows you to play while it recharges. I played both plugged in and wireless, and noticed no difference in the response. The joysticks have built in force-feedback as a way cool added bonus.

I hooked my Xbox up to my 50 inch Samsung DLP TV from a couple years ago. The TV only runs 720p (the new ones from Samsung run 1080p, I wish I could justify buying one). But 720p gaming is stunning, non-the-less.

A buddy of mine & I played with it yesterday evening, and we loved it. We started with Perfect Dark (a shooter) and loved the look and gameplay, but 40 year old nervous systems just don’t work with 12 separate control items and so we moved onto racing - Need for Speed something or other (This Time We go Extra, Extra Fast and are Extra, Extra Naughty or something like that), and it is unbelievably real.

HD gaming in the living room – I can’t go back to the old way, I won’t!

Posted by Craig at 4:08 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

Comments

I went and blinked this summer and missed the fact that 4GB SD cards hit the market in August. Not to be left in the digital dark age, I hurried off to ebay this morning and I found the A-Data 4GB SD card for about $260 bucks. Why was I up at this ungodly time looking on ebay? My boys decided that 4:45am was a good time to get up again. Anyway, $260 was a little steep to upgrade all my SD cards, but I did order one for my Nikon D50. The 2GB SD card I have in the D50 is good for about 550 pictures, which sounds like a lot but I hit the limit last weekend when I took my boys out. It shoots 2.5 FPS, and I like to shoot a lot of images as you never know when the perfect shot is going to occur. The new card should give me about 1100 shots, which seems (at this point, anyway) somewhat reasonable.

Not only is this little badboy 4GB, but it is 150X speed, which translates to about 20megabytes per second of transfer - in theory, I should be able to empty a full card in 3 1/2 minutes.

Posted by Craig at 6:07 AM | Permalink

Comments

I've been lugging around 3 of the 40GB ArchOS mini USB drives for a while now. I typically carry a bunch of ReplayTV shows & some movies, plus leave one mostly free for storing stuff - very handy for when I travel. But what is not handy is the fact that there are 3 of them and trying to remember what is where.

Technology to the rescue. For about the price I paid for one of the 40 gb drives a year ago ($250, but they are $199 MSRP, and about $180 street price now), I bought the Toshiba MK1233GAS 120GB ATA/100 2.5-in 4200RPM Mobile Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer and a little cool USB case, the Vantec NexStar 3 NST-260U2-BK External 2.5in Hard Drive Enclosure (Onyx Black). I always check between NewEgg and ZipZoomFly for the best prices (froogle searches invariably uncover one of those two as the lowest). This time, ZipZoomFly came in at $226 including free 2 day shipping, which beat NewEgg by over 30 bucks, so ZipZoomFly it was.

Together, the whole thing weighs 215 grams, vs 297 grams for the 3 ArchOS drives (and costs $226 vs about $550). So the total savings for this solution is about 25% off the weight and 59% off the price. I love Moore's law!

The case was super easy to use - pull the mounting board out, attach the drive with the 4 included mounting screws, slide it back in, and two screws seal it up. It comes with a cool dual USB to USB mini-B cable. If you have a drive that draws over 500 milliamps (this one draws 700 milliamps), you can plug the cable into a 2nd USB drive to get power. I have it on good authority that I can charge my SP5m phone using this cable and it will charge way faster, but I haven’t been brave enough to try that yet.

The only trick to getting the thing going is that it is unformatted, so you have to go into Administrative tools in the control panel, click into Computer Management then into Disk Management, and format the drive. Intuitive, yes?

Posted by Craig at 6:28 AM | Permalink

Comments