Zibblog

At some point, Leslie and I got seriously hooked on Naruto. So hooked that we had a weekend (Friday night to Sunday night) of watching about 35 episodes (I dare you to start watching the end of the Chunin exam and stop watching before the end of the Konoha Invasion arc). Anyway, I had downloaded a whole lot of fan subbed episodes and was just playing them on a TV using my laptop. This wasn’t a horrible solution, but it was far from optimal. After doing some reading, I realized that I could run xbox media center if I hacked my xbox. Since I assumed I was going to get an XBox 360 when Halo 3 came out, I figured I had nothing to lose.

The constraints on the project were that I didn’t want to purchase anything for the hacking (at some point, I bought an IR receiver for the xbox, but I decided that didn’t count). What I found out is that there were 2 ways to mod an xbox to run your own software: softmod or mod chip. Mod chips are fairly cheap and come in the solderable (the cheapest) and unsolderable (maybe $10-$15 more expensive), but I figured I’d try and softmod. Softmods have come a long way and are fairly easy. Most of them are buffer exploits that get installed as sounds or something else similar. The main problem is getting them onto the xbox. There are about 3 games that you can try and find that will (along with a suitable cable that you can buy or make from an xbox controller and a usb cable) allow you to use game save hacking to mod the xbox.

If you don’t want to try any of those, you can try and put the data on the hard drive yourself. The main problem is that the hard drive is locked until it receives an unlock command from the xbox and becomes locked again when it loses power. It’s possible to find the mod files and create a linux boot cd that will do the job for you if you get the hard drive unlocked. The “recommended” way to do this is to take the top off of the xbox near your computer, start the xbox, and at some point after you get to the main screen, disconnect the ATA cable from the hard drive (while it is still running) and connect the drive to an ata cable from your computer. At this point, you power up the computer and use the linux distribution to put the files on the drive.

It sounds kind of crazy and has a small chance of frying your hard drive, but I got it all to work and can now access and play all the media files off of any computer on the network. What’s nice about it is that it can understand all the IR commands if you get the xbox remote kit. It took a little while to find all of the files I needed, but it’s an easy enough project to complete in a weekend and you have a “free” media center pc without tivo functionality.

I meant to post this a long time ago but never quite got around to it. This will probably be a trend for the next few posts as I try and get out at least one a week.

In January of 2006, there were two products at CES that caught my eye. At the time, I was sure that the sony reader (wikipedia) would make it out before the series 3 tivo, but that was not the case and the tivo is now sitting happily in my entertainment center. After a couple of delays, the Sony Reader made it out in time for xmas and I’ve had one for a little less than a year now, during which there haven’t been any hardware updates other than the occasional firmware. If you want to stop reading here, the main takeaway is that I love it and think that it is one of the most useful gadgets since the ipod nano.

The Pros

• The screen is eInk and is really easy on the eyes. It looks like the output from a dot-matrix printer on plastic. You really have to see one in person to get a good idea of how it looks.
• Because the screen doesn’t need power to keep an image, the battery life on it is really nice. On a trip to mexico for a week, I read 3 books and used half a charge.
• Sony actually built a device that will also take SD cards. In a similar show of openness, RTF is really well supported as a document type and is what I use since it supports reflowing of the document as you change the font size.
• I can throw it in my bag and know that I always have at least one book with me that I want to read. I currently have something like the top 30 books that I want to read next on it.
• The sony ebook store is actually pretty good. There’s been some titles that I can’t find, but I usually have so many books that I could be reading that it isn’t an issue. For example, recently I bought and read Patriot Acts only a couple of weeks after it came out in hardcover.
• Since PDF doesn’t reflow, it’s hard to get PDF looking good on the device unless you are constructing the PDF yourself for the screen size. I had some programming books that I’d bought in PDF that were almost unreadable since they were formatted for letter size paper.

The Cons

• The screen could be a little bigger. Mostly, I like that the device is pretty small, but a little extra screen real estate could go a long way.
• You’re stuck with whatever books you can either find unDRMed (I recommend Baen’s online bookstore) or whatever you can find on the sony store since the hardware and software don’t support the same format that Amazon uses.
• The support software (the iTunes like app for ebooks) is pretty crappy. You have a lot of control over what gets onto the reader, but not a lot of ability to have it do things for you automatically (like transfer books after you import or buy them). There’s a lot of places where they should have just copied iTunes but either couldn’t or didn’t. The software on the reader is pretty straightforward. The only big issue is trying to categorize books if you want to throw a large library on a memory card.

It sounds like pretty soon Amazon will come out with something that will also be wifi enabled but if you travel and read a lot (or just don’t want to lug around a bunch of books), the reader is not too bad for $280.

For a while, one of the big projects at work has been the instant viewing feature for the Netflix website, which involves serving up high quality streaming video realtime to PCs. After having to be pretty careful about what I say about video on the computer for the past few months whenever the subject comes up in conversation, the feature is finally out in the open. There’s isn’t much to say that isn’t in the press release. I’ve been working on web applications for long enough that I’ve forgotten about how much trouble client applications are. Here’s some links to some mentions of the feature. I’ve been fairly happy with the articles so far.  I’ve also been kind of irritated here and there, but they can’t all be positive. I just can’t wait until I hear from a friend that happened to be included in the rollout, so that I can get a trusted third party opinion.  For all you Mac and Firefox people (which includes me), you’re out of luck for the moment at least since the feature requires IE and Windows.

• Hacking Netflix
• NY Times
• Variety
• Forbes
• Gizmodo
• O’Reilly Radar

Netflix’s CEO is going to be on 60 minutes tonight for anyone interested.  They shot some footage at work awhile back, but I had almost forgotten about the whole thing until an email went out a couple of days ago.

For anyone interested, I thought I’d post my experiences with the series 3 after about a week of playing with it. I’d forgotten just how old of a software version I was on with the series 1. The new software has some nice features like having folders by show in the now playing list. I kind of like having another folder with the HD shows grouped together. The guide data looks nicer than it used to and there is a little HD icon if you are flipping through looking for HD or just wondering if that show coming on at 10 is in HD. The other feature that will be nice is the ability to simply clip off the first or last couple of minutes of a show if there is a slight overlap. Somewhere after software version 3 they introduced it and I’ve been sol in terms of software updates since then.

I’m looking forward to playing around with the online features when my account gets sorted out. There were some issues transferring my lifetime membership to the series 3. Currently, customer support says that they are convinced that everything is fine for the service transfer offer, but their computer system still needs some convincing.

The main reason I wanted the series 3 was for recording HD content, so on Monday I scheduled by cablecard install from Comcast. Until then, I decided to see if I could get over the air digital working so that I could get HD that way. I got a $20 Terk antenna at Fry’s just to see if it would work, and I was pretty impressed. I had to go through some of the guided setup of the tivo again to enable the cable channels, but after that, I was flipping through them just fine. There are a few channels like the CW and alternate KQED digital channels that I’ll probably leave enabled since comcast doesn’t carry them. The tivo has a screen to show you the signal strength of the channels as you flip through them so that you can see if they might cut out. The one irritating thing is that there seemed to be no way to disable channels from the channel list while you were viewing the signal strength. I had to just write them down and then go in and change the list later. Out of about 30 – 40 digital channels that tivo had guide data for, I could probably receive 15 and actually cared about 10. After all was said and done, I recorded Smallville, CSI, and some other shows in HD, and they all came out looking great. The odd thing is that the channels seemed to go off during the day but were back on by primetime.

During the day today, I got the cablecards installed. I had read about people having some bad experiences, so I was prepared for the worst. Both of the cards that the tech brought with him worked in the end, but it took him about 2 hours and a lot of sitting around before he could get it working. In the end, he had a lot of conversations with someone at comcast about the fact that the cards were going into a tivo that involved him saying HD and tivo a lot.

From what I’ve seen, the feature set is really similar to the HD DirectTivo that came out a long time ago (at least, it seems like a long time ago to me). The series 3 has a cool little display on the front and has more network features enabled, but the only big differences I can see are the CableCard instead of DirectTV, the THX certification, and the eSATA back connector that will probably be enabled for storage expansion at some later date. If you’ve already got the HD DirectTivo, I don’t think you have any reason to be really envious, but I couldn’t find anything that should prevent someone from spending the money if they’ve got digital cable (other than the paying the high early adopter cost).