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Good progress on Chipping the 360, and some site maintenance (we’re changing tags!)

Thursday, June 15th, 2006
Team Underdog NME-360 DVD Firmware Patch Mod

>> From gamefreax.de (translated from german):
Right now the dual-firmware mods coming out for the Xbox 360 DVD drives are 30+ wire solutions. These points are not only very hard to solder, but it also requires a lot of known-how to extract the FW from the drive, extract the key, patch, encrypt, write back, install external switch on Xbox 360 so you can switch between the 2 firmwares, etc …We received interesting information about a new DVD mod named NME-360, that will be released soon. This chip will be a universal chip for all Xbox360 DVD drives. It will patch the firmware of the drive on-the-fly. The original firmware on the flash of the drive remains untouched.The chip will recognize independently whether an original or a backup was inserted and switches itself to the corresponding mode (patched FW (on-the-fly) for backups and the normal unpatched FW for originals). That also means you will not have to install an external switch on your Xbox 360 to put the chip off.For the Toshiba-Samsung drive you will have to solder only 4 wires, the Hitachi-LG drive will require 11 wires. The official website of the team, named ‘Team Underdog’, will be launched early next week.News-Source: gamefreax.deDiscuss this news item on our forums: forums.xbox-scene.com(Wednesday 14 June 2006 22:14 EST) - (direct link to article)(Posted by:: XanTium)

Xbox-Scene.com - Xbox 360

Yep, you read that right. There’s a cool chip coming out for the 360 that will AUTOMAGICLY switch to the best DVD firmware for the job. Now, we still can’t run unsigned code (though Devil360.com is working on that), but it’s still a good step toward it, and running backups is no small matter in households with little children (I’m talking to you, Matt).

Now, about that site maintence, first I’ll mention: I’m posting this with the integrated posting tool in Flock. Now, I’ve spoken about Flock before, so I won’t go into the specifics here. Suffice it to say, Flock is now in Beta, and it’s now looking better then ever. There are still a few bugs to be worked out (ok, a crap load), but hey, what do you want? It’s free, OSS, and it’s pretty well integrated. My bigest complaint so far is that I’m not too impressed with it’s integrated blog posting tool, but hey, it’s still being cooked. :)

And as for tags, I’m changing them. Until Blogger decides to support them natively (or until I switch over to another framework), they’re just not worth the hassle. I’ll leave all the old ones (not worth the effort, they are kinda cool), but I just think it’s keeping me from posting more (they’re a pain to set up manualy). So I’ve decided to just let Flock’s integrated tagger do the work for me! Yay!

Oh, and any of you out there with lots of pictures of family, friends, etc., check out Riya.com. It’s got this crazy face recognition tech that enables you to upload bajillions of pics and only have to waste time picking out faces of a few before it figures it out on it’s own (mostly).

Ok, that’s all for today. Thanks for reading!

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Blogged with Flock

PS3 is ripping off Nintendo’s Wii, AND the Xbox 360!

Monday, May 8th, 2006

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DUDE! Sony just revealed their New Controller, and it’s a total rip off of the Wii Controller. It’s got “6 degrees of motion” which means it can detect pitch, yaw, and roll. Pfftt. It’s a BAD implimantation of what the Wii can do. Check out the Digg Post on the matter to see more info on it.

And the part about a 360 rip? They’ve got a “PS3″ button right where the “Live” button is on the 360 controller. I’m sorry, but that’s just sad. More so when you realize that Sony bashed Nintendo for their use of Motion Senseing as “Gimicky” last year.

They might just as well have called it the PS36ii. But hey, that’s just what I think. What I wanna know is what do YOU think? Then we know what Wii think, and that’s what matters.

Not drunk anymore (FINALLY!), Xblog, CL2…

Sunday, April 30th, 2006

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Ok, so I’m not drunk now. Sweet. I’m friggin’ glad. I’m not sure the drinkie is so hot for me. :D

But, in other notes, MY XBOX 360 CAN BLOG! Granted, it has a boring life (I almost never get to play) but it’s a cool concept none the less. Check out it’s blog at 360Voice.com. It should be pretty cool.

Also, many of you might know that Google.com came out with Google Calendar, a REALLY neat companion to Gmail. It’s a standard style calendaring application, but it’s integration and ease of use really seem to set it apart from the flock.

Ok, that’s all I got for now. Have a good one, everyone!

Finaly, some MAJOR progress! Full read/write access on the 360!

Monday, February 13th, 2006

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The fine folks over at Xbox Scene have brought us good news: we’re one step closer to sweet, sweet, hacked 360. We’ve got FULL READ/WRITE ACCESS TO THE HARD DRIVE AND THE MEMORY CARDS!!! That’s full game save portability (anyone out there have saves from their old Xbox?), and I assume music and video portibility (though that’s just a guess). I can’t wait to see what we come up with in the next few months!

read more | digg story

OK! Long time no see…

Sunday, February 12th, 2006

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Good golly, I’m sorry I haven’t been around for a while. I’ve been busy with college and I’ve been busy with work and THEN there’s our beautiful baby boy Matthew, so as you can see I’ve been a bit busy.

As I write this, I’m not using the included word processer in Blogger, but instead a much better replacement to Notepad, called Notepad2. It’s just as quick, almost as small, and (the programmer in me LOVES this), it supports Syntax Highlighting. Coolness. Oh, and I THINK it’s OSS to boot. At the very least, I KNOW it’s freeware. Good stuff.

Now, I know many of you are looking for more pics of Matt-i-chew. Well, I assure you we have them; I just gotta put them up.

So, how about that Xbox 360, eh? I have GOT to log more time on that bad boy. It’s sad, but about all I get is five or ten minutes a week (no joke!) to fool around with one of the Arcade titles (such as Marble Blast Ultra or the ever uber Geometry Wars). 3 processers, half a gig of ram, 20 gig HDD, and what do I do? I play a glorified Marble Madness. :D

Family life is fun, if stressful. I swear to god, I don’t know how single moms do it. I’m not even a mom, and I’m going insane. It’s crazy. Pure and simple.

I dream sometimes of making a game. It’s never going to happen at this rate, but it’s still nice to dream about it. I can’t help but wonder where I’ll be in five or ten years. I hope I’m filty rich and no longer working. :D

Gah. MUST UPDATE BLOG MORE OFTEN!!!

Found a neato little visual style for XP. Doesn’t require a program to install, but you DO need a hacked version of the uxtheme.dll file found in (assuming you have your main Windows install on your C: drive) “C:\Windows\system32\uxtheme.dll“.To get the patched version, just google for “patched uxtheme.dll“. After you have it, you can just copy it over your old one (I’d make sure to save a copy of the old one though), and reboot. Oh, and Windows may mention that a system file is being overwritten or something. Just “OK” it when it comes up.

All that work for a cool theme! It’s the Crystal XP Milk visual style. I REALLY like it. It’s a free download, and I think you’ll be pleased too. Check

Have I ever mentioned how huge of a fan of Gmail I am? I REALLY like it. Now they’ve gone and made it EVEN MORE COOL! They have a great new service where they’ll be rolling out Google Talk funcionality RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX!!! I, for one, think that is UBER SWEET! Anyone who want’s a gmail invite, just lemme know in the comments (or follow my email link over on the side of the screen). I’ve got a butt load to give out!

Wow. This is weird. I went to log into blogger, and someone, somehow, had posted spam as a actual blog post in MY BLOG! I’m not sure how (I use an alphanumeric password over 6 characters in length), but that is WEIRD. Has this ever happend to anyone before? It was saved as a draft, and it’s clearly Spam (though I’m not gonna post it, becuase I assume that would only make whoever it is happy). The listed email in the post is to HowdSeamGr@aol.com. Huh. This is weird. I’m gonna have to start hosting my own soon, maybe…

UPDATE: Ok, I think this happened because blogger has this feature that allows you to update by email, and I think some spammer just got lucky and spammed the email address I had set up for this site. Thank god I didn’t have it set to autopost :D . At any rate, I’m calling this case closed!

Ok, this has been long enough, I think. I’ll end by saying that when I hear anything cool about anything, I’ll try to make time to post. Oh, and I’ll hopefully be posting MUCH more when I’m finaly out of college, but we’ll see. :D

Thanks for reading!