It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Tag: video games (Page 8 of 16)

Day 183: half done

August 13, 2009 / / 1 Comment

Every time I mention that my Xbox working, it breaks the next day. I shouldn’t have jinxed it yesterday. It appears my only recourse now may be purchasing a new one. Sigh. Or, I guess, selling all of my 360 games and being done with it forever. But we all know that’s not going to happen.

It’s also a big milestone: I passed my half birthday yesterday peacefully and this will mark over 50% of entries written for the year. Only 182 more entries to go!

I finished reading The Prestige tonight, after a riveting and fast-paced few days. I haven’t consumed a book like that since the Harry Potter series. It left me wanting to read more, which is all you can really ask from a book, really.

My hair is entering that weird mid-stage length where it’s not short enough to just leave alone in the mornings but not quite long enough to cut.

So, the question is…what should I read next? And how long can I wait until buying another 360? And has anyone hacked an original Xbox to put a different OS on it before? I’ve managed to acquire a free one in the past week.

Day 178: sadbox downdate

August 8, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Well, that was a fun 12 hours.

After playing several hours of games, including a good session of Mass Effect, my Xbox decided to bring out its old friend: E73.

Sigh. I’ll tackle it again tomorrow, although I’m still holding out hope that American Express comes through with their extended warranty. It looks like the options now are to do greater surgery/research or just bite the bullet and send it in to Microsoft and cough up the $100 repair fee.

It’s been a somewhat exhilarating and severely disappointing day, a roller coaster of Microsoft hardware emotion.

I also mowed the lawn, so it wasn’t a complete loss of a day.

Day 177: sadbox update

August 7, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I might have (finally) gotten a bit of good luck with the broken Xbox.  I managed to squeeze some pennies under the motherboard in the electric tape/12 penny trick that’s spread across some forums and Youtube videos.

This caused my completely dead box (E73) to switch errors to E74.  After a short intentional overheating, the machine started up again!  But…it would overheat nigh immediately (after less than a minute).  I would see the startup screen, the menu would load, then I’d get two blinking lights and a blank screen.

So now, my machine is running topless – everything is as attached as it can be when half of the cover is completely missing.  This solved the overheating problem.

That wasn’t all, though.  My DVD drive wasn’t functioning well – it would say “Open Tray” as the only option when a perfectly good game was in the drive.  I was able to open the drive up, adjust the laser’s position slightly and wipe a bit of the gunk that had somehow accumulated on the laser track.  After putting the drive back together and into the system, it seems to be working now.

So, my Xbox has no top cover, an extra 12 pennies wrapped in electrical tape iin the bottom, and a (temporarily) working but finicky DVD drive.  But I was able to get it all functioning (at once!) tonight and played several (disc-based) games successfully as well as watch a movie on Netflix Watch Instantly.

So, I’d call this a possibly temporary but definite victory.  Maybe all the havoc I put the internals of the system through will actually hold up.  Maybe.

In the meantime, I guess my gamertag is back online and I can finally participate in my co-worker’s Battlefield Wednesdays.

Day 172: so much done

August 2, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I did a lot today.

I ate a delightful German lunch in Alameda, visited a board game and video game store, defeated a titanic ant, beat up five policemen, and doomed the human race to a deadly pandemic.

I could use a nap. And some ice cream.

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