2 weeks ago
Category Archives: Tech
Kinect and XBox 360 – RROD
Sooo, For Christmas, I bought an XBox360 Kinect thingie along with Dance Central and the Fitness One. It arrives and I wrap it up as a gift to give my son. Christmas comes and he opens all the gifts and is excited to try it out. Later that evening we get a chance to try it.
I plugged it in, connected everything and turned on the unit. I didn’t expect it to do anything yet, and I wasn’t disappointed. I knew it had to download an update since it didn’t come with software. It didn’t seem to want to update on its own, so I put in one of the Kinect Games and sure enough, it informed me I needed to update. I hit yes and let it do its thing. After 3 or 4 or 5 cycles through its update process it rebooted 1 or 2 times and then it started its setup and adjustments…asking me to do certain things. At one point it asked me to confirm or cancel and I couldn’t get the Kinect to do either and then it froze.
Hunting for a GPS?
I recently decided to buy a GPS for my car so I can get even worse at remembering directions! I did find a great deal on a good one. It is a Garmin nüvi 760
and it has several cool features.
- It has Bluetooth – so when your phone is near the GPS, calls are received through that and keeps you from having to find your phone and answer it which could lead to you having an accident.
- It can play through your radio using an FM transmitter. It also has an SD card slot and 440 MB of memory, so you can use it as an MP3 player.
- It receives constant traffic updates and will automatically adjust your trip to get around the problem areas. You can tell it not to of course.
This model is usually $400 but Amazon.com has it for $199. I had no trouble setting it up, entering addresses is simple, adding waypoints to stop on your trip is easy. Finding a restaurant, gas, or store is very simple.
One thing I did get for it was a few new voices. It comes with several good ones to begin with, and they are TTS, which means it will read all the street names and location names. I found a place called Pigtones. While these voices are meant to be funny, they are not worth the price. I downloaded GlaDOS – the computer voice from Portal, thinking it would be humorous. It does sound like her, but she says nothing funny, and all the voices you buy there are Not TTS – so you only get turn right at next exit, recalculating, arriving at destination. It is cool for like 1 day and then it loses its charm. I bought 3 others that are not great also. I feel I wasted my money – at $12-$13 a voice – it is not close to being worth it, plus you can only have ONE of those voices on at a time because it overwrites the plain voice on your unit. If you want to get a strange voice – get the free on from Garmin – Elfrod – it is supposed to be one of santas elves, and he says some witty things now and then.
If you think it is time to get a GPS – Click Here
The MacBook…
So, I now am an owner of a Mac. It is cool. Nice and compact, portable. Nice tools which I haven’t really gotten to play with. I did put WoW, on it – they have a Mac version, and it works just fine so far. I havent raided with it, but normal running around didn’t seem laggy at all.
Nice to watch movies on. Sit on the sofa and explore the net while watching TV. I started to reteach myself HTML… I taught myself way long ago, and have no idea how to use CSS so I thought I would relearn the right way.
Bit the Bullet and Ordered a Mac
I’ve always been tempted to get a Mac. Last year when my computer went died on me, I almost got one…even applied for Apple’s Credit Card. But instead I fixed it myself and it worked. The thing I miss though is being able to sit on the couch and use my laptop. I still have my old one but it got messed up when I wiped the drive and the original recovery disks didn’t work. I bought an Alienware laptop…top of the line, thinking it would be the best thing in the world. It was nice, but had it’s flaws like getting way too hot all the time, and the battery would just die within an hour and a half. I wrote to Alienware to see if they would help and no one ever got back to me. They got my money, so i’m no good to them I guess.
ANYWAY, I was in one of my impulsive buying moods and peeked at the Mac Air. After reading about it, it seemed a little too underpowered. I like to play online games and that just wouldn’t work well. I would liove to have gotten a MacBook Pro, but I didnt want to invest that much money for something I really don’t need! So, I went for the simple MacBook bottom of the line with 4 GB ram. WOOT, My first MAC! I should arrive on March 3rd. Ordered an Airport Extreme for it so I can walk around with it and my iPod Touch.
So, all you Mac users out there…tell me some fun stuff I can do with this new toy! Like show movies on my tv? Cook dinner for me? Pull weeds? Fill me in on some geeky things to do with it!
Blow by Blow….
6:15 PM EST: Arrived home to find a box on my front porch. Assumed it wasn’t dangerous and held the door open with one foot and grabbed the box with my right hand while holding keys, Ipod, and my cell in the other.
6:17 PM EST: Air conditioning turned on, kicked off shoes. Proceeded to open the box which contained a new power supply for my dead computer along with a brain upgrade.
6:19 PM EST: Prepped the operating table by putting two mouse pads down and then placed the patient on said mouse pads in a way to reveal the supposed infected power supply. No need to remove the outer side shell as I never can get it to stay on, so I leave it off.
6:21 PM EST: Removed the new power supply from the box that was inside the box that was on my porch. It looks very similar to the infected one…only difference being that all the wires of the new one are all in separate bags! I must build the maze of wires! But first….I will individually label every wire on the existing power supply explaining where I disconnected it from.
6:49 PM EST: Patients main power supply has been removed – while removing all its workings, I noticed more and more how dissimilar it is the the new heart of the system. Lets hope the “Customizable” power supply has the proper wire configurations in the sealed bags which I have not looked at yet. So much for read instructions first…but, there were none…were there?
I have no one to wipe my brow 
7:20 PM EST: Turn on test fails – but at least it beeped. When I tried to trouble shoot it before – I bypassed the power button in case that was broken. Im going to fix that again….TAPE!
7:30 PM EST: Ok – now all fans turn on – But I get a long single beep over and over – nothing shows up on the monitor. Looking up BEEPS on the web to see which beep I have!
8:29 PM EST: Wiggled, took stuff out, put it back in, switched wires….fans run, memory is all lit up…no monitor though…just the long single beep which my user guide says there is a table below about Bios beeps on page 40, but there is no table about beeps in the book at all.
FAILURE
Guess it goes to a stranger now, to make it unsick.
8:10 PM EST the next day: I came home and switched the places of my memory….nothing…then put them back and shoved them in hard! TADA! it runs! Still don’t know if it is 100% unsick – but it is 98% unsick! WOOT!