As part of my University course, I’ve had to produce a lesson plan. A seemingly simple task that needs to be done before each lesson I’ll be teaching. I think it took me about an hour and a half or so. It’s not that it’s difficult, it’s just time consuming producing everything that I would need, were this a real lesson.

Not to worry, when I go back to school on Tuesday I’ll be doing them for real. Hopefully after making a few it should get easier and I’ll churn them out quicker.

After visiting Retrovision in Oxford last weekend, I decided buying an original XBox was a good idea. Following from this I also decided buying a modchip and installing it myself would be a good laugh. Well I managed to solder it in myself without destroying anything or burning myself. I did a practise solder on an old hard drive PCB and found it wasn’t so bad attaching wire to tiny surface-mount components.

Naturally, when it came to the real thing my hands were wobbling all over the place and I had to go and do something else for five minutes. Maybe this is what surgeons feel like the first time they chop someone open

It’s not until you need to solder a PCB that you realise just how small the stuff on one is. Yes, I know we’re not supposed to be soldering onto PCBs that have been produced in a clean environment with precision tools that need resetting if there’s so much as a loud cough in the room, but it’s like they don’t want us attaching bits of random circuitry to our electronics

I have to say, XBMC is an excellent piece of software. It really is. It does everything I wish the 360’s dashboard did. I have no idea why Microsoft didn’t implement Windows File Sharing for playing music off a remote computer. Using a non-standard version of UPNP is really really dumb. What’s the point of a supposed media player if it won’t work with anything but XP Media Centre?

Oh sorry, this is Microsoft we’re on about… forgot that part didn’t I :-/

The stupid electricity meter is down to 90p. I’ll have to go and buy some more tomorrow. I can’t wait until we’re properly set up with our new supplier, they can then come round and remove this antequated method of paying.

During the past week this place has gone from a couple of rooms with our stuff piled in to somewhere we can sit and watch TV while eating our tea. The BT man came to put a phoneline in, I’ve moved most of my contact details for all the banks and places to this address. I even have my fishtank set up (minus the fish, the water needs time to settle first). The only thing missing is my ADSL, I have to wait until sometime next week for them to begin moving that.

And I have no money left. It’s all gone, spent it on “stuff” - everything from a giant TV aerial, plants, washing machine pipes, pots, pans, lightbulbs, and a rather nice stand to put my fishtank on. Fortunately the first installment of my student loan comes on Monday and I’ll also be applying for the training bursary. Once those payments start coming in I can begin to predict how much money I won’t have at the end of each month.

I can’t decide which I want more - an XBox 360 or a Freeview box with HDD. Having watched Freeview I could quite happily live without the ability to timeshift and record things, it’s repeated so much anyway that missing a program isn’t a big deal. Then again, I have six games consoles already, surely another one won’t make a difference (but this one plays pretty images when playing music! it has more modern games! I won’t have to power up my PC to listen to music! etc… etc…).

The washing machine leaks from its waste hose where I attempted to connect it back together and the Freeview signal isn’t great, it drops out every so often. Never mind, this is the beginning.

My consoles look neat and tidy and it’s my aim that the back also looks neat and tidy. There’s not going to be a rats nest of wires this time, it’s going to be neat. Speaker wire will be neatly attached to skirting boards out the way and other wires will be wrapped up and hidden.

Or that’s the plan. I had to resolder all the connectors on two SCART->Phono leads before I could do anything. The first one was a bit of a botched attempt with blobby bits of solder everywhere. By the time I’d finished the 9th one they were getting neater. I’m not quite up to soldering surface-mount stuff, but I can at least get the solder to stick to the wires rather than make little balls on my desk.

Talking of my desk I have no idea what to do about it. It’s a right mess and is in the wrong place. The speaker in the corner gets in the way. I need to sit down and work it out.

Tomorrow is my last day here. There’s then just three weeks of torture waiting to finish. Hopefully the time will fly and I won’t be sat counting the days too much. Having a house and stuff is much more interesting than living in a single room.

A while ago I bought a TV card for my laptop. The idea being I could connect my Nuon to my laptop and not need a crap NTSC converter or TV. Making the card work sufficiently well in Windows was a nightmare. It either dropped loads of frames, had poor audio output or randomly paused for no sane reason. Making the card work in Linux seemed quite hard so I gave it no more thought until last week when I was home.

After some help from the Video4Linux mailing list (like which card I should tell the driver I own) I had the card recognised, initialised and displaying random images and snatches of sound. It was crazy. I could plug my Playstation in, see the startup images and hear the sound, but as soon as something like Wipeout loaded the screen went black and that was it. If I then unplugged the video lead and wiggled it in its hole I could see random frames of video. Quite what was happening is beyond me, surely if it works with one game it should work with them all.

I’ve just now connected my Nuon to it and was greeted with glorious colourful NTSC and sound. Unlike Windows, the sound doesn’t skip, there’s no weird crackling sounds and the video doesn’t stop. Something’s not right if 3rd party drivers for an OS that isn’t supported by the manufacturer work better than the manufacturer’s own drivers for their only supported OS.

I am now “testing” the card some more

I could do the expensive and daft thing of buying an XBox360 to get Neon, but the XBox would have to become insanely cheap first. I think I’ll wait for the PC version of Neon to come out and see if my laptop can handle it. If not, by then I should be able to afford a new PC.

This weekend I spent a rather pleasant time in London meeting various people from the Llamasoft forum. It’s been ages since I did this and it was nice to catch up with people again. In fact, the last time I met everyone in London was October 2002 when we went to the Game On exhibition. Back then we sat around in the Wellington (opposite Waterloo Station) drinking and playing on various bits of tech we’d brought along. GBAs, Palm PDAs and Pentium 2 laptops were the “in” thing at the time. This time it was almost the same, just upgraded a bit more. We had Nintendo DSs instead of GBAs, Tapwave Zodiacs and funky Nokia PDAs instead of Palms, and a Pentium 4 laptop with enough grunt to play Doom 3 without breaking into a sweat.

We still sat in the same pub and talked babble at each other, just like before The topic of last time’s babble was Jeff’s top secret project that would later become Unity. The topic of this time’s babble was Jeff’s top secret project that turned out to be the XBox 360’s audio visualisation program Neon, and the rather nice version he’s been making on the PC.

You can plug a webcam into it and have the camera’s image turned into part of the light show. Point the camera at the screen and you get feedback with feedback drawn on it which looks quite odd While playing with this, random members of the pub would walk past and go “what the hell is that thing?!” and once given the controller would sit mesmerised for a while before walking off slightly confused looking

My journey began, as it aways does, at Manchester Piccadilly. The train was on time, and nobody was sat in my seat. Two and a half hours later I was in London. This is pretty amazing considering it used to take four hours. They’ve finally created a tilting train that really does tilt, and it’s quite an odd experience feeling it lean over going around bends.

Once in London I hid all my tech in my pockets, took a firm hold of my bag and entered the Underground. London Bridge was my destination as I’d found a hostel within walking distance of the Welly. Just before I got off the tube a homeless bloke stood up and started giving this long explanation of how we had money, he didn’t, and how he’d very much like us to give him some before he gets angry. Deciding I didn’t want to, I got off at my stop. Other people though began putting their hands in their pockets and bringing out change! What is wrong with you people? The days of highway robbery are over, you can just say “no, piss off”.

Anyway, I found the hostel and entered the slightly bizarre booking-in procedure that involved walking further up the road to another building, checking in there, then walking back down the road to the hostel itself. For some reason the reception is separate to the rooms. In my room were some other people who’d spread their stuff (and a bottle of Baileys or something equally nasty) all over the floor. I kicked it out the way and made myself some room, claimed my bed and put things on charge.

After unpacking and letting things charge up I went off to the Welly to find people. Not really being able to remember the way, other than it was to the left if I looked at the river, I decided to take the path that goes along the river. This has to be about the only scenic bit of London really, with all the Christmas lights and other lights from the buildings it looks quite pretty.

I was the first to arrive, which is funny considering I had the furthest to come, so I sat around waiting for people to arrive. By about half six there was a small group which eventually turned into eleven. A table was invaded and the previously mentioned geekery and talking ensued, only to be broken around nine by us piling out the place to go and get a curry.

The curry house under the bridge said we’d have to wait an hour and a half which seemed a bit absurd. In a general confusion the eleven of us picked a random tube station that “should contain a curry house near it” and we went off to ride the tube (which this time didn’t have any crazies on it demanding money…). We had a good sense of direction it seems since once out the station, a short walk up the road produced a big glowing neon sign saying “Indian Food”.

After the curry we went back to the Welly and piled into Jeff’s room. Eleven easily fits in these small hotel rooms, sixteen being the record from last time. No loud swearing this time though, but plenty of XBox action. I had a go with Neon (I don’t want a 360, I’ll wait for the PC version… by then I’ll have enough money to buy a PC good enough to run it), played a bit of Geometry Wars and watched other people play some of the other release games. By 4am it was time to go to bed.

Hooray for drunk people… I quietly crawled into my bed and tried to get to sleep. I was almost at a stage where the smell of the room and the sound of people snoring wasn’t cutting through my brain when click! some cretin turns the light on. It was six AM! I’d been asleep for two hours and didn’t appreciate being woken up! I went off for a pee and noticed my jacket had gone for a walk. It wasn’t on the floor it wasn’t under the bed… where had it gone?! Deciding someone had either nicked it or it was just lying somewhere I’d not noticed, I went back to sleep until at 8 the cretins woke up again, waking me in the process.

That’s when I noticed the person across on the other bed from me was wearing my jacket… cheeky sod! Her (it was a mixed dorm) companion seemed reluctant to remove it from her, but he muttered something about something and went out the room. He returned sometime later, packed stuff (I watched him with some interest making sure none of my stuff was getting packed) and woke her up. I eventually got my clothing back which wasn’t an all together unpleasant experience give she didn’t have much on underneath it and was too hung over to notice I was there.

I woke up again at 12, feeling rather ropey and went to find a toilet that wasn’t blocked, and a shower that was working. After that we all met up again at the Welly and went off into town to walk around an look at the shops.

Regent Street was heaving. Every shop was packed… except the Gizmondo store which was completely empty. The Apple Store was an interesting place. I turned my Zodiac on and asked it to find all bluetooth devices in the area. After a minute’s scanning, 50-odd results and more yet to be named I gave up and turned it off. Seems everything in the Apple Store has bluetooth. Saw a very nice dual-display setup with widescreen 20-odd inch displays. After that we went towards Totenham Court Road to look in all the electronics shops.

It was at about this time I made a detour into Virgin and came out with a Nintendo DS… It’s great being able to play games over Wifi with other DS owners, or over the Internet. Games start off all friendly and then degrade into childish shoving and pushing races. It’s fantastic

That night we gave the curry house some pre-warning and managed to get in. I had the best curry I’ve ever had. Some food is alright to eat, other food is fairly nice. Every once in a while you eat something that is just outstanding. I can’t remember what it was, but it had quite a bit of lime in it and some other spices that when combined with a Peshwari naan resulted in something exceedingly tasty. After that more game-playing commenced in Jeff’s room before I had to leave and wander back to my room.

This time there were three other randoms in it who didn’t steal my clothing, spill things on the floor or cause a lot of noise. The fact they could barely see or stand might have had something to do with it

Walking through London at 9am on a Sunday is an odd experience. The place is deserted and a bit like the beginning of 28 Days Later - only without the zombies (they’re still in bed). There’s a BT OpenZone access point in Euston Station, but my DS didn’t want to talk to it. The train ride back took longer and stopped at most of the stations on the way so I fell asleep.

Earlier that morning I’d noticed some oil depot somewhere had exploded. Figuring the Iraqis were trying to kill each other again I gave it no further thought until the train manager announced we were just about to go past it on the train. Looking out my window I saw a massive massive cloud of smoke reaching high into the sky. It really was quite impressive. It happened in Hemel Hempstead and people in Slough were woken up by the sound.