Flicktitious

How To Replace the Hard Drive in an Xbox 360 Slim 4GB Arcade

While I never ended up with a red ring of death, my three year old Xbox became an overheating two red light mess last weekend. For the last year it sounded like a 747 getting ready for takeoff, so it wasn’t a surprise when it went, and its unfortunate demise seemed like a great reason to grab the new, quiet Xbox 360 Slim. But, my old Xbox had a 20GB hard drive, and not needing a 250GB one (nor wanting to pay for it), I decided to get a Xbox 360 Slim 4GB Arcade and swap my 20GB hard drive over. Without further ado, here’s how you do it:

Tools Needed
T7 and T10 Torx screwdriver
Flathead screwdriver

Take apart the old hard drive case:

Why Microsoft decided to bury a 2.5” SATA drive inside of 4 inches of solid plastic I’ll never know, but they did, and you have to get it off before you can put it in your new Xbox slim. The plastic carriers are not even remotely compatible. There are three T7 screws on the bottom of the case that need to be removed. Once off, pry around the edges of the case to loosen it, then pull it apart from one side. If you have no further use for this case, then just give it a good yank and it will crack open.

Remove the old hard drive:

The 2.5” SATA drive is held in place by 4 T10 screws, and is connected by a standard SATA connector. Remove the screws and pull the drive out.

Open the Xbox slim 4GB and drop the hard drive in:

On the bottom of the Xbox slim is a removable plate. Push the tab in and pull it off. At the bottom of this port is a SATA connector. Line the hard drive up with the SATA tabs (make sure you have it facing the right direction, one connector is smaller than the other), then push it in until it clicks. Put the cover back on the Xbox slim, and you’re done!

This is completely worth it if you have an old, dead Xbox with a hard drive in it. The aftermarket Microsoft hard drives are the same drives, just with a plastic case around them so they slide in and out of the port easily.

Update October 20th, 2010: If you’re wondering about online co-op and firefight modes in Halo Reach, dropping an older style drive into a new Xbox slim will allow you to play those modes. For whatever reason, Reach doesn’t recognize the on-board flash memory as a legitimate hard drive, and I wouldn’t be surprised if future games have this same issue.

Disclaimer:
I never told you how to do this, and if you do it wrong, it’s your own fault.

Shark Weak: Six Things More Likely to Kill You Than Sharks

Sharks. Ferocious sea beasts that patrol the oceans, looking to slake their thirst for human blood by chomping down on some innocent beach-goer’s dangling legs. The innate fear of sharks is understandable, they lurk underwater where no one can see them. The irrational fear of sharks comes from things like the movie Jaws and Shark Week. The reality is, sharks attack 50 to 75 people each year, with only 8 to 12 attacks being fatal. Now, I’m sure those 50 to 75 shark bites aren’t much fun either, but let’s be real here, there are a lot of other ways you’re more likely to die. Such as:

Driving Your Car to the Beach. Way, way more dangerous. In 2009, over 33,000 people were killed in motor vehicle crashes in the United States, almost 93 per day. Now, it’s unlikely you’ll die in beach traffic since you’ll probably be traveling at the fender-bending but not skull-cracking speed of 4 miles per hour as you watch rollerbladers pass you, but have a few Coronas before heading out, and you might as well call it a life. Or maybe you’d just like to snack on some tasty, non-alcoholic treats while waiting in traffic. Not a good idea, you’ll probably…

Choke to Death on Gummy Sharks. And yes, I mean gummy sharks. About 3,000 people die each year due to obstruction during ingestion. Amongst children, 19% were due to candy, 12.5% of that being gummy or otherwise soft candies. That’s about 4 kids a year, and while adults are more adept at chewing (and probably eat fewer gummy sharks), simply enjoying a snack is much more dangerous than any shark. If you do manage to survive the car ride, you might want to think twice before getting a real meal once you get to the beach, because you’re even more likely to die…

Eating Fish. About 5,000 people in the United States die every year due to food-borne diseases. Sure, that shark is a big scary fish, but the mahi-mahi that got left out on the counter of Tugboat Bob’s Seafood Shanty is much more dangerous. Well, it’s not so much the fish itself as the little fellas crawling all about it. Makes shark attacks seem much more reasonable; they don’t want to hurt people, they just want their food fresh. Oh, and if you do pick something well cooked, remember to wait 30 minutes before going swimming, otherwise you might…

Drown. Over 3,000 people drown each year, regardless of stomach contents (although, drinking and swimming is always a bad idea). And if you’re male and a minority, swimming in the ocean is as dangerous as heading out with the crew of the Starship Enterprise. Let’s assume you decide to stay out of the water, and lay out on the warm, safe beach instead. Uh oh, looks like you’re trying to get…

Skin Cancer. Yes, it is caused by exposure to the sun, and it kills about 8,000 people every year. As Kurt Vonnegut never suggested, you should always wear sunscreen.

So by now you’re probably saying, “screw it, I’ll take my chances with the sharks.” Good! It’s completely irrational to be afraid of something that has less chance of killing you than a lightning bolt or a forklift. But, do remember, if you are one of those unfortunate 50 to 75 people who were attacked by a shark, there’s more bad news: you might just die of an infection in the hospital. The hospital you’re holed up in is swimming with little fellas who’d like to hole up in your bloodstream. While the number of deaths due to infections isn’t concrete, studies estimate it to be around 10,000 per year. Sure, the odds of living without hospital care is pretty slim, but you’re not out of the woods yet.

Have a fun Summer everyone!

Google Moves Closer to “Eye of Sauron” Status

Google announced today that they’re adding real time information feeds to their search results. Google will search public posts on Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Twitter, and Identi.ca. I think it’s a great feature, and if it integrates with the geolocation features of any of them, could make local searches much more fruitful. I can only dream of a future where someone can post, “I just saw someone get hit by a car!” on Twitter, and someone else can find it by searching for, “did anyone else just see that dude get hit by a car?” to find not only the viewers Twitt, but also the one claiming, “I just got hit by a car!” Maybe an irrelevant example if you live outside of Boston.

Should be interesting to see how Google filters the results, especially during times of high traffic, such as the next Presidential election. A vague search on Twitter for something like “Obama” will bounce back a constant stream of updates. It will also be interesting to see if more people rely on the real time information for local news and information.

Rocky and Bullwinkle Brainstorming

I watched the Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends (hulu.com) cartoon all the time when I was a kid. While I enjoyed the Mr. Peabody segments more than any other part of the show, I always found the “multiple option” endings of the Rocky and Bullwinkle bits to be incredibly confusing. Sure, they were sort of relevant to the show you just watched, but couldn’t the writers come up with one good title for the next episode?

Well, I was a kid, what did I know. For anyone who hasn’t seen the show, here are a few examples. At the very end, two titles would pop up as the voice over would say something like, “on our next show,”:

All That Glitters or Baby, It’s Gold Outside
Go Down Mooses or The Fall Guy
Boris Goes for Broke or A Friend in Need Is a Fiend…Indeed

Brilliant, right? Now older, and a little more cultured, I can understand what the possible titles mean, and I can see that they’re (mostly) pointing to the same theme. Beyond being a cultural oddity of an antique television show which still has some fading relevance, it’s a great technique for expanding your writing. Coming up with one title or theme to work on is great, coming up with two that are linked immediately expands your understanding of what you want to write about.

I’ll talk about it in the context of a timed class essay, the kind you get barraged with in college. It’s equally applicable to writing a blog entry in 30 minutes. You start off with a topic, come up with a few points, and then start writing. You’ll get stuck in one of two places, your opening statement, or your conclusion, either way you waste time having to think about just what all of those points really have to do with the topic.

For practice, I rewrote some headers I found in my Google Reader feed in Rocky and Bullwinkle fashion:

iPhone App Store Rejects Find a New Home: “The Land of Misfit iPhone apps” or “approval, please Apple, we want some more”.

Live view of the eastbound traffic at the Weston tolls: “If you lived at the toll booth, you’d be home by now” or “the Slow and the Furious”.

White House party crashers’ appearance on “Larry King Live” canceled: “Beauty and Deceit” or “hello caller from Washington, D.C. Do you have two forms of identification?”

The strength to this technique is not coming up with something clever (although, it helps if you end up generating all your titles like this), it’s the fact that you’ve created two distinct statements which summarize the content. If you can come up with three, quickly, all the better. The more simple, singular statements you can make about a topic, the better you understand it.

Is this technique worth it if it takes you 10 or 20 minutes to come up with decent titles? Probably not. But if you find your writing is too formulaic, or two often ends up being an opening statement, a list of your key points, and no good closing statement or coherence to the points you chose, give it a shot. It’s a lot easier than building a Wayback machine to fix those problems after the fact.

Who Gives a **** About an Oxford Comma?

I was helping with a GED writing/reading class last evening and saw a multiple choice question stump everyone in the room. It was a “re-write this sentence” question, with the incorrect sentence reading as:

I’ll make toast bacon eggs and sausage for breakfast.

The possible corrections being:

A) I’ll make toast and bacon and eggs and sausage for breakfast.
B) I’ll make toast, bacon, eggs and sausage for breakfast.
C) I’ll make toast, bacon, eggs, and sausage for breakfast.
D) Both B and C are correct.

The correct answer is D. I knew the correct answer, but possibly only because I read Eats, Shoots & Leaves. That said, this sentence highlights the problem with not using the serial (or Oxford, or Harvard) comma. When reading B, most of the students thought the breakfast would consist of toast, bacon, and some egg and sausage combination (e.g. a scramble, or for the truly glutinous, a scotch egg). C, it seemed to them, made it clear that the breakfast would consist of four separate things, in any order: eggs, toast, sausage, and bacon.

The idea behind B being correct is that the comma replaces the “and”. We all know A is wrong, there’s no need to put “and” between each item on the list. If the comma is used instead, but there’s an and separating the last two items of the list, then there shouldn’t be a comma. It makes sense, but when correcting a sentence completely out of context, there’s no way to be sure what the sentence is saying.

Consider this example which my neighbors have probably uttered once or twice:

“My life would be meaningless with my cats, Tom Brady and Ted Kennedy.”

Before you say, “well, no one names their cats after athletes or politicians, this sentence makes sense as is,” I’ll add that the cat next door, which sleeps in snow banks, is called Ted Williams. Or Ted for short. But this sentence:

“My life would be meaningless with my cats, Tom Brady, and Ted Kennedy.”

Reads as, “now that Ted Kennedy has passed, I’m left finding meaning in these furry things that live with me and a Super Bowl champion with a bum knee.” This confusion will come up with any list that starts with a category and ends with two examples. For instance:

“I hate my parents, Mookie Wilson and Hillary Clinton.”

Seems like an overly angry individual. And, while Mookie and Hillary have spent time in New York, I don’t believe they’ve spawned any children. One could re-write the sentence as:

“I hate Mookie Wilson, my parents and Hillary Clinton.”

This way, you would see that this person remembers 1986 well, hates his parents, and probably isn’t in a union.

The lesson learned is that it works both ways. When in doubt, throw an extra comma in, because you might end up writing about music one day and come up with this winner:

“My favorite bands are Belle and Sebastian, Matt and Kim, and Simon and Garfunkel.”

Hackintosh Build

I recently spent an evening converting a PC running the Windows 7 RC into a Hackintosh. While reasonably impressed with Windows 7, I’m an OSX user at heart. While a large majority of the software I run is not platform dependent, there are a few that are OSX only, and the idea of having a server box running OSX instead of just my Macbook appealed to me.

First things first, hardware support for a Hackintosh is getting better, but you’re obviously going to have more success if you start with a something that has been inside a legit Mac (i.e, Intel processors over AMD, graphics cards that have been OEM on iMacs/Mac Pros). I got lucky, the computer I built out of cheap parts happens to have impeccable compatibility and a number of in-depth write ups already done for it. The important specs look like this:

Intel E5200 processor
Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L 775 ATX motherboard
4GB OCZ DDR2-800 RAM
Diamond Multimedia Radeon HD 4850 PCIe
Western Digital 500GB SATA drive

Of this list, the key ingredients are the Gigabyte motherboard and the Radeon HD 4850. Everything else is interchangeable, assuming you’re using a relatively recent Intel processor and a SATA hard drive. On top of the PC, you’re also going to need:

a Snow Leopard DVD
a USB stick or external USB hard drive 8GB or greater

I had an old 40GB laptop drive hanging around collecting dust, I threw it in a cheap external USB case and went to town. Since there are so many excellent guides to getting this board running out there already, I’ll just share the links and some notes I picked up while working on this.

First, setup the USB drive as a copy of the Snow Leopard install DVD and add a bootloader to it. Directions are here (infinitemac.com).

This part is fairly easy. In fact, if you follow the directions above, you’ll have a mostly fully working Snow Leopard install in no time. The only notes I have from this part are:

The HD4850 didn’t work on the first boot. The solution was to unplug it, and boot off of the onboard video. You’ll be stuck at 1280×1024 resolution for a bit, but it’s easy to get the ATI card up and running once Snow Leopard is installed.
I never saw the Snow Leopard installation progress bar get to 100%. It started at about 45 minutes remaining, got to ~50% progress and said there were 30 minutes remaining and stayed there. It will appear completely frozen (no animation on the progress bar), but give it time and it should reboot itself.

Once you’re in Snow Leopard, follow the guide above to get sound and bonjour working. Ethernet was fine out of the box, using the onboard jack, but I will say that of the two PCI wireless cards I had, neither had compatible chipsets. If you’re insistent on getting wireless working on a desktop, you’re going to have to hunt down a card with a compatible chipset. This guide (osx86project.org) will help, but be aware even if there are drivers for the card, it might require a separate app running instead of having airport integration. For me, it was easier to just move the router into the same room.

Now that you’re in OSX, you can get the video card working. Following the guide above, I tried rebooting using video off of the reinstalled HD4850, and was treated to a solid Apple-gray screen. Some searching led to this guide (insanelymac.com), which fixed the problem, and after a reboot gave me full support on the HD4850. Once you’re done with this, copy the kext and kext utility onto the Snow Leopard boot drive, it will make the install much easier if you need to do it again.

That’s that. Start installing some apps, and see if you can break it. A few leftover notes:

Sleep doesn’t work. I realize the guide I linked to claims it will, and it probably does in some fashion, but as of now sleep will shut down the display and disks but leave all the fans running, and it won’t wake up with any input. Could be a BIOS issue, I’m still working on it.
I haven’t tried Time Machine yet, although I assume it will work. Time Machine has been clutch for me on my Macbook, and one of the best features of Leopard, so I’d like to make sure it works before going using this full time. As it is, everything important is on multiple disks, but if I wanted to do a full wipe/reinstall OS/reinstall apps and files I’d just run Windows ME again.
You have to check before running any updates to the OS. That only makes sense, and after watching an Ubuntu install go supernova on me during a routine upgrade, I think it’s an issue I can live with.

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