So this morning they are well and truly in the corner with their dunce cap on. What has brought this about? The XBox Live upgrade.

Now I’m a huge Xbox 360 fan and am equally fond of the Live service. But in reality I use it mostly for download content, when I really get into a game the ability to add extra features/missions or whatever is a good thing. One such example of this was the game Oblivion. I lost more hours than I’d care to admit playing this game and added all the extra game elements just to make it really long. After several months away I decided recently to start again from the beginning and play through Oblivion all over again. That is after all one of the points of RPG style games, replayability.

So this morning I turned on the 360 and left it to boot up and …. no message about download content. Hmmmm. OK so continue where I left off and I am asked if I want to continue as some of the quests rely on downloaded content that is no longer available. Arrrrgh, hard drive problem! Err no. That’s fine. OK so I’m not logged into Live, easy, I’ll just do that. No, that doesn’t work, would I like to test the connection? Hell yes, let’s do that. MTU fail. Really? It was fine yesterday. I’m reliably informed that I need an MTU of at least 1364. Well I think you’ll find I already have that. Time to do some checking.

So a quick search on Xbox Live MTU fail gets me to the helpful Microsoft support page that tells me what I already know. I also already know that my Internet connection is fine because, well I’ve just done a search online. Keep checking. OK so now I’m getting somewhere, a few results down I get to an earlier issue that occurred when the Live service was down. Could that be it? Lets try xboxlive.com.

“Xbox.com and the Xbox Live® service are currently down for maintenance.
We’ll be back soon with amazing new My Xbox® features!”

I see.

Not happy.

Further digging tells me that this is in fact “planned” and it will be off-line for up to 24 hours. I look forward to the refund for the day that I have paid for but can’t use. Obviously I missed the email from the “XBox Live Team” to forewarn me about this, they helpfully email me about all sorts of upcoming titles but not that the service will be missing for a whole day. To add salt into an already sore wound the Microsoft blog post I eventually get linked to tells me that this downtime won’t actually turn anything new on, it’s just preparing for something later on in the year. No really, that’s what they actually said.

And low, after 24 hours the service returns and my MTU problem mysteriously vanishes and my downloaded content has helpfully returned.

So Microsoft, two important things that you need to learn (over and above the minor lesson that taking an online service down for a whole day for “maintenance” especially when you also tell us that this won’t actually give us anything new is beyond incompetent) are:

Firstly, don’t respond to a problem at your end by telling me there is an error at mine.

Secondly, the clue is in the name, downloaded content sits on my hard drive having been paid for by me, don’t stop me using it when your service is down, especially if you can’t ensure that the service is available at all times.

Right, back to Oblivion :-).

UPDATE

OK so it turns out that the XBox team did tell me about this by way of a message on the Dashboard. You know, the dashboard I hardly ever see as I tend to go straight into games and couldn’t access with Live down. Oh well, at least they tried!

Which is where the passive aggressive note comes in.  Anyone who has lived in a shared house has probably experienced these.  Fortunately the folks at Passive Aggressive Notes have started a collection of classic notes from around the world.  There are some gems;

Now this I understand!

and

Think this is a hint!

are just two of the ones that made me laugh.  The site intro admits that some of them are pain aggressive rather than passive but that doesn’t make them any less funny :-).

Some times however things don’t go quite to plan.

Happy Weeding Day

Or

Well theres something worth celebrating!

Or

Wtf?

These are just some of the fine examples collated by Cake Wrecks. This is a funny collection of some of the most bizarre and frankly just wrong examples of the bakers art.

Who can forget Dramatic Chipmunk, Diet Coke+Mentos, Numa Numa, Star Wars Kid or All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Not to forget 2 girls, 1 cup.

But by their very nature the internet meme is transitory. Rick Rolling was so last year. However they also now appear as references all over the place, an episode of Family Guy couldn’t exist without them :-).

Fortunately someone has spotted the gap and created the site of remembrance for memes past. Internet memes is a site that shows a timeline of internet memes going all the way back to the birth of the home computer. The easy to use interface allows you to zoom in or out, seeing the timeline from 500 years ago all the way down to the last hour. Obviously the range of the last 10 years is the most interesting! The site is clearly meant to be a user created one and people are adding memes all the time.

Whether you remember them first time around or not this is definitely one to keep an eye on.

So I realised that what I needed to do was upgrade the hard drive to allow more to be stored on the Apple TV itself. Within months Apple themselves had realised the error of their ways and launched a 160Gb model. Of course there is no trade up mechanism. You got in early, you suffer. Thanks Steve. To make matters worse, what is essentially a trivial hard drive upgrade is made complicated by a software image that can’t easily be replicated on a new drive. There are plenty of sites that will give you chapter and verse on how to undertake such an upgrade but to be honest it all sounded like too much of a faff. It was therefore with some delight that I came across a website belonging to The Powerbook Fanatic that has a whole host of Apple related upgrade options, including the Apple TV hard drive. What’s more, they even offer an even more spacious 250Gb version which outdoes the top spec model from Apple.

There are two options available for the upgrade, home or away. If you don’t want to get involved in any of the hassle the away service allows the entire Apple TV to be sent to the company who will perform the upgrade and send it back. I however chose the cheaper home option which simply involves them sending a ready prepared hard drive for you to fit yourself. The biggest problem with getting into the Apple TV, a feature shared with the Mac Mini, is that there is a plastic cover on the base of the unit that is glued on and does it’s level best to defy any attempt to remove it. To be honest, my unit now has three separate pieces to its cover as I couldn’t get it off in one go. Fortunately this only becomes apparent if you turn the unit over so it’s not a huge problem. Once the plastic is removed however the rest of the upgrade is fairly straightforward. The screws in the unit are not the bog standard type, Apple in common with many manufacturers have opted for hex screws so you’ll need the appropriate hex bits but these are fairly standard in most screwdriver bit kits. Four screws get you inside the box and then all there is to do is to take out the original drive and stick in the new one. One word of warning here, there is a spacer stuck on the original drive that keeps the drive casing and the boxes metal case apart, don’t forget to swap this to the new drive or you may find as I did that the unit won’t boot. As soon as I realised I’d missed this I popped it onto the new drive, reassembled the box and all was well. Once swapped the unit simply boots up and is a virgin Apple TV once more.

Re-synching the device does of course take an age, especially as I have now synched a load of TV shows and movies making full use of the new drive. The added on-box content has overcome the previous requirement for streaming. By choosing the movies to synch manually I can keep my favourites on there permanently and just add others when I want to watch them. This has breathed new life into the Apple TV and it once again serves my needs exactly. The service from The Powerbook Fanatic was excellent and I can heartily recommend them to anyone wanting an upgrade.

Totally unrelated to this I came across this site that does exactly what has been proposed for dozens of cities in the US. It categorises crimes and allows all or a selection of these categories to be mapped over a 3, 7, 14 or 30 day period. It makes interesting reading. Different cities provide differing amounts of information but the level of detail is still quite interesting. As an example of a real case I chose Palo Alto, CA. From this example it is clear that the placement of the crimes is down to a fairly precise level on the map.

One thing that I did find interesting was that in some of the smaller cities there appears at first glance to be a fairly large amount of crime and it is only when you start to read through the categories and details that you realise that the large number of crime icons on the map may be due to an aggressive targeting of a particular offence, for example youngsters with alcohol. This shows that as with all information designed for the “public” there needs to be a clear explanation as to what the data shows. It isn’t too big a leap to imagine a situation where an area gets a bad reputation simply because there are a large number of icons on the crime map whereas a closer inspection shows that in fact the opposite is true and there is relatively little actual serious crime due to a “zero tolerance” approach by local police.

The Crime Reports site relies on local police departments volunteering the information and obviously any UK service needs to be a nation wide operation if it is to be meaningful but I think it could be a useful addition to the debate on crime.

There is an issue though.  This is one URL at a time.  Now for most situations this may be OK but there are times when I need to send a whole bunch of URLs to someone.  To date I have simply TinyURL’d them and sent the group off.  Now though someone has come up with an alternative.  LinkBunch
takes the concept that stage further, instead of one URL you can enter a whole bunch (did you see what they did there?) and what is created is a simple small URL.  When clicked this takes you to a page on the LinkBunch site that allows you to click one at a time or open all together.

An example is http://linkbun.ch/cma which is a link to some of my sites.

retrievr

The upgrade went totally smoothly.  Upgrading the previous 2.3.x versions had all worked without a hitch but going to a totally new version was still met with trepidation.  However I should by now know better, everything worked a treat as this post shows :-).

The new interface is clean and simpler than the previous one and on the editing side has introduced a number of new media adding options which I look forward to using in due course.

All in all it’s a good thing.

Well help is at hand.  Marco Arment has knocked up a website that allows you to tag a page on another site for later reading.  It’s called Instapaper and once you’ve set yourself up there is a bookmarklet to add to your links bar and then when you see an article of interest in RSS (or indeed that you some across any other way) you go to the page in question, click the bookmarklet and it is added to your Instapaper.  Then when you have time on your hands, go to the Instapaper site and all your read and unread pages are listed for you to read at your leisure.  I’ve found it really helpful.

 Instapaper can be found here.