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For the last year or so I’ve been using Connect360 to stream video from my MacBook, whenever I wanted to watch it on the big screen via either Mike or Kitty’s Xbox 360s.

However, I keep all my films and TV shows on a 500GB external hard drive, that has both FireWire and USB 2.0 ports:

It seemed silly to always have to plug that into my MacBook, and then plug my MacBook into the mains and so on… Why not just plug the hard drive directly into the Xbox 360?

Luckily, though I originally formatted it with a GUID Partition Table (all the better for Intel Macs, only not really…), a year or so ago I copied all its contents elsewhere and reformatted it with an Apple Partition Map. My reasoning being that if I ever wanted to boot my old iBook, GUID would not be my friend.

However, surely a HFS+ formatted drive would not work with an Xbox 360, I thought to myself, only FAT32 or NTFS. Nay! FAT32, sure, but instead of NTFS, Microsoft decided to support HFS+ instead. All part of that happy iPod halo effect; when I went to a presentation in 2005, Jonathan Hayes was excited to show how the Xbox 360 could read the contents of an iPod plugged into one of its USB ports and allow you to listen to the music.

Because I used my iPod shuffle to test it, for some reason I had in the back of my mind that it would be fine with FAT32 but not HFS+… But it would have been pretty odd to go to the effort of writing the software to crawl an iPod’s contents and then limit that to only iPods for Windows…

So, anyway, the Xbox 360 can read HFS+ drives (so long as they have an Apple Partition Map, not GUID) and it can even play back pretty much any video files you choose to throw at it (the only ones that did not appear were 10 really old MPGs, and the few ASF, RealMedia and MKV files I have too).

There was just one problem; a whole bunch of videos were not showing up in the Xbox 360′s interface and I couldn’t work out why. Some were ones I had just added to the drive, so maybe there was a cache that wasn’t being updated? But wait, a whole bunch of old videos that I knew were on there weren’t showing up either…

In the end, I had a brain wave; the videos that weren’t showing up were the ones I had named with “, The” at the end… For example, in all my anally retentive glory, I name video files like so:

Sarah Silverman Program, The – 106 – Batteries

That they all might appear in alphabetical order, in both the Finder and when streamed to the Xbox 360 in the past. And all such files would obviously be in a folder named “Sarah Silverman Program, The”…

So, does the Xbox 360 just want to punish me for my foolish ways? Nope, it just can’t handle any of the following four characters in the name of a file or folder:

,

+

?

/

Using any of those will simply make the file or folder invisible to the Xbox 360, and that’s the end of it. I had used commas in the aforementioned “, The” technique, but plusses, question marks and forward slashes? I guess I like my episode titles to be grammatically correct…

Anyway, so, right, I removed the +s, ?s and /s from the filenames but how would I get around the “, The” issue? Happily the Xbox 360 is totally fine with parentheses, and so I simply renamed things like so:

Sarah Silverman Program (The) – 106 – Batteries

And all is well. Yay.

One final comment; this is one of the most niche, specialist situations, ever, I realise. Most people’s drives are probably FAT32, most people probably don’t rename their video files in such a way as to include any of the above characters and most people probably aren’t even plugging hard drives directly into Xbox 360s, are likely streaming instead. Anyway.

Back when I was tiny, I had an alarm clock next to my bed that had glowing red numbers and a radio built in too. Then, for many years, I did not.

Now it kind of almost returns!

Its official name is “Net LED clock radio” and it was bought from Habitat at half price just after Christmas. The main body is white plastic with a faceplate in brushed aluminium. The numbers and indicator lights are a very bright blue and the back has all the usual buttons.

Holding Alarm and Sleep together results in the seconds display appearing, so I get to relive those exciting moments of 3 minutes and 33 seconds becoming 3:33am and so somehow sticking forever… Or at least 26 more seconds anyway. 2 minutes, 22 seconds into 2:22am is even better… 37 seconds! Not to mention the almost-as-satisfying, yet where-did-the-left-most-digit-come from? 22:22 and 11:11.

That the time is displayed in 24 hours was unexpected however; my earlier one had an AM/PM indicator in the same region as the Alarm LED… 24 hours is less ambiguous I suppose.

As for the materials, they are very similar to the current Apple Keyboard and continue the mostly inadvertent trend of mine to buy electronic devices in white shells; iBook, eMac & MacBook, Nintendo GameCube & DS, Eee PC… With the current trend towards aluminium however, I suppose this will end soon; my monitor, USB hub and 500GB external hard drive are all silver-painted-plastic.

Modifications that would make the Net better would be a tighter door on the battery compartment as sometimes the four AA batteries pop out due to the slightest jostling. A switch to dim the LEDs would be appreciated as at night my entire bedroom glows blue. This doesn’t bother me as I don’t notice it with my eyes closed, but it does mean Kitty will not allow it in the bedroom when I move back in with her. Finally, though the batteries maintain the time and even allow the radio to operate when the power adaptor is not plugged in, I’d prefer it if they also powered the LED clock itself.

Thinking forward, when the FM and AM radio signals are finally switched off, I plan on either opening it up and fitting an MP3 player of some kind, or possibly simply using a USB FM transmitter to stream content from a computer. Also, I’d like to change the blue LEDs for white ones, or at the very least red ones, as blue is for some reason much harder to see than those two.

And that’s that.

[NOTE - I forgot to say originally, but I would not have this clock if Elton had not been super-powerful, going to several branches of Habitat and calling all around on my behalf until he eventually managed to find one of the few remaining in stock. In return, I totally helped him proof-read his review of Indiana Jones 4. Hoo-hah.]

This Saturday just gone, I played Carcassonne with some friends and made a time-lapse video of our game, as we had discussed the week before:

( Time Lapse Carcassonne (YouTube, 18 seconds )

If you like, you can also download a much higher quality version:

( Time Lapse Carcassonne (5.44MB QuickTime Movie) )

2 hours and 45 minutes compressed into a little over 18 seconds? Hoo-hah.

In a kind of follow-up to my Resident Evil 4: Good Guy post from over a year ago, I show proof that I really do like this game too much:

I am at least playing the Wii version now, my own copy no less, which means I have a shiny new laser gun to play with and aiming is a lot easier…

Anyway, other things soon.

First off, if you have (or know someone who has) an Xbox 360 and a Guitar Hero controller, you can download a demo of the third game that’s due to come out next month:

http://www.xboxlivetheguide.co.uk/News/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1653

Second, of the five songs on there, four are quite fun to play, one not so much, and two very satisfying; Lay Down by Priestess and The Metal by Tenacious D. On the former, I have even scored 100% on Expert mode:

Hoo-hah! That’s all, nothing more right now.

Hoo-hah! I have got the search engine over at my comic book library to sort its results alphabetically. I’ve been looking for a way to do this, on and off, since I started using it, but had not had much luck until now, it seeming to be a feature no-one has ever seen fit to document.

However, today I decided to upgrade to the latest version and in looking through its code, that I might apply my own personal modifications, I came across a buried sort function that is not called by any of the parameters you are told to include in your search form.

All that’s needed is a variable named “sort” with the value “title”. This results in the comic books being listed alphabetically by title rather than according to some random “weighting” algorithm. However, it is rather a simple sort, placing books beginning with “The” in amongst the Ts and ordering numbers as 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 20, 3, 4, 5 etc.

Simply instructing the aforementioned sort function (on line 454 of the search.pl file) to use the “docs_db” database instead of the “titles_db” one means that it sorts by filenames instead, which I purposefully structured two years ago that they would be pretty darn close to both alphabetical and chronological.

Also, I added four lines of Perl that let the results page use the singular term instead of the plural if only one matching comic book is found. Studying for a Computer Science degree has taught me things!