Just Uber

Hull for those of you who don’t know - it is a city which is trying really hard. Hull is working its arse off to drag itself out of economic and social decline and to establish itself as a ‘top 10 digital city’.

After years of treating this as back page news, the local media really seem to have got behind the people to protest about the Kingston Communications monopoly here in Hull.

The Hull Daily Mail have published details of a poll on the Prime Ministers Petitions site urging:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to scrap the monopoly that Kingston Communications hold in Hull for broadband users.”

So far, the response has been pretty good. As I write this, there are 1,259 signatories. That’s over one thousand in the single day the petition was advertised by the Hull Daily Mail.

The BBC are helping out too. Check out this video giving some background on the problems we face here in Hull.

The more publicity we bring to this, the better our chances of fighting against the suppressive monopoly that stifles the economic development of Hull. If you can, I ask that you take the time to write on your website or blog a little piece on what’s happening here in Hull to help spread the word.

For more information, you can always check out the unofficial Karoo Forums website.

Thanks for reading.

Again, the standard disclaimer. This like any other type of mod can jigger your Xbox!

This time round though the risk is slightly less. If you make a mistake on your new hard drive it’s not the end of the world. You should be able to replace the original drive again as long as you are careful with it!

Oooh, mental note - you might want to revert back to the EvolutionX dash for your backup, rather than the XBMC. It’s not obligatory, it just may give you a bit more backup in case anything goes wrong.

In this the final stage of my Xbox modification project, I’m going to cover removing the existing drive to install a larger (320 GB in my case) hard disk.

To accomplish this we’re going to need to take the backups recovered in the last tutorial and use them to image the larger drive. Once prepared, the existing drive can be removed and the larger one inserted.

First of all, ensure that you have backups of the following.

C: Drive
E: Drive
Eeprom (Specifically the eeprom.bin file)

Unpack the xboxhdm archive referred to in the last tutorial onto your Windows XP desktop. Take the C and E folders and use them to replace the existing C and E folders in the xboxhdm\linux folder. Take the eeprom.bin file and put it into the xboxhdm\linux\eeprom folder.

In the root of the xboxhdm folder, you should find a batch file named make-iso-win. Running it creates an .iso image which you need to burn using your favourite CD burning software. This creates a custom Linux Live CD which will allow you to reimage your larger hard disk drive.

Take any old PC and unplug the IDE cables from the mainboard. Plug the cable into the IDE socket attaching the CDROM as the secondary device and your large hard disk drive as the primary device. In my experience, cable selection often goes wrong; so you might have to fiddle with jumper settings. Check the BIOS to ensure that the devices are set up correctly as the Live CD won’t work if they aren’t.

OK - that out of the way you can now boot from your newly created Linux CD.

1) Select option 1
2) Type xboxhd
3) Choose option 1 again (Build a new Xbox Hard Drive from Scratch) If you get errors at this stage check you setup the CDROM and HDD properly.
4) At this stage the installer should ask you whether or not you want the files from C and E transfering to the drive. You do!
5) When asked if you want to create an F drive, you do too.

Now you have nearly finished creating your new larger hard disk drive.

Reboot the PC, and start from the Linux Live CD again. Type ‘3′ to enter the locking/unlocking utility screen and type ‘lockhd -a’ when presented with the prompt. The hard disk drive will be locked using the code located in the eeprom.bin file you saved on the Live CD. It is now prepared for insertion to the Xbox.

Now simply remove the existing drive and replace with your new larger drive and start up the Xbox. It should now boot up nicely!

If you have selected a very large hard disk, you may not be able to see all of it. This seems to be due to some of the limitations of xboxhdm so you will need to grab a copy of the UnleashX dashboard to reformat the final partitions of the hard disk.

Once you get hold of a copy, FTP it to the Apps folder on your XBox. You can then select it as an application from the currently installed dash - and once you have it running - you’ll find options for reformatting partitions on the hard drive.

Finally, to wind the project up, I thought I’d treat you with some screenshots from the XBox Media Centre (Click to enlarge).

First of all the sombre warning. Don’t rush into this, read around. Use this article as a basic guide and check around on the ‘net for more info to pad it out. You can totally knacker your Xbox by softmodding it if you’re not careful. This is my experience of having a bash with one Xbox. YMMV and you take full responsibility for all of this!

To save headaches later, I’ll give you a list of everything you need now. The nature of some of this software is a bit dubious, and I’ll only link to anything I know to be legal. Don’t worry though, there is enough info here for you to figure out what you need…

Psst - I’ve also included the stuff you’ll need to install a bigger hard drive in the next tutorial. These items have an asterisk * next to them. If you simply want to softmod your Xbox then you can ignore them.

1) USB to Xbox cable
2) Torx 10 & Torx 20 screwdrivers *
3) Blank CDs and a CD rewriter *
4) PC with Windows XP (Just to set it up, Linux is fine for the day to day running)
5) Large hard disk drive *
6) Action Replay for Xbox software (Search the net)
7) Microsoft USB View
SID5 Softmod Installer
9) UnleashX (If you want to use a drive bigger than 137 GB) *
10) xboxhdm 1.9 *
11) Compiled copy of the Xbox Media Centre (XBMC)
12) Original copy of the old ‘Splinter Cell’ Xbox game

Phew, OK - Lets get started!

Install the Action Reply software onto your Windows XP computer but don’t start it yet.

Turn on the Xbox and insert your homebuilt Xbox USB cable with the USB memory stick attached into the Xbox. Navigate to memory settings on the dashboard. The Xbox should display a message indicating that it has formatted your memory card.

Remove the USB stick from the Xbox USB cable and insert it into your Windows XP computer.

Run the Microsoft USB View executable. Locate the USB stick that you just inserted and locate plug in usb stick and locate the idVendor and idProduct settings.

Now navigate to the folder in which your Action replay installed and locate the drivers subfolder. In it you should find a file called xbreader.inf

Check out the format of the file. You will notice a section called Devices (just like the example below). You need to ‘con’ Action Replay into believing that your USB stick is an Xbox memory card device, and you’re going to do this by inserting the idVendor and idProduct settings you discovered earlier into this file.

Insert the last four digits of the idVendor (VID) and idProduct (PID) codes into file as show below. In this example my VID is 07AB and my PID FCF6 (Although yours will more than likely be different)

[_Devices]
%S_DeviceDesc1%=_Install1, USB\VID_07AB&PID_FCF6

OK, so if everything worked out OK you should be able to open up the Action Replay software and see your USB stick as an Xbox memory card. If it didn’t work, check that you followed the previous steps correctly. If it still won’t work you may have found a USB stick that doesn’t like being treated like this. Try another one.

You now need to take two files from the softmod installer kit you should have found earlier. These are SID5.Installer & SID5.Loader.SplinterCell.PAL. Copy them to your USB stick using the Action Replay installer.

Remove the USB stick from the computer and reinsert it into the XBox USB cable which is should still be connected to your Xbox.

Behold! You have now reached the step of reckoning!

To make your life easier, it’s suggested that you use the latest version of the Xbox dashboard. My fingers hurt, so I’m not going to tell you exactly how to do that (it’s covered on a thousand sites on the ‘net) but make sure you have version 1.00.5960.01 installed. If you don’t insert a game like Halo 2 and it should update it for you.

If you’re happy with how everything is going, then now is the time to copy the specially crafted files from your USB stick to the Xbox hard disk drive. You can do this in the Xbox dashboard.

Now start the Splinter Cell game selecting the save game called LINUX. Select a checkpoint.

Your Xbox will now restart. Don’t worry if the screen goes black. It may take 15 seconds or so for it to do anything. If all goes well, you should see the softmod start screen. Hurrah!

Before you do anything else backup your C drive, Eeeprom and MS from the backup menu. Now set the network settings and FTP the whole backup file to your PC where it’s snug and safe. If you screw your Xbox up now, you have much more chance of recovering it if you have these files.

Finally you can install the softmod. If I remember correctly I chose hacked dash/softmod dash option with an EvolutionX dashboard. You should have received a PDF as part of your softmod package so check out the description of what each option does to ensure you get what you want.

When the installer has finished, you can restart your Xbox. It should now start up to the EvolutionX or UnleashX dashboard (depending on your choice).

To get the Xbox Media Centre application working, simply upload it to E/Apps and restart the Xbox. Now when you navigate to the Applications menu on the dashboard it should start up the Media Centre.

Once you have established that XBMC is working correctly, changing the configuration of a few files will make it the default dash. You should find a _tools folder inside the XBMC distribution with a couple of files inside it. Locate the .xbe file which starts your current dashboard. Mine is E/evoxdash.xbe. Rename one .xbe file in the _tools folder to evoxdash.xbe and the config file to evoxdash.cfg. Edit evoxdash.cfg so that it contains one line containing the location of the XBMC dash. For instance:

E:\Apps\XBMC\default.xbe

Rename the original evoxdash.xbe file (the one on the Xbox at E:\ ) to evoxdash.xbe.old, and upload your new evoxdash.xbe and evoxdash.cfg files in it’s place.

You should now be able to reboot and the XBMC app should boot as you dashboard. Don’t panic if something goes wrong. Simply turn the Xbox off, and turn it back on again by pressing the CD Eject button as opposed to the power button. This will get you back into the original softmod dash where you can revert any changes you have made via the built in FTP server.

Right then. I’m knackered now, so can’t be bothered to write the ‘how to stuff in a massive hard disk drive’ article. I’ll write it up later in a separate post so until then - have fun - and remember, if you bugger this up it wasn’t my fault!

I’m thinking of turning my Xbox into a media centre, it isn’t used much any more so it might as well become useful (or die trying).

I don’t have a mod chip, I don’t want to take the Xbox to bits (and I’m too tight to pay someone else to do it) so my remaining option is to ’soft mod’ it.

Let the games begin…

Building a USB Cable for the Xbox

First off, we need to copy some files from a PC onto a USB stick and then transfer them to the Xbox. To do this we need to make a cable capable of attaching standard USB devices to Microsoft’s proprietary version of the USB interface.

Assemble the following items:

1) Second hand Xbox controller (£4.99 - Gamestation)
2) A copy of Splinter Cell (we’ll need that later) (99p - Gamestation)
3) USB extension cable (A couple of quid)
4) Cornish Pasty (75p - Cooplands Bakers)

Start eating the pasty.

Now take a pair of scissors and cut the Xbox controller cable at a point close to the controller unit.

While continuing to eat the pasty, cut the USB extension cable. Bear in mind that you should keep the total length of your final cable to less than 5 metres (probably less than 3 given my dodgy soldering skills).

Finish the pasty.

After stripping the wires back, note the configuration. We don’t need the yellow wire, the straggly bits of tin foil or wire thread inside the cables so we can cut these back. Fortunately joining the cables together is quite simple. Connect black to black, green to green, white to white and red to red.

With a dab of solder carefully link the cables together. Do one at a time and take your time. If like me you’re a soldering newbie, check out the advice here. It’s worth following.

Now marvel at my rubbish soldering! Note the yellow wire left over. Chop it off and ensure that you trim the silver foil and mesh back ( you don’t want them connecting together, it may cause a short).

Finally, get some insulating tape and carefully insulate each wire from its neighbour, finishing up by covering the whole lot in a protective wad of tape.

And that’s that. You now have an Xbox USB cable. It can be used to attach a USB Keyboard and mouse or storage device to the Xbox via the controller port. If you need to attach more than one USB component to your Xbox I’m led to believe that a USB hub would work (which would save you the hassle of making another cable of course!).

I’ll touch upon installing the softmod in another post. I’m not going to go into great detail (hey, you’ve got to have some fun finding stuff out) if nothing else other than some of it seems ‘quasi legal’ to me. Keep your eyes peeled if you’re interested though and feel free to drop me an email or a comment if you want any help.

Wikipedia tells us that “high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques.”

Phew…

Chris ‘o’ pedia would read something more like “HDR images look really cool. You can make pictures that look kinda neon and freaky, a bit like giving your digital camera an acid tab. What’s more you can create them using Ubuntu Linux - for free!”

All you need other than a digital camera and a computer with Ubuntu installed is a piece of software for creating HDR images. As luck would have it, there’s one in the Ubuntu repository. It’s called Qtpfsgui. Go get it!

sudo apt-get install qtpfsgui

Whilst you’re installing software, you may as well have a method of lining up your photos ‘just in case’ they don’t come out quite as you wanted.

sudo apt-get install hugin hugin-tools

OK, first of all you’ll need some images.

Take your camera and shoot a series of images with a range of exposures. You can do this by decreasing/increasing the shutter speed, aperture or using the ‘bracketing’ mode on your camera. Check out Wikipedia’s article on Exposure Value for more info. The important thing is to get a good range of exposures which show the bright and dark features of the shot you’re taking.

Now you have a few images, simply open Qtpfsgui, create new HDR, load all of your images in (I used 12 for mine but you don’t need that many) follow the wizard then select Tonemap HDR.

Try the ‘fattal’ algorithm, it seems to create the most striking results.

If you want to look at some really great HDR images or find out more about Qtpfsgui then check out the Qtpfsgui group on Flickr. In fact, if you really want to get into creating HDR images you need to do some research and this Flickr group is a good staring point.

Finally, here’s my attempt at creating a HDR. The subject is a little boring but all I could conjure up this evening!

Have fun and post back here to show me your efforts!

The BBC have quietly made public their new web 2.0 style homepage. It looks good, but under Ubuntu + Firefox I´m finding it pretty slow.

Personally I see a performance hit when trying to drag a content box. Id find it interesting to discover whether or not this is because I’m using an old machine, because I’m using Firefox/Linux or if its just because this is a beta and isn’t ready yet.

Has anyone else tried it out? If you have access to a Windows machine check it out and compare the performance (I don’t at the mo as I’m not at work).

OK, imagine if you will, that I suddenly developed uber programming skills and coded a great application for - lets say - keeping track of properties in an estate agency.

At this point I’m faced with a couple of choices (but please add more if you think of any):

1) Provide my software under a proprietary licence, charging my customer for both the software and my support of the software

2) Provide my software under an open-source licence, giving away the source code for free, but selling my support to the customer

At this point hypothetical software vendor Chris (much to freedom loving Chris’s disappointment) leans towards model 1. In this way I keep the source code of my uber application and corner the estate agent market.

As an advocate (albeit user of) open source software, my internal freedom loving Chris urges me to learn what the business benefits (to the vendor) of the open-source licensing model are.

Can anyone steer me in the right direction?

Don’t you just love it when the small guy socks it to ‘The Man’?

In the few days since Pandora closed its doors to UK listeners, a website has been created to circumvent Pandora’s IP address blocking scheme.

As you’d expect, the owner of the globalpandora.com site has registered the domain anonymously. No surprises there then. What is surprising however is that the web server is hosted by OVH.com, a French dedicated server company.

I wonder if this server is acting as a front end to access Pandora via some US TOR proxies perhaps?

What on earth is the difference between ‘Funwall’ and ‘Superwall’, and why do I keep using Facebook when it’s so bloody dodgy in the first place?

Hi there,

This is not Chris, but Adam writing..

I am embarking on a small project to design and build a web-app using the Symfony MVC framework and thought it may be of some benefit to someone somewhere… I am not the Worlds best coder but thought it would be fun to have a go learning Symfony after buying the book. Any way, take a look at the wiki under projects, you will find one called symfony mvc developed website and tell me what you think . I will endeavor to update it weekly.

Thanks

Adam

“Just in case you’re confused and reading this from a feed. Adam is a blogless mate of mine who occasionally has to get ideas out of his head before it pops. As a humanitarian measure, I let him write stuff on my blog (heck, brains are hard to scrub off the walls). I’ve syndicated it under the Ubuntu feed as I thought readers of OSS/Ubuntu aggregators might find it interesting. What’s more, it’s an interesting real world problem that’s worthy of some ink (read pixels).” - Chris Out….