XBox 360 + Media Center

Wow am I loving my 360 and Media Center PC. This year for my 30th birthday I got an XBox 360, my birthday is in February and this meant a long wait for the actual machine. During this wait I did some research on what you can do with the 360 and I discovered Media Center. Basically this setup allows me to store my media on the PC and stream it to the 360 for output.

So how has it been? Well having had the 360 for a month now I can safely say its been as good as I had hoped. Most of my music is now recorded in MP3s on the PC, allowing it to be shared between Media Center, Media Player and iTunes. The music plays perfectly on the PC and 360, as well as on my Zen and Alison's iPod. TV watching has also changed. I now try and pre-record everything that I want to watch. The TV guide (once setup) allows Media Center to automatically record all of the shows that I watch. I also have the digital photos on the Media Center PC, and am currently playing with setting up albums, and seeing if I can add audio (you can play these together manually, I want to see if there is an option for creating and saving this)

Games for the 360 have also been great. I got the VIP pack with Perfect Dark Zero, but I haven't played it much, the other games I got are far too addictive. Oblivion is my number one game at the moment, and I have clocked over 30hours game play already (on one set of batteries for the controller as well, you can buy a lot of batteries for the price of the recharger kit...). I still feel that I am only just getting started with this game. Every time I play it feels like such a huge world, great game.

The other game I'm playing is Need for Speed Most Wanted. After hitting 30hours on Oblivion I thought that I should play this a little, and have been hooked on it since. Love the graphics and game action. Basically it was a toss up between NFS and PGR, and I chose NFS mainly due to price. It was more expensive and there was an "all games $75" sale, so I saved more by getting it. Why not both? I'm an academic, so $ are not in great supply :(. Main problem with my choice is that all the others I know get PGR and not NFS... No big deal, I am loving the game. Just hit #9 on the BlackList and the races are starting to get really challenging. Should be good.

Problems? Well I have had some. The 360 has crashed on me a couple of times in Oblivion with disk read errors, and also in NFS. This hasn't happened so often that I feel the need to take it back, but if it happens more I will be. Other than that everything has been great.

So what's next? Well I need more disk space on the PC for all the media I have. I also want to get some extra tuner cards so that I can record and watch more than one channel at once. Then there is a steering wheel for the 360, and more racing/adventure games. For the moment I need to save some $... but that's nothing new :)

For anyone on XBox Live my gamertag is "The MS Guy"... See you online.

LA Times runs a feature Beyond Bullets

This LA Times article examines the Beyond Bullet Point approach. Front page of the business section. Very impressive.

Making progress

A small group of students stayed back with me after the lab last night. It was really great fun! We extended the maze game to include the monsters and then went further to improve the monsters movement, and this morning one student talked to me about adding multiple monsters. This is a very funky little program now. I have added a screen shot below. Basically the player can move the "person" around in the maze while the monsters will move themselves. The code for this is available from the above links, there is a maze txt file at the end of the first iteration. The Pascal compiler is free and open source.

Students and Learning

One of my favorite (modified) sayings is:

"You can lead a student to material but you cant make them study"

This is the joy that I am having at the moment. Motivating first years to actually study is a lot harder than I thought. Today I looked at how many people are actually looking at the Discussion Board. This is used for all important messages to students (such as when assignments are released, general feedback, guidance, suggestions, etc). Most of these messages are not communicated in any other way.

The following image shows the number of accesses to the Discussion Board by student. There are about 80 students of which 45 have never accessed a single discussion board posting.



Evil plan 1: Make sure that I release much more help via the discussion board... :)

Evil plan 1 is going into action today when I am releasing the assignment... I told them it would be available this week and that I would announce it on the discussion board. Lets see how many actually paid attention in class... My bet is about 35 :)