The Richter Scale^®

I had the Media Center Extender running on my original Xbox some months ago, though not soon enough as it took Sony forever to release an update to bring my VAIO desktop (purchased August 2004) up to Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. However, I have pretty much never used it since.

And I suspect it may end up being the same with the Media Center Extender on my Xbox 360.

The reasons for this are simple, but I will point out that they may not apply to everyone.

First, I don’t use my PC for much MCE video recording - I generally don’t record the over the air programs or the ones from the TDS (terrestrial digital service - like DirecTV, but land based instead of satellite) because the quality of the signal isn’t great on either, and because I don’t have any easy way for the MCE PC to switch channels on the marginally better TDS system (none of the remote controller set-up options works for the custom Zenith set-top box).

Second, on the rare occasions I have used my PC for recording programs, they are programs I would rather my children didn’t have access to (think HBO or Showtime programming in the 9pm and later time slots and you’ll get the idea). While I know there are parental controls available on the Xbox 360, they do not appear to apply to the programming I’ve recorded from our local TV signal sources. I don’t need my children asking me why all those people on the shows I recorded, like Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t! on Showtime, or Entourage on HBO, swear all the time. A similar issue applies to my photos - I don’t want non-family using my Xbox 360 to be able to view all the photos on my network storage - nothing embarrassing there, but there are about 15,000 images from the last three or four years, and some are more personal and private than others.

Third, video over the Xbox 360 wireless connection is poor and unsteady. I know they warn you about it, but the five-port Ethernet switch in my entertainment system is full (Xbox, PS2, GameCube, networked Onkyo receiver, and the network connection), and I didn’t want to bother adding another switch.

Fourth, while the music playback system on the Xbox 360 Media Center Extender is nice, once you get it to recognize and catalog music in locations other than the annoyingly default “My Documents” directory, the free remote (the short one) I got with my Xbox 360 has no apparent way to allow me to enter letters into the search fields for the artists or albums or songs I want, meaning that if I want to listen to Paul Simon’s music in my 400+ CD digitized collection, I have to scroll all the way down - a horribly painful and tedious process. Some letter/number keys on the remote would have been a useful touch. I also had the impression that the MCE remote control I got for the Xbox should work (per the configuration settings in the Xbox 360), but no joy there either. And I really have no desire to buy a more functional remote to make up for it.

And finally, I don’t want to have to keep my computer powered on all the time on the off chance I might want to watch a recorded movie or show, or listen to music. I already have a couple of file servers running 24/7 (main one is a Linux box with RAID-0, and the other is a very old PC running bare bones Windows XP for performing back-ups every night), and that’s enough. And I don’t want to have to boot up my PC just to watch some recorded video. Heck, it’s easier for me to just burn it to a DVD and watch it that way.

So, one of the big reasons Microsoft touts for putting an Xbox 360 in the living room “for the whole family to use” just does not fly in my household. It is nice for playing games though.

So, after days spent mostly playing my Xbox 360, my son asked me to play Star Wars Battlefront II with him on the Xbox, and after only a few minutes of gameplay it finally hit me how visually spoiled the Xbox 360 has made me. The Xbox connected via component video doesn’t even touch the Xbox 360 connected via the VGA/PC connection on my HDTV system.

Battlefront II in single player mode is okay and pretty playable, but in split screen multi-player mode, pixel chunkiness and coarse graphics (in contrast to the Xbox 360’s detailed high resolution output) really detracts from game play (never mind making it much more difficult to clearly see your enemies and navigate).

Having read recently about some Microsoft Xbox 360 evangelist commenting that the emulation of the Xbox on the 360 actually made Xbox games look better, I decided to give Star Wars Battlefront II a spin in my Xbox 360. Woe was me - the game is not yet support by the latest emulation code from Microsoft (list of what has been certified to work is here).

I am increasingly coming to appreciate the graphics capability and visual acuity the Xbox 360 provides. I guess you don’t know how good you have it until you go back to what you were using before.

I still have regular mini-frag fests with my kids and their friends over SystemLink on my office Xbox and the one in the living room, mostly playing Halo 2, and again, in single player mode (on my system - it’s usual 2, 3, or four of them in the living room on a single screen), that’s fine. Although some might question my gloating when I kick butt against a posse of 8 and 10 year olds (but I should note that sometimes they kick my butt too).

I definitely won’t be getting rid of any of my current generation consoles, but I suspect I will be spending more and more time with the next generation, including the Xbox 360.

I have observed a number of things the our new Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner does which I think make for good life lessons, so, without further ado, here’s a list of five things my Roomba has taught me:

1) Don’t give up easily. The path to your goal may not be an easy one, and may in fact require lots of false starts and turns, but if you persevere, you’ll get there.

2) When you get worn out or have finished your job, head home, take a breather, and recharge your batteries.

3) Avoid slippery or unsteady situations by planning ahead. There’s nothing worse than spinning your wheels and getting nowhere, and just wearing yourself out doing it.

4) If you’re going to charge forth to change the world, it’s not a bad idea to give a bit of warning to those close to you.

5) When you’re worn out, and just don’t have the energy to do the job right, don’t let people push your buttons. Let them know you need a small break to get your wind back.

Have any additional life lessons courtesy of a Roomba? Post them in the comments.

A couple of weeks ago an early Christmas present my wife and I were giving to ourselves arrived with our latest freight shipment from the U.S. - a brand new bouncing (not in the traditional sense) baby Roomba Scheduler.

For those who have been in a cave for the last year or two, Roomba is the trade name given to a family of robotic vacuum cleaners by iRobot, the company which developed and sells the Roomba products. The Roomba products work on battery, and operate by bouncing (gently) around a room and cleaning in a pattern designed to cover most of, if not all, of a room. They purportedly work great on carpets as well as hard surfaces (we have no carpets, so I cannot attest to that part - but it’s great on the tile floors we have).

Simply said, we are very happy with our new family addition. We have two dogs, a cat, two hamsters (not free roaming though), and a native Bonairean parakeet (called a “Prikichi"), plus two children and dust laden winds, so our floors get pretty gritty in no time - you can feel it on your feet (yes, even in December we walk around on bare feet - take that snow-draped New England!).

I’ve been using the Roomba to clean a room or two a day, and what a difference that makes, especially in contrast to the more time consuming and tedious manual sweeping we had been doing before. And I can now tell my wife I really am doing my share of house work.

The Roomba is smart enough (well, equipped with enought sensor technology anyhow) to not fall down stairs, which is a big plus, and one can create “virtual walls” which the Roomba will “bounce” off of so that you can limite the area in which it should focus its cleaning skills. Plus, it goes under beds and furniture providing there’s about 3 inches or so of clearance. And one of the coolest things is that when it thinks it’s done (or when it’s battery is running low), it finds its docking station and self-parks to charge its battery.

I must say I have been remiss in not even bothering with the scheduling functions of the Roomba, but I find that it’s easy for me to pick up wastebaskets, isolate a room, and pick up floor mats and towels and then just press a button on the Roomba to tell it to clean. Actually having to program it to clean at a particular time seems wasteful when I can just start it up manually and leave the immediate area (and yes, I am a geek, but I try to be practical)

The only things so far that the Roomba seems to have had problems with have been floor towels (e.g. in the bathrooms - it chokes on them and then bleets for help), floor mats (gets stuck on them - half on, half off - and spins in circles, and concrete dust (too fine for it to pick all of it up - haven’t found a vacuum cleaner yet that does, either).

I also have one piece of furniture which the Roomba has gotten wedged under - easily remedied by putting something solid in front of the furniture that the Roomba would bounce off of.

All in all, these are minor things - I am very pleased with the unit, and I have started recommending it to friends here on Bonaire as a great way to deal with dust, dirt, and pet hair/feathers.

I give my Roomba Scheduler a healthy 8.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

(As a footnote, iRobot has also recently started shipping the Scooba - a robotic wet mop. Definitely looking forward to checking that out at some point. If it’s anywhere as good as the Roomba I’ll be happy!)

At E3 in May, the big hullabaloo about the Xbox 360 was whether it was going to be backward compatible with the Xbox. There was cheering at the E3 Xbox 360 pre-launch when Peter Moore of Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360 would in fact be able to play “leading” Xbox titles.

Now that the Xbox 360 is here, and the list of Xbox games it will play grows (and occasionally shrinks), does it really matter?

The reason I ask is that there’s no easy way to transfer saved game data between the Xbox and Xbox 360. So all the time and effort that I’ve invested in working my way through countless Xbox games is wasted on the Xbox 360, unless I want to redo all my hard labor on that platform. Heck, it’s just easier to keep my Xbox around and play that when I want, knowing that it is in fact 100% Xbox game compatible, than it is to bother playing Xbox games in my Xbox 360. This is one area where Sony got things right on the PS2 - it’s possible to use PSOne/PSX memory cards on the PS2. With the Xbox this is not viable, because the memory cards hold only 8MB, but one might have all sorts of downloaded (and paid for) level maps on the Xbox hard disk which consume a lot more than 8MB, so there’s no way to be portable without hacking the systems. And even then, it’s not clear that would work.

I would guess that where Xbox backward compatibility is important is to those who don’t own an Xbox in the first place, which I suspect rules out pretty much all current Xbox 360 owners, since fanatics and game jockeys are the most likely to have had the forethought or perseverance to have obtained an Xbox 360 at launch on November 22nd.

Time will tell if Microsoft’s backward compatibility effort bought them anything.

Over the last few days, I’ve done a bit more in the realm of comparing current generation console output (e.g. PS2 and Xbox) with nexgen Xbox 360 output, and I must say, although in some games it’s subtle, the Xbox 360 does win hands down.

But I think that’s only because I am taking full advantage of the output quality potential of the Xbox 360 on my HD-ready TV, a 62” Samsung DLP.

My Xbox and PS2 are connected to my TV via component video (my GameCube uses S-Video), and are set to be aware of 16:9 format output.

But in planning for the arrival of my Xbox 360 I went and bought an Xbox 360 VGA cable, which outputs analog video at potentially high resolutions via a 15-pin VGA connector to any type of monitor which can support such a connection. I did not use DVI because my Samsung progressive scan DVD player is already connected to the DVI port on my TV, and I didn’t want to have to deal with a DVI switch box. The VGA cable worked great.

After organizing my Xbox 360 into my entertainment center (it sits on top of my PS2) I configured the Xbox 360 to output 1360 x 768, which is higher than the DVI connector to my TV supports. This does produce a very crisp picture compared to what I see on the Xbox or PS2. My wife even commented that the fog and snow effects in Call of Duty 2 looked realistic (high praise from her).

That said, I think a real HD-capable TV or monitor is a necessity to make an Xbox 360 useful. It’s a waste to use an Xbox 360 via composite, S-Video, or even component connections as you are still basically resolution limited, at least in comparison to the resolution potential available via the VGA cable.

But an HD ready TV with PC inputs will run you at least $999, plus another $40 for the VGA cable. Makes the Xbox 360 a pretty pricey toy.

Being a gamer, it’s not unusual that both my kids are into video games too - I let them play with all my toys. Many an evening we’ll play together before it’s their bed time. Games we frequently play include Champions of Norrath (both versions) on the PS2, Star Wars Battlefront II (Xbox)(nice to finally be able to have more than two players - up to 4 in a cooperative mode!), Halo 2 (matches), and some various party games on the GameCube and Xbox.

That said, the Xbox 360 launch titles were a major disappointment.

Most of the games were definitely age inappropriate for 8 and 10 year olds, and I draw the line more liberally than some parents - shooting games are fine if they don’t involve modern age humans shooting each other. Games with bad language are also right out as are really bloody gore-filled games. Under those rules, Halo 2 is in, but any version of GTA, Call of Duty, Counter Strike, Quake, is out. So are GUN, Condemned: Criminal Minds, and perhaps Perfect Dark (need to play that more to make the call).

And, as my kids and I are not major sports fanatics, the bevy of Xbox 360 sports games at launch was pretty uninteresting (although I still ended up with all of them).

That pretty much leaves Kameo and King Kong. And neither of those allows for more than 2 players, and in Kameo, the cooperative mode is a reward for achieving levels in single player mode, and not a given right as with most other co-op games I’ve played of late.

Again, Microsoft’s proclamations during the Spring of 2005 at GDC and E3 about the Xbox 360 being a system the whole family will enjoy seem to fall flat, at least for now.

Sure, I’ve looked at the Xbox Live Marketplace and seen I can download a bunch of games, but of course, then I’d have to pay for them, and wait for the tedious downloads ("broadband" on Bonaire means “occasionally faster than a dial-up modem” - huge difference to what “broadband” is in the U.S.). And I didn’t get my Xbox 360 to play effectively 2D games with cute graphics, or slightly improved remakes of games I used to play in the arcades a couple of decades ago.

I’m hoping some game developers out there are working towards filling the multiplayer family gaming vacuum for the Xbox 360.

I’m pretty sure I was the first person on the island of Bonaire to have an Xbox 360. It arrived at 5pm on Thanksgiving Day, November 24th (not a holiday on Bonaire, since the island is Dutch, not American). I had ordered the high end “all inclusive” Omega pack from GameStop.com a few months back and had it shipped to my in-laws in New Hampshire. They received it on Tuesday, November 22nd and turned it right around to ship to me on Bonaire via FedEx. Not the cheapest way to go, but certainly the most efficient (other than flying it down in person).

After we had finished Thanksgiving dinner, my kids and I set the console up. I plugged it into the VGA/PC connector on my Samsung DLP display, attached the wireless adapter, turned it on and lo, it worked!

However, the set up was horribly tedious, as I decided I wanted to have the thing configured properly for Xbox Live as well. If this is Microsoft’s idea of a console for the masses, they haven’t a clue as to what the masses will put up with to, I think. My 10 year old daughter finally gave up watching me enter data via the on-screen keyboard and went to bed. My 8-year old son, bless him, was patient enough to bear witness to the completion of the set-up and even play a game with me.

One major annoyance was that I could not use an existing Passport.net account when setting up the system, and woe to anyone ordinary mortal who only has one e-mail address and an existing Xbox console that they have registered. I happen to run a web hosting provider and have an unlimited number of e-mail addresses I can use or generate, but that’s a rare thing out there.

The other annoyance was that using an on-screen virtual keyboard is a royal pain in the butt when having to fill out page after page of forms. Would have been a lot nicer to either be able to plug a PC keyboard into the box and type on that (and it may be possible to do it via the USB connectors), but no suggestion was made by the Xbox to do so. Or, alternately, allowing one to do all the data entry on a PC via a web site, and then just punching in a few codes on the Xbox 360 to finalize the set-up. But I persevered and got it done.

Of the dozen and a half games I got with the system, my son decided that we should try King Kong (I pretty much ruled out Call of Duty 2, Perfect Dark, Condemned, GUN, and Quake 4 as being inappropriate for him) as our first game. The graphics were pretty decent, but not awe-inspiring. I had configured the Xbox 360 for the highest resolution the DLP display would support, and it did a good job crisply filling the display (although the Samsung DLP does not show PC output as completely full screen, for some reason - there was a small black border all the way around the image).

We didn’t play for long as my son had school the next day (as my wife came to remind me at 10pm).

I stayed up and playing about a half hour each of Call of Duty 2, Perfect Dark, GUN, and Quake 4. Enjoyed them all in various ways. However, Microsoft’s highly touted efforts back in March at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco to make the use of the controller, and more particularly, the use of particular controls universally the same across games apparently didn’t make it to production. Everyone of the five games used different variations of buttons to fire various weapons, etc. Movement seemed to be the only thing more or less universally constant, but that tends to be the case on other consoles too.

I must say, I love the responsiveness of the new wireless controllers, and the wireless-ness is great too. But the “Charge & Play” cable idea just plain sucks. I don’t want a cable connecting my wireless controller to the Xbox 360, plus it never seems to charge the battery to the point of getting a green “I’m fully charged” light (and it doesn’t consistently charge the battery when the Xbox 360 is off). The suggestion in the documentation to use a quick charger for the rechargable battery is a good one, but no one is selling these quick chargers!

Anyhow, the next morning I got the Media Extender functionality running, but not without further hassles, like having to reinstalled aspects of Media Center Edition 2005 on my Windows MCE-based computer. The link the Xbox 360 provided for the MCE extension software for my PC did not help.

I’ll have many more comments forthcoming, but in summary from initial impressions, the Xbox 360 is not worth the high premium one presently has to pay. The graphics are good, the game play is good (for the few Xbox 360 games out there now), but the game selection is poor (especially for games kids can play), and set-up is horrific (if you want Xbox Live).

On The Richter Scale, I give the Xbox 360 a 6.5 out of 10.0.

Almost four months ago I wrote a review of the Creative Zen Micro after having used one for six months.

I have been procrastinating sending the semi-broken unit in, but a couple of weeks ago, the Zen Micro I had purchased for my wife also failed, in that it would no longer boot up (unless connected to a PC or wall power supply, but not on battery).

So now I’m struggling with Creative’s customer service department to get two RMA numbers for these units.

Two out two units failing (and my wife rarely uses hers) in less then 10 month’s time is pretty ridiculous. I downgrade the Zen Micro to a 3.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale as a result.

And then, adding insult to injury (no fault of Creative’s) is that Yahoo! is significantly (double the price) increasing the cost of their subscription music service if you want to continue to use subscribed music on a portable player (like the Zen Micro).

To heck with that. I’ll just go buy my CD’s on the cheap at Amazon’s CDNOW Preferred Buyer’s Club and then rip them into MP3s so I can use them on something more reliable like an Apple iPod. The new 60GB Video iPods sure look interesting…

I had over two weeks in July where I vacationed in New England, visiting with my in-laws, checking out an inn in Vermont where Linda and I took some cooking classes, heading out to the coast for lobsters, and visiting with a couple of friends. I’ll cover some of these in future blog entries.

However for now, let me share one of the highlights of my time away from most work and from this blog - trying out a Segway Human Transporter.

Turns out one of the friends we visited has an “in” with Segway, based in nearby (to them and us at the time) Manchester, New Hampshire, and managed to bring home a couple of loaner Segway HTs for us to try out.

What a blast! Segways have been out long enough so that the idea of being able to balance on two wheels doesn’t seem so outlandish any more, but actually trying one is still a thing of new found joy - I felt like a big kid playing around on one. After our hosts felt I had shown enough aptitude, I even managed to graduate to “fast” mode (peak of 12.5 miles per hour) from training mode (5 mph max).  That’s done by using a different magnetic key to “start” the Segway HT.

Driving one of these requires a bit of practice. You move forward by leaning forward, and slow down or even go back by leaning back. Turning is accomplished by turning the left handle on the handle bar. Turning gave me the most trouble - I kept twisting the handle in the wrong direction - that’s problematic when moving at a good clip, as I discovered. Once you get in the groove it’s pretty easy to operate. I only wish there were an even faster mode available.

Linda and both the kids tried out the Segway HT as well. Linda was okay with it, Bas (age 8) loved it until he collided with a park car at a low velocity (turns out he was also a bit too lightweight for the unit and it couldn’t easily detect his weight shifts), and Krystyana (age 10) took to it as well as I did.

I am contemplating one of these for back home on Bonaire, but am concerned if I had one, I’d just get lazy - I should be riding my bike instead of using powered transport. For folks in urban areas, I would think the Segway HT would be a great thing though - you can use it on the sidewalk in some cities even.

On The Richter Scale, I give the Segway HT an 8.5 out of 10.0, especially for being fun and cool (never mind practical).