Category: General

Autumn Xbox 360 update to enable downloadable Xbox games, including Halo 1

Paul

It’s getting to be about time for an Xbox 360 Dashboard update, and Official Xbox Magazine is reporting that the Fall update, due December 4th, will come packing a huge new feature: downloadable Xbox games. The list includes some biggies: Fable, Burnout 3, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex, and, or course, the original Halo. Games are reported to cost 1200 points, (around $15), and the games list is expected to grow over time. Of course, Microsoft hasn’t confirmed any of this yet, but December is right around the corner — looks like we’ll find out soon enough.

Update: Well, that didn’t take long — according to Microsoft, downloadable “Xbox Originals” will be available starting on December 4th.

[Via Joystiq]

More reason to buy an XBOX 360, I hope they put all the xbox games on there soon.

Windows 7 feature request list leaks out

Paul

Although the Vista transition is far from complete, that doesn’t mean Microsoft isn’t already hard at work on Windows 7, the next version of the venerable operating system — and this list of user-requested features unearthed by the folks at NeoWin might hold some clues as to the future. The “wish list” was sent out by Microsoft before Windows 7 development even began, so most of these features probably aren’t even on the radar, but what’s most interesting is that seemingly small fixes like “Window Update progress indicator” vastly outnumber big-ticket items like “integrated audio / video codec manager” and “Windows ‘Game’ Mode.” We’d say that speaks to a major lack of imagination, so consider this a years-early How Would You Change?, and sound off in comments — personally, we’re hoping for a transactional file system, but we know you all can totally outdo us.

Read — post at ArsTechnica
Read — full list at NeoWin

I think this is so funny, Should check out the full list at NeoWin, I throughly enjoyed it!

Drive eRazer Tabula Rasas Hard Drives, No Computer Required

Paul

Need to kill the data on a hard drive you have lying around but don’t wanna bother hooking it up to a PC? Wiebetech’s pocket-sized eRazer plugs directly into lonely hard drives and genocides whatever naughtiness you have have etched into it at a rate of 35MB/s, leaving a 250GB hard drive scorched earth in under two hours.

There are two versions, both the latter of which meets DoD HDD sanitation specfications: The $99 Standard hooks up to IDE drives and performs a single pass, while the $150 pro model jacks into SATA drives and sports a multi-pass mode for the super paranoid. [Wiebetech via Crave]

Nice to have for the computer repair on the go!! 😉 You can always plug and play!! Not Sure how securely it formats the HD! 😉

Rogers Wireless expecting iPhone home for the holidays?

Paul

TUAW has posted up a potentially sweet holiday tidbit with the Canadian Apple store showing an iPhone in its holiday gift guide. Of course, as some clever reader has pointed out, the Italian Apple store is also showing an iPhone with a bit of cut and paste wizardry, could this be a case of just a template mistake on Apple’s part? We know iPhone’s coming to the Great White North — or at least are pretty sure — and the holidays do make sense, but until we hear something official, we’d lean toward error on this one. Check your local site and post back with your findings, make a game of it.

[Via TUAW]

Yep if Rogers is coming out with the IPHONE. I really hope they tell people soon.

How to enable Time Machine on unsupported volumes

Paul

Although we’ve been mostly happy with Leopard, one of the features we were most looking forward to was the ability to set Time Machine to use a NAS volume like Airport Disk, thus making laptop backups wireless and sexy (well, sort of sexy) instead of wired and cumbersome. Sadly, Apple cut the feature at the last minute, but as with all things OS X, nirvana is usually just a defaults write command away, and Volker Weber has got it sorted for us. Just pop open a terminal window and enter:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

and you should be able to select NAS volumes in the Time Machine prefs. Of course, you should only re-enable this for giggles — we don’t know why Apple turned it off to begin with, and it could very well be full of bugs and hose your data. Considering some of the other glitches that have cropped up in Time Machine, we’d actually recommend staying well away from this one, but if you’re desperate, by all means — go for it and let us know how it works in comments!

Since I do not have a mac, I do not know how well this works. If anyone tries it let me know!