Die Hipster Scum

Originally uploaded by markltb.

Excellent t-shirt found in Urban Outfitters New York.
(P.S. – I’m in New York this week. Our rented apartment has wireless broadand and we took the Powerbook with us. Whoo!)

I was able to spend a few hours roaming the Science Museum last weekend, and found this!

Not quite what you’d expect them to say, is it?

However I also found this funky installation:

Text swirls around the inside of the ring, posing and then answering popular science questions, with answers taken from public visitors to the museum. Hence my name for the ring, the Ring-O-Pinion!

Added my gamercard to the sidebar on the left (if you’re looking at the full site rather than an RSS feed).

I used the official method but others exist too, e.g. mygamercard.net make this handy jpeg version:

This is turning into one of those “Microsoft actually does something useful, shocker!” posts. Oh well.

I ran into an odd problem with my wireless router and Xbox Live today – everything would apparently work fine, but after 30-40 minutes the wireless signal would vanish. Not just for the Xbox 360 but for other WiFi devices as well. Checking with iStumbler showed the signal was clearly packing up. But the router didn’t appear to have crashed, and wired connections to it worked. Ooer. A reboot of the router fixed the problem, but 40 minutes later, it’s off again… gargh!

Now I know that the connection to Live uses Universal Plug N Play (UPnP) to tell the router to set up a communication channel from the outside world, so that multiplayer games and voice chat works correctly (I’ll spare the technical details – see the link for more info).

I’d had the router for months without problems, so I thought it must be that I was doing something different from before for it to go wrong. That pointed the finger stright at UPnP.

So, I want to disable UPnP – now the problem here is that my Xbox would now have a hard time connecting fully to the outside world (technically it wouldn’t be able to accept incoming connections). Helpfully there are a couple of documents on the Netgear site (this one, and this one) that talk about getting routers to work with online games and Xbox Live.

The step by step fix is:

1. Disable UPnP.
   On my router it’s in the UPnP configuration screen, uncheck the box marked “Turn UPnP on” and click Apply.
2. Assign the Xbox 360 a fixed address.
   In the LAN IP Setup screen, click Add on the Address Reservation table, hopefully the Xbox’s address is already listed so you just click on it, give it a sensible name and the click Add. You need to remember the IP address you set here (e.g. 192.168.0.10). 
   If you can’t work out which address you Xbox has, go to the Xbox Dashboard and look at the network configuation screen, it should tell you what the current IP Address is.
3. Set up the route from the outside world to the Xbox.
   Again on my router (Netgear DG834GT) this is how (more info on the Netgear site here)

1. Go to Services and click Add Cutstom Service. Name the new service XboxLiveA, set Type to TCP/UDP and the start/finish ports both to 88. Then click Apply.
2. Repeat the above step to add a second custom service, called XboxLiveB with the port 3074 and again for both TCP/UDP.
3. Go to Filewall Rules and click Add on the Inbound Services section. Choose the XboxLiveA service and enter the IP address for the Xbox in the “Send to LAN Server” field (e.g. 192.168.0.10). You may optionally turn the Log to Never.
4. Reapeat step 3 to add the XboxLiveB rule as before

That’s it! Quite detailled but basically you’re just setting up a manual route from the outside world to the Xbox 360, rather than have UPnP do it automatically. This seemed to stop the router from getting confused and falling over every 40 minutes. Phew!

technorati tags: fix, netgear, DG834GT, Xbox, Live, 360, solution, UPnP, NAT

Wow, a ton of robot-related links!

Bluetooth-controlled robots! PLEN, The Bluetooth Robot at Akihabra news.

Fujitsu’s HOAP-3 weilds a baton – eek!

Lastly, crazy Kimono Bots!

I was very lucky to get hold of a 360 on the UK launch day – I did cheat slightly as I managed to get one via my job as a game developer. If it makes you feel any better I did pay full price, and they had still run out of Scart cables so I’m using a (surprisingly good) composite video cable instead. Oh well.

First Impressions

• The WiFi connection works, hooray! Note to security-concious home users: the WPA networking does work, but set a long passkey that’s made up of words or numbers you can cope with entering from scratch about a dozen times to get the 360 to work. That wasted a good 90 minutes.
• Xbox Live Arcade just rocks and I’d have to say that Geometry Wars is my current favourite game (but then the rest are ‘on order’ from work so that’s perhaps not saying that much)
• Wireless controllers seem to work very well, better than previous 3rd party PS2 controllers I’ve used. Impressive. No news on battery life yet, but I can see a “Play and Charge” kit being purchased in the future I’m sure.
• Perfect Dark Zero: clearly rushed to get it out the door, it’s unfocussed and the plot is nonsensical. It’s too easy to break the missions by going in the wrong place at the wrong time, and combat is unsatisfying. Having said that it’s still quite shiny in places and is ok as a launch title. But it doesn’t stand up to Halo 2 or the forthcoming Black from Criterion Games (blatant plug for my company’s work, sorry, but its true)

P.S. If anyone out there in internet-land wants to grab me via Xbox Live, I’m sure you can probably guess my gamertag…