Those of you on my Facebook or Twitter may have recently noticed updates on Movies and TV Shows coming from Boxee. I know you’ve all been staying up at night wondering what on Earth Boxee is and how does it work, sleep easy my friends as I’m about to tell you about my latest project.

If you’re a dedicated follower then you’ll remember my last project, XBMC, well Boxee is a fork project off the back off XBMC and is my new HTPC replacement (or should I say addition as the XBMC XBOX is now running in the bedroom). Boxee Beta (I was using the Alpha but it wasn’t nearly as good) is running on my Samsung laptop which I have connected to my new LG HDTV via a HDMI cable. The draw card for Boxee is its online content partners and social media integration but for me it’s biggest feature is the media lookup service. This indexes your TV shows and movies and downloads cover art, titles and descriptions from IMDB and TVRage.

Another feature I’m slowly getting into is the online content I previously mentioned. With Boxee you can browse through their App collection and add online content providers such as Joost, Justin.tv, YouTube and even BBC iPlayer. These come from the default Boxee repository but you can easily add more app repositories from users with custom built apps and feeds.

My next project is to build a NAS (Network Attached Storage) for my media and backups. My current 1Tb drive and laptop HDD are about 95% full so I need to look into something a little better. With media centres in multiple rooms, the laptop and 2 iPhones in the house means media on the network has become a must.

Download Boxee Beta here: http://www.boxee.tv/

Check out the new Boxee Box by D-Link: here & here

To pickup where I left off last weekend, I finished the hardware side of the mod and was halted by the fact that I needed an original Xbox controller do flash the chip. Last Sunday night I was looking on eBay for a new controller and most were around £4-5 but I found another great deal, an Xbox, 2 controllers, 2 games and remote for £11!!

Saturday morning I downloaded the new Xecuter Bios  flashed the modchip. I normally do this over FTP but I don’t have a router/switch here or any control over the internet so the safest bet was to burn the bios to a dvd and flash it that way. Once done the Xbox would accept unsigned code and I would be able to run my backed up games and more importantly the open source project XBMC (Xbox Media Center).

Sunday I played around a little more and have nice new ‘Media Stream’ skin for the program which displays all my movies and tv shows nicely. In fact I like it more than my Vista Media Centre I have setup back in Australia.

I think I will mod the new extra Xbox I have now and install a Linux distro on it, perhaps Xubuntu and run myself a test web server =)

_B

Saturday I made my second attempt on modding my Xbox this time with all the tools in hand. I gave up last week as the wire install method wasn’t working for me (not my preferred method anyway), this time Matt from work had lent me his solder sucker and it was time to clear the LPC port. The image to the right shows what I have in my v1.0 model and that you can just solder each wire to the board, this may work for some but the port was meant for a header so a header it shall have.

Stuart warned me on Friday that a solder sucker may not be right for the job as you need a tight fit whilst the solder is hot in order to remove it and I would be better with braid. That may have been the case but I had use the sucker before and wasn’t about to change plans at the last minute, these tools weren’t easy to get.

Anyway I removed the old pin install and made my attempts at removing the solder. After much negotiating of positions I managed to get 1 hole clear with the board on its side between my knees the soldering iron in one hand and the sucker in the other…this was to be the only time that move worked.

After many attempts I gave up and cursed around the studio for awhile until I had myself a light bulb moment. I ran out to the communal hallway and spotted my good friend Harry the vacuum cleaner (not in that way).

I pulled off the end and taped up the short metal end (so there was no metal on metal action) and let him rip. The vacuum attached tightly and formed a seal on the bottom of

the board and I simply touched the iron on the top of each point. With incredible easy the holes were clear one by one, I can’t believe I didn’t think of this last weekend.

Once that was done the rest came quickly as I had performed the pin header install many time before. Although you’ll see below my soldering skills are pretty rusty and I made quite a mess of the reverse pin header install but it works so that’s all that matters.

I booted it up and started the Bios flashing stage and encountered another hiccup which would prove to be another project staller. The controller wasn’t moving through the options on the FlashBios screen (to select the location of the new Bios file – HTTP, DVD, HDD), I knew the controller worked fine as I tested it the week before. Some quick interweb searching and I found out that only an original controller will work with the FlashBios screen (something to do with the Xbox being in low level I think).

With that I made a mad dash down the street to the pawnbrokers looking for a controller but come up with nothing, even a bus ride and walk up and down Kilburn High Rd proved fruitless. My weekend Xbox project will be delayed yet another week.

After the break are some photos I took during the process. Until next weekend.

_B

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My insurance money finally came back over the holidays after being robbed way back in September, talk about efficiency! So I went out and replaced the stolen 300D with a brand new Canon 450D with a 15-55mm IS and  70-300mm IS lens.

The new model is way better than the old one with double the Mega-Pixels and way more features, best of all the camera and lens cost the same as the original buy price on the one that was stolen.

I will add more photos to my gallery section soon, I think I might redo that section too.

_B

The other day my new replacement camera arrived in the mail. I got myself a Fuji Finepix F100fd, a 12Mp compact with a zoom lens. It was a little more expensive than the old one that was stolen (about $50) but it’s well worth it.

So yeah more photos to come, and I will most definately be backing all of them up as soon as I can to avoid anymore losses.

_B