Thursday, June 22nd, 2006

My home’s setup for internet is kind of wonky in the living room, so I have been trying to find a cheap way to hook my xbox 360 up to my home network. I had played around with a few options, but nothing really worked. Finally, I decided to try to use my MacBook’s internet sharing feature to get online. I figured I’d post this here in case anyone else wanted to try this, or couldn’t figure it out.

All I did was connect a regular ethernet cable, no need for a crossover cable, from my ethernet port to the port on the Xbox. Checked the IP assigned to the ethernet port (in terminal.app, type “ifconfig en0″ [zero, not a capital-o] and it will return the info about the config of the built-in ethernet. On my machine it returns “inet 192.168.2.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.2.255″. I believe OSX always uses 192.168.2.1 but it would be best to check rather than just assuming.

Connecting to XBOX Live via OS Xs shared networking:

IP Configuration: Manual
IP: 192.168.2.2
Mask: 255.255.255.0
Router/Gateway: 192.168.2.1 [or the address returned from the ifconfig command above if it's different]
DNS Configuration: Manual Type in 2 DNS addresses, supplied by your ISP. If you can’t find them, type “dig” in terminal.app and after a bunch of text scrolls by, you’ll have a line starting with “SERVER” near the bottom, the IP address in that line is the DNS server your computer is using, so you can enter the same in the xbox settings.
PPPoE Settings: Off
Advanced: Automatic

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Posted on June 22nd, 2006 | No Comments »

Monday, June 19th, 2006

Someone buy me this shirt.   A very clever use of typography.

Posted on June 19th, 2006 | 3 Comments »

Thursday, June 15th, 2006

My friend Dave sent me a link to this video from about 5 or 6 years ago.  I’ve got a cameo appearance in it, so I reccomend you check it out.  I’d like to get my hands on all the other lame videos I used to do with those kids.

Posted on June 15th, 2006 | No Comments »

Thursday, June 15th, 2006

Parallels Desktop for the Mac has been released today.  If you have an Intel-based Mac and haven’t tried out this amazing virtualization software, you’re missing out.  This program basically gives you the ability to install copies of Windows, Linux, or whatever OS you want into a virtual hard drive that you can run alongside your Mac OS system, so you can basically use 2 Operating Systems at once.

This is great for people like me who have to test websites in Internet Explorer all the time, but really don’t want to buy another computer just for testing, nor do I want to partition my drive, install XP on my Mac, and reboot every time I want to test some CSS on IE6.

There is a time-limited trial availble to try over at their site, so go give it a whirl if you’re running a Macbook, Macbook Pro, new iMac, or new Mac Mini!

Posted on June 15th, 2006 | No Comments »

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006

I decided not to renew my .Mac subscription. After thinking long and hard about it, I can’t justify paying $99 for an email address (daniel.andrews@mac.com), bookmarks synching (which Google does for free now), photo galleries (flickr does it easier and better), a backup utility, and a few other goodies.

Having the iDisk was the one thing that almost made me renew - basically iDisk is a webdav-enabled local disk, that whenever you update, add or delete a file, it syncs it with a server. You could use rsync to perform the same action, but it was so damn easy. I used it between work and home a lot, and I’ll miss the ease of use there. However, I just couldn’t justify the $99 for slow up/download speed, wonky synching between computers at times, and tons of downtime with email on the .Mac servers.

Apple needs to rethink their strategy here, and start offering something pro users would be more interested in. People with multiple computers may still be willing to shell out the hundred bucks to keep their info sync’d, but it’s only because there is no competition in other areas. They’re getting their butts handed to them by competing (and usually free) products, but still have the gall to sit on their ‘laurels’ and rip customers off. I won’t be sitting around for another year of it.

Oddly enough, Steven Frank was asking the same question today.

Posted on June 13th, 2006 | 2 Comments »