Ignoring the legal dubiety of XBMC, the old XBOX is still one of the best media centres there is. Granted the Xbox360 can play videos and music, but XBMC does it much better.

Like many people with XBMC I have a bigger hard disk in my old Xbox – a 160Gb Maxtor. This worked fine for a few years, until my FTP connection dies during an update and left me with a bad main executable. The dash crashes on loading – holding white+Y for ‘safe mode’ doesn’t work.

So… I made an Xbox boot DVD. The plan was to boot up, replace the damaged file and be on my way. After many hours of trying different brands of media with my notorious Thomson DVD drive the box still wouldn’t read a disc and boot. It would read ‘proper’ DVD games though. I replaced my 160Gb HD with the original 8Gb drive, cursing the whole time.

When the Xbox was back together I powered it up, forgetting that I’d left a boot DVD in. It read it without hesitation. So did all the others. Then the penny dropped – it takes more power to read a writeable disc than a ROM, and the bigger HD was drawing more power from the PSU. I forget where or when I read about the power thing, but it makes sense.

update – this may not be accurate, but the observed fact remains that my Xbox would not read a writable disc while using the more power hungry hard disk.

So now I need to power my HD externally, boot the Xbox with a DVD, replace the bad file and put it all together again.

Just for reference, the bigger HD draws  0.96Ma at 12v DC.

I found some info on the XBox PSU on xbox-scene.com (I corrected the 3.3v figure)
+3.3V:4.8A = 15.84 watts
+12V:1.2A = 14.4 watts
+5V:13.2A = 66 watts
total = 94.8 watts

A three minute, mostly accurate overview of Galileo’s scientific method.

After over a year of hosting this site on my ageing eMac G4 (and before that on an even slower PowerMac G4) I decided to put it on an actual host, albeit a free one. Mainly because the thought of the limited CPU being chewed up by PHP and MySQL processes was nagging at me. Plus it runs a bit faster on the new host.

I stuck it onto 000Webhost and modified my DynDNS entry to point at the ‘record for A-entry’ IP address. Export and import of the MySQL went without hitch. If you fancy doing it, the main thing to keep in mind is choosing the right option when setting up the domain with 000webhosts – click ‘I want to host my own domain’, then enter the domain you picked on DynDNS. All plain sailing from there.