Xbox 360 and Yahoo! Music Unlimited

It’s well known that the Xbox 360 works well with the iPod. You just plug it in and you are good to go. Yesterday I was pleasantly suprised to find that the XBOX 360 will happily stream DRM’d music files from Yahoo Music. If you download the file using Yahoo Music Engine it goes into your “Shared Music” folder by default. When setting up your pc to be used as a music/picture server for your 360 you need to run the install from http://www.xbox.com/pcsetup which will set up that folder as a default share. Then you can access all of the files from your 360 which for most people will be next to your home theater system already. That experience is made particularly sweet with the handy media remote and the digital audio out on the 360.

A key feature of the 360 that shouldn’t be overlooked is that you can play any music the Xbox has access to while you play any game. It’s all done through a standard UI which is accessed at any time during any game by pressing the Xbox button on any controller. So during the day as I listen to Yahoo Music while I’m working, if I come across a good track for high speed driving, I can add it to a playlist. When I start playing PGR3, I can just set the xbox to play my custom playlist over the entire game. Since it’s Yahoo Music, I’ve got access to a million+ songs from my 360.

XBOX 360 is here

Put your gamertag here too.
My XBOX 360 came today. Who knew FEDEX delivers on Saturdays? Initial impressions on games: PGR3 is very well done and should be purchased with your 360. Madden really is not as playable as the other versions on the XBOX and PS2. Do not buy the version for 360. It looks good but it plays like crap.

My impressions of the system are good for the most part. The system integrates extremely well with XBOX Live and I’m quite sure that Microsoft will be continuing to hold it’s #1 spot in online gaming. The marketplace and level of integration with games is seamless and easy to use.

The worst things I’ve seen so far are that the power adapter is the largest that I’ve ever seen for anything. The other bad point is that the 360 is quite loud, especially when loading data.

I’m currently using the Microsoft VGA adapter for the 360 and I can instruct the device to output all sorts of HD resolutions and beyond. The device also works very will with any Media PC’s that you have as well as the iPod. If you have a PVR in your home, the 360 is a really nice playback device.

Crazed Masses

Originally uploaded by Mr.Donut.

Having forgotten that retail shuts down on Thanksgiving, I had to venture out to try to get some gear today.

The crazed masses managed to fill up the entire parking lot of Fry’s and the surround lots.

I did get what I was after though… the last VGA adapter for the XBOX 360 and the much less rare Madden for 360 and Virtua Tennis for PSP.

so slow…

I just removed Google Analytics from the templates. At first, I thought, “Free Urchin! woohoo! ” . Then I was let down when it didn’t provide anything close to real time monitoring. After using anything else, I don’t know how you could use that. They’ve apologized and I’m sure they’ll fix it. For now though, I’m sticking with Mint. It’s not free and it’s not got an extremely rich set of features, but he’s got the stats most people need to look at 80% of the time. It’s real-time of course.

I’ve also removed my AdSense experiment. I’ll probably write more on that later.

Berkeley Lab

I always like going to the Berkeley office to work. It’s not just the smart people and good ideas they’ve got.
It’s the twix and the cheetos.
Oh and also the easy access to good lunch restuarants in every direction.