I plugged in my home made cable and nothing has gone bang yet
Made a new cable so I can plug a normal usb drive into the xbox I bought, it's a real bodge, but it seems to have worked so far. As I think I already mentioned, armed only with a leatherman I have frankensteined together an existing USB extension lead and one of the xbox controllers. Looks very messy indeed, but the xbox recognises the usb drive, so I can use that to get software onto the xbox. Might do that this evening, then I will have XBMC running before you know it. Gave a couple of the games I got with it a try, but didn't have any enthusiasm for them. Are they worth anything, should I sell them?
Will take some pictures of my terrible hacking, wish me luck for getting the rest of this working.
Why am I doing it? I'll tell you why, I wanted something like the power of itunes but running through my front room TV / stereo set up. This was a very cheap way of doing it. Think this is possibly the first time I've seen one of those "you can make this out of these leftover bits" where I actually had all the bits I need going spare. I love the instructional videos and how-tos on http://makezine.com but I never seem to actually have a spare video camera or remote controlled helicopter or whatever to dismantle...
Also put that imac on the new table I bought, it goes a treat, and the shelf underneath it could be made for a keyboard (hmm, not so sure it's technically an antique1 now I come to think about), it even has a suitable gap to thread the cables through so I didn't need to mess it up drilling any holes, AND the hidden shelf is just right for a four socket power bar thing... Have used it for playing music about the house so far and a little bit of internetting.
Must dash, have a thing to put live at EXACTLY 2pm!
xbmc: XBox Media Centre, some software that would run on an old xbox or other computer hardware to play movies and music etc. I used to talk about this a lot...
Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in A small town. Wed and father to two, I'm a full-stack web developr, + I do js / Node, some ruby, other languages etc. I like pubbing, parkrun, restaurants, home automation + other diy stuff, history, tree stuff, TV, squirrels, pirates, lego, and time travel.