Recently in gaming Category

Zynga's Mafia Wars has embraced the April Fool's day insanity ..

At the moment the game is offering a whole range of unicorn related upgrades!

See below for examples

The garage is now a unicorn castle

And you can upgrade it:
Kind of fun I suppose, but I don't understand why they just changed that one element and so thoroughly ..

More shots:
and here are the various parts you'll need:

Kind of seems pointless, or maybe this is another "tie in" that I missed out on?

I've been toying with the idea of getting some form of media server solution setup for quite some time. I had initially been interested in setting up some way of streaming all my audio CDs, but more recently I was interested in doing something similar with AVIs and DivX.

I don't use Windows that much and I currently don't have a functioning desktop PC at home (hard drive death).

So that leaves me with my MacBook Pro and an Xbox360, which I got a few months ago from Microsoft Ireland.

The Xbox does have support for video and audio, but the problem is getting the files onto it or to it..

Fortunately there are solutions available.

Connect360, which costs $20, is a simple, yet powerful, bit of software that can help turn your Apple Mac into a media source for your Xbox.

Download the installer, run it and then tweak the settings a small bit and off you go.
I currently don't have iPhoto installed, but it recognised both the Xbox and the various multimedia files on the hard drive of the Mac.

The only other setting that I tweaked was the location and scan frequency for "movies":



The one possible downside is that the Xbox itself will display absolutely all the directories and subdirectories of the source, so you could end up doing quite a bit of scrolling to find the file you want to watch.

In terms of supported formats, the Xbox seems to support most of the common ones that you're likely to encounter, though some AVI files I threw at it wouldn't open.
Passing them through Avidemux seemed to resolve a lot of the problems.

Of course, if you can't view the file using something like VLC on your Mac, then trying to get the Xbox to open it is probably futile.

The Xbox's user interface for playing AVIs etc., is reasonably intuitive and includes basic play, pause, fast forward controls.

Being able to watch various video formats on a decent sized screen with the audio going through my AV receiver is a significant improvement over trying to watch them on a 15" laptop screen with "tinny" audio.

There are, of course, other ways of doing this.

In terms of commercial software there is also a package called Rivet, which retails for slightly less than Connect360. According to this review Rivet has better structuring in terms of the navigation of files on your Mac.

I also came across a "free" way of doing streaming, but haven't had a chance to try it out.

July / August are odd months ..

While for many they are associated with holiday and relaxation, for me they're the ramp up to the autumn season, so they're actually busier than other times of the year in many respects.

Over the last few weeks and those to come I've been working on a number of projects that will hopefully bear fruit in the next few weeks and months ..

One that has finally "gone live" is a new blog - New TLD Guide, which has been setup to help people come to grips with the new domain extensions... Hopefully people will engage with us and we'll all be able to learn something new.

I've also been working on more screencasts for the Blacknight video channel, but have been having massive issues with audio - it's probably something simple, but I haven't found a solution as yet ...

And then there's the biggest distraction of them all - my new Xbox 360 (thanks Microsoft!). I've become quite addicted to Call of Duty 4 ! (more on that at a later stage..)

I've also become quite addicted to Lee Child - I picked up one novel when I was down in Cork recently and have become totally hooked!

I don't use Windows that often. Generally speaking I use Windows in the office via Parallels Desktop to access one specific bit of software or when I remote desktop into a server on the LAN to bludgeon more rules into my Exchange profile.

This afternoon I decided that a game of Battlefield 2142 would be a good idea, as killing random players on a multiplayer server is good fun.

Now if I had been thinking clearly I would have fired up the Mac OSX version, but based on what ensued I somehow doubt that my choice of OS would have made much difference.

At least it would be if the EA games updates were:

1. Where they say they are
   
2. Easy to find
3. On a decent connection

Needless to say they aren't any of the above, so almost 2 hours later I still haven't managed to download the updates, as the EA games download servers are so damn slow.

(and I probably should add on another 45 minutes for all the other random windows, antivirus and other software updates that have decided to force themselves on me since I booted into XP)