Fried Crab Stick W.P.F.R….whaaaaat?

Rollover

Cingular’s started appending a gigantic blob of advertisement to every MMS you send. We’re going to have a chat about that one.

Dig -

redshark v2 car test rig

It runs, too. The voltmeter’s there to make sure I don’t kill another alternator.

I just now booted the XBox from 12V power! It started up perfectly normally, and booted all the way into my custom player UI.

The only external difference due to this mod is the wiring harness sticking out from where the AC socket used to be. This provides power, ground, and ignition sense to the power supply through a six pin molex (I wanted a couple pins left over for future expansion). In this photo, the system being supplied voltage from an ATX PSU through a four pin to six pin Molex adapter I built. For initial car testing, I’m going to build a six pin Molex to cigarette lighter plug adapter and ignore ignition sensing for the moment.

To my limited knowledge (mostly consisting of Googling), this is the first 12V XBox conversion ever done. Hey, it’s true until I find out different. The power switch still dosen’t work right, so it’s currently hot-wired. To make it work like stock again, I’ve ordered a copy of Hacking The XBox by Andrew Huang, which has a section on ATX conversions.

Oh, and today I saw the freaking Wienermobile. It was parked at a cheap hotel in Goose Creek. I hope nobody stole it. Check it:

Front Wiener

Side Wiener

Rear Wiener

Speaking of wieners, I really should get something to eat. I’ve been working since breakfast.

Got my XBox to turn over on the +12V power supply tonight! It worked enough to blink the front light red, mostly because the hard drive and DVD drive aren’t plugged in…It isn’t quite right yet. It ignores the front power button until you hot-wire the power supply (shorting green, or the On signal, to black, or ground). At that point, the CPU fan spins like mad but the rest of the machine dosen’t start…when you hit the front power button, the CPU fan spins down to a normal pace and the machine starts cranking up. So I still have some debugging to do, but at least no smoke came out.

Oh yeah, so last Friday I met up with Pete, Alysia, DHarp, Jason and others to see Matter play at the VT. They were great as usual – sounded a little heavier than last time, which was great. After they finished, I was treated to one of the odder performances I’ve seen in a while. Valient Thorr, who claim to have arrived on this planet in a UFO crash in 1957, float somewhere in my mind between fascinating and terrifying. I first spotted the lead singer, looking all the world like a youthful Charles Manson, replete with long, wild hair and beard and wearing a brown leather jacket with fringe, standing on a table in the back of the room during soundcheck. He was keeping time with the band by banging a fork on a bottle of ketchup. The wierdness continued – the pattern established by Young Charlie was to rant about…something…for a few minutes, then blaze their way through a vicious hailstorm of a song resembling Motorhead fronted by, well, Charles Manson. Lather, rinse, repeat. Occasionally loudly berate the audience or the people at the bar for not paying attention. One rant involved Terri Schiavo and armed revolution; another had to do with how the Illuminati could track your activities through the pyramid and eye on the back of your dollar bills. It was…strangely compelling. I decided to nickname them “Uncle Charlie’s Happy Funtime Band”. Seemed to fit.