Red Ring of Death fix

If your Xbox 360 has the 3 red rings of death and you can't send it into Microsoft then you can follow this guide to get it back up and going. This info was made available from a brilliant, and incredibly hot engineer.

This will void your warranty if you have one still on your Xbox 360, but if it has expired this will save you at least 100 dollars. Sending back an unwarrented Xbox cost nearly as much as just buying a new one. I must point out, that if mess up - I am not responcible. It's all you from this point on.

You will need to buy:
1 Arctic Silver 5 (this is a thermal paste to use on the GPU and CPU) Cost: $10
16 Flat Metal Washers that are size #8 Cost: $2
16 Nylon Flat Washers that are size #10 (#8 could also work too) Cost: $2.50
8 Machine Screws size #10 and I used 24x1/2" length (some sites said #8, but they were too small for me) Cost: $1
Total cost without buying errors and not including gas to drive everywhere: $15.50

Now that you have everything you will need to take the Xbox apart. Again this will VOID your WARRANTY; so don't blame me if you do this.

Take off all the casing using a small screwdriver or some other object (I actually used some small scissors that are now worthless). Take off all the screws and take off the X holders (place a screwdriver under there and twist is the easiest way) and the fan. Now take out the mother board and take off the heat sinks. See all that thermal past gunk everywhere? That is not a good thing so now you have to remove all that with some alcohol or some goo-gone stuff. I had some alcohol 70% in the house so that did not cost a thing extra and used that with a q-tip to rub the processors to a nice mirror finish shine. (Clean the heat sinks as well, but you don't have to make it shiny)Now you can put on the thermal paste. Put a little dab on the processor and use a card or thick paper to spread it thinly over the processor. Don't use too much or it will have adverse effects. Now put the screw with a metal washer and a nylon washer into a hole for one of the heat sinks. The nylon washer always needs to be next to the mother board so it doesn’t short out. Now put on another nylon and metal washer on the other side of the mother board (yes you have to hold all 4 of them up and this part is kind of difficult) and you can screw in the heat sink you are working on and do the same for the other one as well. Tighten them up a good amount (not too tight). Now you can plug in the power button, the fan, the cables, disc drive, and the power cable. Now turn it on and it should start up. (I’ve heard you need the disc drive plugged in or it will cancel your Xbox live account) place one of the fans over the CPU heat sink to cool it, but not the GPU. You want to over heat the GPU, but the CPU will get much hotter and shut down if not cooled. Let it heat up for 10 to 15 minutes. Shut the Xbox down take out all the cables and put it back together. You now have a working Xbox 360!

Life lived Virtually

Animal Crossing City Folk is still very popular. A lot of people that have lives and friends are probably unaware or uninterested in this fact. Yes, it's just another simulation game like The Sims or Harvest moon, with a few multiplayer pseudo-social aspects ala World of Warcraft and the late Everquest. Oddly, it's marketed at children.

Which is terrifying, and hilarious. Every five minutes a duck or cat or some thing runs up and asks me to write him a new catch phrase. Obviously enough, my animals can't say a good old fashioned swear. Or the more creative "twat waffle" but "douche bag" and "cum guzzler" made it past the censor.

Another interesting feature is the letter writing system. Somewhere, someday, an impressionable youth may meet a kangaroo that shows him the letter,

"Dear Astrid, Fuck you! Fuck you with something hard and sand paper-y!
Go die.
Love, DLP"

Much more likely, it will probably be someone I actually know who decided to Wi-Fi with me. So when a vulgar, provocatively dressed animal shows up in your town, brandishing hate mail - you'll think of me. And what a twisted person I probably really am when I don't think anyone is looking.

Dante's Inferno

It's hard not to like Dante's Inferno. It feels familiar, cool monsters, bad-ass hero. The controls are tight, the music is eerie and memorable. The puzzles are mostly fun, and are rarely frustrating. The camera can be glitchy and for graphics this nice, and an enviorment this intricate and stylized, it would have been nice to have some controll over it. It takes some getting used to useing RB instead of X or B. I'm not going to pick at the differences from the poem, or the similarities to God of War. Kratos moved a lot like The Prince of Persia, who moved a lot like Laura Croft, who moved a lot like someone else anyway.

Making my through Hell I kept waiting to see George Bush, Hitler and Thomas Edison - but apart from saying "bitch" and "tits" they really did stay pretty true to time period. I won't give any spoilers, but I will say that adding a To Be Continued at the end of your game is kind of sleazy and cheap. Like begging for another $50 from the player for next year, for quite possibly the exact same experiance. I'm not sure how Dante would hack up Pergatory and Heaven, and I don't think I want him to. The story and the ending could have been much more fufilling if the team had focused on making the title stand alone.

Turned On

Hello, and welcome to my little corner of cyber space. I've got big plans for it. Game reveiws, tech help for the red ring of death and homebrew to name a few and my own cute, nerdy rantings.