Your Xbox 360 can blog.

Yup, all on it's own. 360voice will monitor your live account for new games being played or movies being watched and generate a personalised blog about your activities. If you don't use your 360 for a while, youcan expect entries complaining of neglect.

It's a pretty pointless website, but a good laugh and something interesting to show your friends and an easy way to compare gamer score (yes, I know 2095 isn't much).It's also a good way of telling when you game too much and need to get more of a life. :P

There are a few nice features including GamerScore Challenges. This involves inviting your friends to see who can gain the most gamerscore in a set period of time which can be a good laugh or seriously compete for prizes.

All in all a fun site, go check it out, sign up, check out my blog, and most importantly, have fun.

PocketMod

I found this nice little diary/organiser a while back while browsing lifehacker and figured I'd share it here.
It's basically a diary made from a folded up piece of paper. It benefits over a normal diary or PDA by being very small, it will easily fit into a back pocket or wallet. You don't need to worry about damaging it and it's completely recyclable.

All you need to do to get one is visit the link at the bottom of this post, click "Create PocketMod" and you're on your way to a stylish pocket diary.
You will be presented with a simple little interface that allows you to drag and drop different page layouts on to any of the eight available pages. The list options it gives you is surprisingly large, it will allow to have anything from simple a week or day per page diary to a randomly generated sudoku puzzle.

PocketMod.

Here's video of folding instructions.

Playing DVDs in Ubuntu 8.04

One of the few annoyances I found when switching from Windows to Linux was the lack of DVD playback support out of the box. DVD playback is not included in Ubuntu due to some legal reason. I'm not sure what this reason is, so if anyone knows feel free to enlighten me in the comments.
Here is how I enabled DVD playback.

To view an unencrypted DVD all you need to do is install these packages:

• libdvdnav4
• libdvdread3

This can either be done using the package manager or in the terminal. The commands for these are:
$ sudo spt-get install libdvdnav4
$ sudo apt-get install libdvdread3

To play encrypted DVDs, i.e commercial DVDs you will need to run the command:
$ sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

When you insert a DVD into your drive it will now open and play automatically using Totem. However, Totem does not support the menu feature of DVDs (lame I know) so you will need to use a different program. I recommend VLC because it's a nice compact player that will happily play pretty much anything you can throw at it.
You could also use something like MPlayer or Kaffeine.

It's a pretty easy process but if you get any problems, leave a comment or drop me a message and I'll see if I can figure out what's wrong.

New Blog and Virtual PCs.

Hi chaps and chapettes, this is going to be my attempt at a TechBlog.
Hopefully I will be able to provide some useful information and guides to help you make the most of your computer.
To start with I'm going to show you how to setup a Virtual PC.

What You will Need.

• A virtual PC program.
  

  - In this tutorial I am using Virtual Box. You could also use something like Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 or VMWare.

• Either an Operating System install disk or ISO.

The Process.

First of all you will need to install Virtual Box. In Windows you just need to download and run the .exe file and follow the instructions. Under Linux (I'm using Ubuntu 8.04) you'll need to open up the terminal and type

$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox

Type in your password and when it prompts you press Y to accept the download and press enter.

When this has finished you can access Virtual Box by navigating to

Applications > System Tools > Virtual Box OSE.

Open up Virtual Box and you will come to this screen:

Click the New button in the top left to open up the New Virtual Machine wizard.

Click Next here.

Give your PC a name and click Next.

Select how much memory to allocate your PC and hit Next again. I've only assigned the default 64Mb but if you plan to use this PC often, I recommend allowing it to use at least 256Mb or more.

Select a virtual Hard Disk or create one if you do not already have one. Hit Next.

Check your details, if they are correct, click Finish, if not then you will need to go back and change whatever is wrong.

Your virtual machine will now be listed in the left hand side of the Virtual Box window.

Highlight your new machine and press Start.

Click Next.

Select your boot media, in this case I will be using an Ubuntu ISO image.

You will be asked to confirm your choice, do so by clicking Finish.

The Virtual Machine will now load the installer for your Operating system of choice. Follow through the OS installation like you would on a normal PC.

There you have it, your own PC within your PC.