Matt Charlton

Towards the end of November the Fall update for the Xbox 360 will be released. 

Traditionally this has contained a large number of bugfixes with the occasional new feature.  Last year saw the support (finally) for xvid avi files and a number of other things. 

Over the last few months it has become apparent to anyone using an Xbox 360, particulary for marketplace purchases that something isn’t quite right.  Due to the way that the spoke and menu selection systems work, once you get a lot of content, it can be very hard to navigate through and find exactly what you want.  Browsing XBLA (Xbox Live Arcade) titles can be very tedious. 

Details on what exactly will be changing can be found here:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/nxe/

We’re getting avatars and allsorts :p

Towards the end of last week, Major Nelson – Microsoft’s Xbox Live Directory of Programming posted a tweet with a teaser to keep an eye on his blog because news of how people can get the NXE would be appearing shortly. 

Sure enough on Friday night I checked majornelson.com and found the details and a link to the survey you had to fill out.  I signed up and started to fill the survey out, then noticed I needed my console ID.  I was in York and the 360 was back in Bradford.  FAIL.

I gave it up as a bad job and by the morning signups were full anyway.  Oh well, I can wait a few weeks it doesn’t matter.

When I got home today, I decided to have a look, just to see if the signups were still closed.  I clicked the link and signed into Microsoft Connect to see the same error message as other people have been seeing.  The only difference was I had a link in the side bar to “available surveys” – the NXE one was there, probably because I’d started it but not submitted. 

Filled out the info and sent in – we’ll see if I make the cut when the emails get sent out at the end of the week. 

It’d be nice to get to grips with the new features before everyone else.  Will also give me a chance to write a half decent review, which would be fun.

Right then,

320GB hard disk installed.

Play TV set up and working, currently no series link option but you can set recordings to repeat – so for example if you had Coronation Street, you would set up a seperate recording for each instance and put it on weekly repeat. 

I expect series linking and things to come in future software updates.  They said they were going to update it fairly often.

It will only record one thing at once.  Not a massive, massive thing I guess.  If we’re mostly recording things from terrestrial, all four channels (the ones that matter) have catch up online.  We’re keeping the 20mb broadband so thats not a massive issue.  Theres even an unoffficial PS3 iplayer port. 

Going to do some testing over the next few days with recordings and will probably give Virgin a call in a few days to start negotiating.

As you can probably tell from looking at the right hand side of the page, I’ve made some changes. 

Gone is the picture of Sue and I, this may return – I’m still pondering.  I’ve added a few widgets to allow various things. 

My latest tweet will show in the top right, sometimes this might state I’ve posted a new blog post or a new picture, it’ll look weird on here but it means facebook is updated with whatever is going on here.

I’ve also added a last.fm widget which shows either what I’m listening to at that very moment or the last thing I listened to – very nifty.

The final widget I’ve added provides me with visitor statistics.  I don’t get very many comments on my posts, I seem to use a lot of bandwidth though, I think a lot of this traffic is due to the photoblog.  People that visit my blog may not be aware of the photos I post, people that visit the photoblog might not be aware of the blog. 

The visitor stats should allow me to see just how many people read this thing – purely out of interest really.  I don’t know if people read what I type, if they do, funky.  If not, I’ll carry on procrastinating…. I think I spelt that right (wordpress spellcheck says yes!)

I often think about blogging about things that are going on in the world, rather than using this as a personal diary thing.  Maybe I will. 

I also need to start using tags so I can get a funky tag cloud.