mehblog

Well, I’ve had my 360 since Friday. I haven’t played on it a vast amount, but here are my initial thoughts.

The console itself looks fine. Certainly more styled than its predecessor. No gripes there.

The power supply is enormous! No really, its huge. Got to be the biggest one I’ve every seen. There have been reports of overheating but I’ve not had any issues on that front.

Games; I got Project Gotham Racing 3 and Perfect Dark: Zero. The former is great. Really like. Fantastic gfx. Great gameplay. I haven’t ventured onto xbox live as yet, but as I have a gold account, my offline scores get recorded online and I can see how I’m doing against everyone else. Which is nice.

Perfect Dark: Zero however wasn’t really my bag. I’m not a huge fan of shooters on consoles generally. With this game, I wasn’t ‘feeling it’. The game looks pretty, but I really couldn’t get into it. I’ve exchanged it for Call of Duty 2. COD2 looks great also and I’m having fun playing it.

So, all good really.

I got a call from HMV on wednesday to let me know that they had a 360 core system with my name on it if I wanted it. I had to think about that (for about 2 seconds) and went ahead and reserved it.

The surprising thing for me was that I had been allocated one at all as I only reserved it about a month ago. At that time there were reports all over the web that most places had stopped taking preorders early September.

So, I’ll be dropping a few quid this afternoon on the core system, a headset and a memory card. I’ll think about the harddrive, wireless controller and all that in the new year I think.

Games wise, PGR3 and Perfect Dark are my top choices. King Kong has been getting some very good reviews too …

Update this evening on first impressions (assuming it doesnt get given away to someone else before I pick it up of course).

The recent announcement of video calling in Skype 2.0 prompted me to download it and have a look

For some reason I haven’t looked at it before.

Anyway, downloaded it and it worked first time, something I have yet to see with other voip providers.

The interface is polished, theres no setup to speak of and their pricing is very competitive as far as I can tell (I primarily use voip to call the family back in Ireland, none of whom have a landline…).

Good stuff.

Well I probably won’t be able to afford the real thing for christmas, but maybe one of these will do.

We’ve been using Asterisk here in the office for several months now. It handles our voip phones and also incoming faxes.

We have always had a problem with the fax line ‘jamming’. Every now and then the fax would get stuck while receiving a fax. To rectify this we would have to restart asterisk.

This morning one of our clients couldn’t get a fax to us. It kept jamming at our end. They must have tried about four or fives times. Same problem each time.

So I decided to try and fix this problem.

To cut a long and boring post short, I found this posting to the Asterisk Users mailing list which has a fix. It involves increasing the gain on the card that has the fax line.

I gave it a go and on the next attempt the client’s fax came through perfectly. Coincidence?

Perhaps, but this tip from Paul is definitely worth a look.