Xbox media center

Last week I noticed a familiar clicking sound coming from my hard drive. I also noticed that the xbox media center was locking up. This was upsetting because I have to buy a new PATA drive. I found one on newegg:

Western Digital Caviar Blue WD1600AAJB 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - OEM

I just received it yesterday and I connected it to my xbox with my original drive and tried to run the HDD upgrade tool from my Xenium chip. Everything looked good except I kept getting errors saying cancel or ignore. If I kept hitting ignore, the format and copy failed. I plugged it into my pc and it worked just fine. Great. This sucks!

So I did some searching around and found a program called XboxHDM that would make it work. The first website is a repository of all hard drives that did and didn't work for the xbox. It can be found here. Next, I found an online tutorial or a how to use XboxHDM and that can be found here. So tonight I will try this program and see if that works. Otherwise I'm out 50 bucks!

Getting around T-Mobile text messages with G1

So I started poking around the google voice settings for my cell phone. There are two ways to stop SMS messages being forwared to my cell from google voice.

First let me explain how this works. On my G1 I have an app called google voice. I open this app and it looks similar to the email app. I can view all my SMS messages and compose a new one. I've noticed that I can only send txt to one person but eh, it still rocks! Then the person responses to my SMS and it shows up as an SMS message to my phone ( forwarded ) and in my google app. The SMS on my phone comes from a completly different phone number than my friend's number and it pre-appends my friends name as it is spelled in my address book. Last, if I want to SMS that person back through google voice and not using the app, I just SMS back to the same number google sent to me and it gets routed through google to my friend. I'm not sure why someone would want to do that, just that it can be done. So in short, if you have SMS history saved on your G1, you will start seeing strange numbers. Don't worry, those are just the google numbers.

So back to the issue at hand, I first tried changing my phone type in google voice settings to Home. However, with my google voice app loaded the notification never came through ( this might be a fluke but I did wait about 10 mins, and usually it shows up within a minute ) when I received an SMS through google voice.

Second, I changed the type back to cell and unchecked "Receive SMS on this phone (mobile phones only )". That seemed to work because I didn't get the SMS forwared to my phone but I did get a notification from my google voice app! Hooray!!

T-Mobile can go to hell with charging me more than a regular phone data and msg plan! Wouldn't it be awesome if google became a cell phone company? Down with the status quo!!

T-Mobile pisses me off!!

Just got my bill today for last month and I somehow received $27.60 in text messages overages. I checked my account and I went over by 138 messasges. That equals $0.20 a text message!! When I was with ATT it was only $0.05!

So I checked Verizon, T-Mobile, and ATT and here is the break down:

T-Mobile - .20

Verizon - text only .20, Picture/Video Messaging .25

ATT - .05 for the 1500 plan, .10 for the 200 plan

The thing that kills me is how do the text messages cost that much. I mean, really?? And as I was looking around the T-Mobile site, I started creating a new plan with the Motorola Renew and found they have 'unlimited web + Umlimited Messages for phones' for $20.00!!!!This is bullshit that I am paying more just because I have a different phone. I don't think the G1 has a server like blackberry, so why should I pay for it?!?!? And now T-Mobile dropped the 400 txt msg on the $25 plan!!

I'm going to do some searching around and find away around this. I will post my results. I know with ATT I bought a 2 year plan and got a free phone with 20 unlimited internet and text then bought an unlocked N95 and it worked just fine.... I wonder if the same principle applies?

Below are screen shots from each company:

St. Louis T-Mobile 3G finally!!

While at the Green day concert last night I noticed a 3G symbol on my G1! I've seen this before in elevators or out on 55 as a glitch, but I woke up this moring and it was still there!

Now google maps is usable, and web browsing is a pleasant experience. I live inside the 270 loop and I remember hearing that is phase 1. Phase 2 ......... Phase 3, profit! Oh, sorry, phase 2 is west of the 270 ( not sure if this includes St. Charles or not ).