There are a whole great new set of features, my favourites are below… note that some of these are not available in non-LIVE locales.

1. Avatars

Avatars are no longer just for the console but are escaping out onto the web and Windows Phone 7. With the new Avatar Editor you can create your own avatar or modify your existing one with a new easy-to-use interface from your browser.

The new Avatar Marketplace lets you search and find cool items for your avatar to wear and try them on right-there in the search pages. Head on in either by game or by lifestyle (brands) (click the little grid icon to see sub-brands such as your own university’s sports team!).

Because these guys are 3D animated they require Silverlight to be installed on your machine (the streaming videos on xbox.com also require it)

2. Marketplace search & results

A brand new search function means we get much better results than before, fuzzy matching and some dynamic filtering options that appear on the left-hand side letting you dig down into family friendly games (e.g. bt game ratings).

Another cool use is to search for your favourite band and see what tracks and packs they have available. Then head to the game filter on the left to see only the ones that work with your game (e.g. Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Dance Central etc!)

When you visit the product detail page it now shows the images and streaming video inline (goodbye popups) as well as game add-ons showing which games they work with – useful for those music track packs!

3. Hand-picked promotions

Our content teams can now put together collections of themed hand-picked games, add-ons etc. that you can you filter, sort and explore from such as the new Kinect games or family-friendly fun (these will be per-region so might not exist in yours yet).

Gold and family gold members should keep an eye out for Gold exclusive offers or pricing!

4. Streamlined account creation

It’s now easier-than-ever to sign up for a free Xbox live account. Less questions, less steps and we’ll give you a randomly-generated gamertag you can change for free later when you’ve had chance to decide on the perfect name for your game-playing alter-ego. (We’ve seen some fun auto-generated ones during the development cycle including FirmJunk,

5. Compare games with your friends

Okay, you could compare games before but the new UI is better and there’s a cool hidden feature that lets you compare against multiple people at the same time.

To do this head into My Xbox’s Game Center and choose a friend to compare with. Now, notice the url at the top of the page? Put a comma after it and another gamertag to see three… or another comma and a gamertag to see all four (the maximum) side-by-side.

6. Family center

New with this update is the Gold Family Pack which lets you get four gold subscriptions for $99 a year and lots of cool family features including play time reports, gifting points, allowances etc.

There are a whole host of extra features to be seen at xbox.com including mobile-to-web gaming, improved messaging, simplified UI etc. so go check them out!

[)amien

I can now exclusively reveal more! You may recognize some from projects you’ve already worked on but didn’t know had a name much less a recognized methodology.

ADD, Agro Driven Development

Developers code features directly proportional to the amount of heat they are getting from users, sales or managers. Results in a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.

CDD, Clone Driven Design

Features and design are achieved by cloning somebody else’s product thereby removing the pesky overhead of having to come up with ideas of your own. Sure fire way to stay firmly behind the leader.

EDD, Ego Driven Design

Where the direction of the project is dictated purely on an individuals ego and their ability to shout long and hard until they get their own way. The individual involved is rarely the target audience for the product which is often the ego-bruising trigger in the first place.

GDD, Golf Driven Design

Where features and specifications are agreed on the golf course by people who neither use the software nor are responsible for implementing it but want to write off the whole trip as a business expense. With any luck they won’t check the final product.

LDD, Lunch Driven Development

Where features, goals and APIs are decided over lunch by the developers and users who care enough to meet up over their lunch-time. Lunch must not be provided or you stray into Golf Driven Design instead.

PDD, Psychic Driven Development

Where specifications are not so much decided through real communication but rather obtained via a psychic link with potential users with mixed results. Often seen in conjunction with Ego Driven Design.

QDD, Query Driven Development

Every page or screen starts with a question to the user what they want to see, writing that as a SQL/LINQ query statement and then dumping results out via a simple UI. Would likely be better off in Access or Excel but people involved want to claim they have intraweb experience.

XDD, Xenophobic Driven Development

Where the majority of development time is given over to making sure others can’t do anything BUT what the original developers wanted. Typically observed by large sets of exception messages, the absence of hooks and a sprinkling of the sealed keyword.

YDD, Yesterday Driven Development

Features added today are the ones the customers thought they were getting yesterday. Generally used in very-tight rapid methodologies.

ZDD, Zzzzz Driven Development

Every waking hour is given over to the development process at the expense of quality and design ideas that are only appreciated by the sleep-deprived. Normally observed on tight schedules such as those in the gaming industry.

[)amien

In the mean time I’ve been entertaining myself with the following comedy gems until I can at least find a proxy server in the UK to let me back into iPlayer (BBC) and Catch-Up (Channel 4) so I can watch QI, Top Gear and Grand Designs.

Podcasts

Adam & Joe – highlights from their BBC Radio 6 show has me laughing out loud in the office sometimes to the bemusement of colleagues.

Jonathan Ross – more highlights this time from Jonathan’s Saturday morning show that is always worth a giggle.

Comics

Weebl & Bob – two egg-shaped friends make sense of a purple world that never has enough pie but an abundance of silly voices, ninja pirates and tiny bovines.

Joy of Tech – geek cartoons from some Apple loving talent.

Pictures

ICanHasCheezBurger – because there’s no such thing as too many pictures of cute cats with crazy captions aka Lolcats. (My own attempt shown at the top of this post)

Videos

Fonejacker – George just needs your bank account details and sort code for your gas refund (3 million Ugandan dollars) and the sales pitch of Internet service providings who offer a better level of Internet service providing.

MineSweeper The Movie – the only computer game left to convert into a movie. (Well, except for Half-Life which is just dying for a good movie). Some of the other strips on this site include Street Fighter: The Later Years.

Zero Punctuation – video game reviews full of more great English humor, quip and amusing animations to take your favorite games down a peg.

[)amien

Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series were both spot on, Paycheck was very much off the mark.

Here’s a few in the pipeline or already released elsewhere but yet to hit the UK.

Stardust (2007)

One of my favourite authors, Neil Gaiman, wrote a grown-up fairytale about a star that falls to Earth (a little like 10th Kingdom but with less comedy).

Much of the cast, the directory and writing team are all English although the ‘star’ role goes to the very lovely American Sienna Miller. The film is scheduled for an October 19th release here in the UK and is already out stateside.

Neil also has Beowulf and Coraline coming out in 2007 and 2008 respectively.

Northern Lights / The Golden Compass (2007)

The first book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series will no doubt be compared to Harry Potter in that it is a series aimed at children, features magic and has a strong female character in the lead. The similarities extend to the first book in the series having a different name in the USA and England but thankfully end there.

Whilst the casting of the film looks good abandoning the religious aspects is worrying – why DO the directors and film companies feel the need to excise or alter important parts of source material that has already proven a commercial success?

Cross your fingers and hope it hasn’t lost too much for the UK release on December 7th.

I Am Legend (2007)

Will Smith is leading the role as the last human being alive on the planet after a condition turns the rest of the population into vampires. He goes hunting by day whilst they sleep and ensures his home is fortified for the nightly onslaught when they wake.

Richard Matheson penned the novella in 1954, any novel still in print 50+ years after it was written signals to me the book must be good.

One worry is that Hollywood will turn this into a massive in-your-face action flick instead of the brooding horror of the book. The trivia at IMDB notes large budgets, sets and military vehicles/extras so this is a very distinct possibility. Hollywood have done this several times with Philip K Dick’s books and just not getting the point that his stories show ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

We will find out here in the UK January 4th and Mr Matheson has The Box and The Incredible Shrinking Man due out in 2008.

The Golden Man / Next (2007)

Philip K Dick’s book is the story of a golden man, the next evolution of humanity, who can see into the near future and his attempt at escaping his pursuers (kind of like the escape scene in Minority Report).

Not technically forthcoming as it hit the UK shores in April but I missed it being that it had a totally different name to the book. Being that the guy who can see into the future is now a Las Vegas magician played by Nicholas Cage I’m not sure I’ll bother.

If there was a point to the book about how we will react to our own evolution it’s lost. Perhaps Hollywood think that’s been covered enough by the X-Men franchise.

Altered Carbon (2009 ?)

Richard K. Morgan writes the story of one Takeshi Kovacks, an ex-military elite soldier in a future where your body is easily replaced providing the metal backup device implanted in the base of your skull is in tact. Kovacks is egotistical, violent and methodical in his new job as a private investigator seeking out why his rich client apparently committed suicide (and was promptly restored from backup but lost some essential hours).

The book is gritty and certainly not aimed at children. Would Hollywood pay the big bucks required to get the imagery right for such a grand undertaking of a film that would be limited to an adult/18 category is unlikely but somebody has the rights and is penning in a 2009 release date.

If the film is a success there are two more books in the series which will demand grander sets and even larger budgets.

Rendezvous with Rama (2009 ?)

Morgan Freeman picked up the rights to Arthur C. Clarke’s fantastic novel about a large cylindrical object that enters our solar system briefly and the subsequent exploration of it’s interior but has seemingly done little since.

There used to be a web site with some renders and notes but that has long since gone and the ‘producers are still working on the adaptation’ and Morgan’s schedule seems to indicate he is rather busy on other projects.

Morgan claims that part of the delay is getting a studio on board that doesn’t want to turn it into an action movie (great news and can be a success as Contact shows) and that they are still working on the script (get David Peoples on the case).

Whilst the film is on a grand scale it would probably be relatively cheap to film as most of it could be green-screened against rendered backgrounds being that everything inside Rama is not man-made anyway.

[)amien

Here’s a few tricks that may… or may not cause some amusement. Just make sure you step in before they need to call their IT support guy!

Simulated operating system crash

An operating system crash sends a shiver up the most confident of spines.

Windows Blue Screen of Death

Install the SysInternals teams BlueScreen Screen Saver complete with genuine looking reboot sequence.

Mac OS X Kernel Panic

Try out Doomlaser’s Kernel Panic Screensaver although be prepared for genuine confusion at their first exposure to an operating system crash ;-)

Confused keyboard

If they are a hunt-and-peck typist confuse them by swapping a few keys around on their keyboard (make sure it lets you pull the tops off, some of them don’t and leaving them with a broken keyboard isn’t fun at all).

An alternative if the keyboard doesn’t allow you to remove the key tops or if they’re a touch-typist is to change the keyboard map to one similar but not the same. Favourites include US for Brits and and British for Americans if you want something very subtle that may take a few hours to be noticed (when they hit some symbols, pound signs etc.) or German for something a bit quicker (W and Z reversed).

Head to the Windows Control Panel or Mac System Preferences to activate.

Permanent hourglass (Windows)

A simple trick that just involves heading into Control Panel > Mouse Properties then choosing the Pointers tab and double clicking on Normal Select. From there choose hourglas.ani

Google goes abroad

Google remembers which language you you last used so simply head to something like http://www.google.com/ru (Russian), http://www.google.com/cy (Welsh) or http://www.google.com/fr (French) then close the Window and walk away.

Any further visits will show in that language, even searches made from the built-in boxes of Internet Explorer and Firefox. To set back head to http://www.google.com/en (English) or whatever language you normally use.

Swap short cuts (Windows)

Choose properties on either the desktop, start-menu or quick launch icon they use to launch their favourite applications and change the target to a different but perhaps similar application. i.e. iTunes and Windows Media, Word and WordPad, Excel and PowerPoint. They’ll probably think they hit the wrong icon or that something has messed up the file associations.

Change the display gamma

Head into Control Panel > Display (Windows) or System Preferences > Display (Mac) and adjust the gamma or colour profile for their display. No amount of fiddling with the displays brightness or contrast settings will get it quite back to how it was.

Jeff Atwood has futher suggestions for people who don’t lock their machines. Remember kids, Windows Key + L is your friend.

[)amien

Music you don’t know the name of

If you get a song in your head you’d like but don’t know what it is then Midomi might be what you are looking for.

The site takes 10 seconds or more of your attempts at singing or humming the track and then tries to match it against the songs it knows about. The catalogue isn’t particularly comprehensive right now but it has a reasonable selection of tracks. You can also help it improve results by singing a fragment of a song that it will use for matching providing you don’t mind anyone being able to listen to it.

Educational tracks for free

This May Apple launched iTunes U – a section of the iTunes Store featuring free educational content from various US colleges and universities.

The tracks are mostly unedited and lack polish but some of the content covers everything from philosophy to economics and technology so there should be something to interest you.

Audio books for free

• Simply Audiobooks have a small selection their library available for free as well as a rental club and purchasing options that ship physical media. The download club option is not compatible with the iPod. (Microsoft’s PlaysForSure is worst name ever – it doesn’t play on the iPod or Microsoft’s own Zune)
• LibriVox use volunteers to record chapters of books available in the public domain and put the completed audio books up in mp3 and ogg formats. The quality of speaker can be variable and the content spans classical literature.

Podcasts for free

The podcast scene just keeps growing but finding what suits you can be tricky. My favourites currently include:

• BBC Focus podcast of the popular monthly science and technology magazine
• DotNetRocks developer podcast with guests including Phil Hack, Rob Conery, Jeff Atwood, Scott Guthrie and Miguel de Icaza
• Productive Talk – an 8-episode podcast with David Allen on the subject of Getting Things Done (GTD)

Improve audio quality with iTunes Plus

Apple’s plan to remove digital rights management (DRM) whilst increasing audio quality on iTunes gains momentum with music publishers each day – no doubt enticed on by the increased margin and ability to get an extra few pence or cents from existing owners.

Besides the crisper sound and larger file sizes the other noticeable difference is that iTunes music sharing works with these tracks (Sharing protected AAC involves an authorisation landmine).

Head to the Tunes Plus link in the Quick Links box at the top right of the main store page. You should see an option to upgrade your library if any tracks can be upgraded but bear in mind it’s an all-tracks-or-nothing deal that costs £0.20 per track.

Watch your DVDs

Why not take a DVD you like, or better yet one you haven’t yet seen, with you on your iPod Video.

There are a number of tools to help you with the job of copying from DVD into an iPod friendly format but Handbrake is free, cross-platform and easy to use. As a bonus it also includes presets for other portable video devices such as the PlayStation Portable.

Watch YouTube

Why should iPhone owners have all the phone when the iPod Video is perfectly capable of watching YouTube content providing you upload it to your iPod before you set out.

There are a number of tools to do the download & conversion job but DVDVideoSoft’s one for Windows works quite well. For the Mac the latest 1.9 version of Squared 5 would appear to do the job but I haven’t yet tried it.

[)amien

• Ideal for the four instruments (Drummer, Singer, Guitarists) – no Bittersweet Symphony
• Well known enough that you all feel the music – no obscure bands or tracks
• Attention keeping – no massive 2-minute intros or solos
• Killer guitar track – this is rock after all!
• Not previously featured on Guitar Hero I or II
• Variety – no band more than once plus a mix of 80s, 90s and 00s

So here it is…

1. Opening Licks

• The Passenger – Iggy Pop
• I Predict a Riot – Kasier Chiefs
• Bad Medicine – Bon Jovi
• Wonderwall – Oasis
• All Right Now – Free

2. Amp-Warmers

• Money For Nothing – Dire Straights
• Let Me Entertain You – Robbie Williams
• Paradise City – Guns ‘n Roses
• Somebody Told Me – The Killers
• It’s Been Awhile – Staind

3. String-Snappers

• Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana
• Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Green Day
• Going Down/Love in an Elevator – Aerosmith
• Bohemian Like You – The Dandy Warhols
• Holy Water – Bad Company

4. Thrash and Burn

• Summer of 69 – Bryan Adams
• Eye of the Tiger – Survivor
• Darts of Pleasure – Franz Ferdinand
• Inside – Stiltskin
• Sk8er Boi – Avril Lavigne

5. Return of the Shred

• Poison – Alice Cooper
• All The Small Things – Blink-182
• Walk This Way – Run DMC
• Danger! High Voltage – Electric Six
• In The End – Linkin Park

Okay so there is no way they’d ever put so many great tracks in one game – they’d be worried you’d not buy the next one to get more tracks and so we’ll get second-rate filler just like the record companies have been doing with albums for years.

Most of these are available at the iTunes store so enjoy my first iMix entitled Dream Rock Band.

[)amien

The latest secret under suppression is a short 16-byte key which locks away the content on HD-DVD discs that only licensed software and hardware can play it back and prevent you from making copies.

This type of protection used to be called copy-protection but these days it goes under the equally unpopular name of "Digital Rights Management (DRM)". It enforce the copyright holders rights whilst denying you yours and does it in such a way that in some countries re-asserting your legal rights means you end up breaking others.

The AACS Licencing Authority believe they can now protect by law what they failed to protect using technology. This is particularly amusing because their predecessor, the DVD-CCA, failed on both counts when the encryption on DVD was broken in 1999 by an enterprising trio. Apple gets it and is going down the DRM-free route and not treating their customers like criminals.

Basing an entire business model on keeping a sequence of characters secret defies belief and thinking you can wipe the secret off the face of the internet once it’s out is laughable especially when you consider the infinite number of ways you could represent it. The AACS are at it anyway with take down notices to the likes of Digg and others. Amusingly the take down notice itself includes the ‘magic key’.

Alternative 16-byte sequence where each byte is an offset on the previous one is "09 F0 18 F1 9B D7 6F 78 7D 69 15 6F 9E F3 32 38" which if run through the following program yields a certain magic key.

class Program {
    static void Main(string[] argv) {
        byte b = 0;
        string key = string.Empty;
        foreach(string a in argv) {
            b += byte.Parse(a, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.HexNumber);
            key += string.Format("{0:x2} ", b);
        }
        System.Console.WriteLine(key);
    }
}

[)amien

Despite reservations we’ve found ourselves jumping around performing a variety of silly stances, head bops and special moves whilst we attempt to strum ‘n chord in time to the tricky yet rewarding tracks available. Once we got a second guitar and hit the co-operative (one bass, one lead) and VS modes (turns each or both together) then out-performing the other player off-screen as well as on became an integral part of the game.

The line-up of songs is a little disappointing – when there is one “made famous” by a well known band then it tends to be one of their less famous song. I say “made famous” as the game clearly points it out they are, alas, cover versions bar a small handful.

Extra tracks are available on-line in packs of 3 for 500 MSP‘s each. These are again cover versions presumably due to the developer being unable to licence the original audio mix to the songs so that they can cut out the guitar and bass lines when you fail to hit the right combination of colourful buttons and strum in time.

One pleasant surprise is that the guitar is just a normal USB device and can be used under Windows once the Xinput common controller driver is installed or on the Mac using TattieBogle’s Xbox 360 OS X driver.

Why would you want to do that? To play the free cross-platform Guitar Hero clone Frets on Fire with all the fan-created songs of course!

Whilst there are plans for Guitar Hero: 80s Edition and Guitar Hero III the franchise is being handed over to Activision’s Neversoft team (Tony Hawks) as they bought the rights to the name when they snapped up Guitar Hero’s publisher Red Octane.

Original music-game-only developer Harmonix aren’t whining about it or heading to the courts, oh no. They are fighting back with Rock Band that throws drums and vocals on top of lead and bass guitars.

Fantastic!

[)amien
PS: Under no circumstances consider playing either game with a keyboard or a regular controller – the experience just isn’t the same.

Simon Pegg plays Nicholas Angel – one of the Metropolitan Police’s finest. The problem is he’s so good he’s making the rest of the force service look bad in comparison so he is quickly dispatched to the idyllic village of Sandford out in the countryside.

Angel soon meets the local constabulary who are used to dealing with the odd escaped goose or accident and have their own interpretation of alcohol and gun laws. Long-time friend and former flatmate Nick Frost stars as local officer Danny Butterman who images city policing to be much like Point Break and Bad Boys II.

Director Edgar Wright produces plenty of slick visuals much in the style of those found in Shaun of the Dead and Spaced albeit more action based yet finds time to slip in plenty of grisly deaths as the plot unfolds and the body count starts to rise as a bizarre series of ‘accidents’ befouls residents of this sleepy hamlet.

There are plenty of laughs including physical slapstick, in-jokes and movie references though it has lost some of the magical charm Shaun of Spaced possess. Despite the setting being firmly English west-country it feels like the script was written with more of an international/American mainstream audience in mind with both the plot and the genre nods being spelt out so much as characters holding DVD’s of the film to the camera and reading the tag-lines.

Some moments playing up to the action genre cliche go on too long – like talking slowly at the end of a joke hoping for someone to get it an laugh. Shave that down a bit and slip in a few more jokes and it would have been perfect but nether less worth the wait and certainly recommended providing you don’t mind a bit of gore in with your comedy. Adam Buxton (half of the legendary Adam & Joe Show) goes out in the most horrific way I’ve seen in a while (but then I avoid horror films :D)

Overall highly enjoyable and probably the best film I’ve seen so far this year – although it is only February.

Alas given the likely success this and the prior success of Shaun there is almost zero chance of that elusive third series of Spaced.

[)amien