Xbox Avatars on your desktop

So last November Microsoft introduced the New Xbox Experience (NXE) and along with it, the addition of Avatars. Now we can have little digital versions of ourselves on our 360's. Additionally a few websites have made use of them as well (for example www.360voice.com displays your avatar on your Xbox's blog page).

I wanted to be able to check out the avatar's of some of my friends on XBL, and I thought it would be cool to have them on my desktop. From this, a Perl script for doing so was born.

For example, right now my desktop on my netbook looks like:


As you can see, the avatar's (and gamercards!) for 4 of my friends are drawn on my wallpaper. This script which started off so simple, has now become quite complex (as most programming projects do), and is quite versatile. You can now:

• Specify the number of columns of gamers (in the above screenshot this is set to 1, but you could have 2 or 3 or as many columns of avatar's and gamercards as you want)
• Set the opacity (transparency) of the avatar's so that you could have your background image partially show through.
• Have as many or as few gamers as you wish
• Change the card look by specifying a different base URL from MyGamerCard.net
• Output the image in 8 bit, 24 bit, or 32 bit colour depth
• Output the image as a PNG file or Windows BMP
• Only generate an image consisting of Avatars & gamercards or have them drawn on a suppplied background image (in GIF, JPEG or PNG format)
• Specify the width & height of avatar's and/or gamercards
• And much more
  

The script itself is written in Perl, and runs fine with v5.10.x of ActivePerl for Windows (if using older versions, you'll need to install the GD library as well). It is command-line driven and intended for relatively "advanced" users. For help:

perl genWall.pl -?

will show all the options. And lastly the script itself can be found at:

http://webhome.csc.uvic.ca/~aparkin/xbox/genWall.zip

And it is released under the conditions of the GNU Public License (GPL), so is free to use and modify as you see fit. Enjoy!

My streak is now done....

Well, I was on quite a roll this year, keeping a (I think) pretty impressive achievement streak going, but alas, as the cliche goes, all good things must come to an end. I'm currently away from home in the Kooteneys doing a combination of work and visiting family. I brought a 360 with me, but after the 9+ hour drive yesterday I didn't find the time to get any gaming in and as a result my 216 day achievement streak came to an end.

I really gotta tip my hat to people like Knuckles Dawson who did close to 2 solid years getting at least one achievement a day. That's incredible perseverance.

Oh well, maybe now I'll get that masters degree finished. :p

Some stats about my streak:

• Length: 216 days (Dec 31, 2007 to Aug 2, 2008)
• Total Gamerscore gained: 33,808
• Total Number of achievements: 1,475
• Number of Games 100% Completed during the streak: 23 (20 retail and 3 arcade)
  

And for the record, during my streak I also was doing full time studies at the University of Victoria working on my masters degree. I'm also married, to a wonderful woman who for some strange reason didn't divorce me even though I spent many an evening cursing at pixelated bad guys on the TV. I also taught in the months January to April. So yes, I did have a life while doing this.

Xbox Live Orientation

Came across this while watching the latest Sessler's Soapbox. It's a funny vid of a hypothetical Xbox Live Orienation, and it's gets everything just about completely bang on.

http://www.g4tv.com/xplay/videos/21418/Xbox_Live_Orientation.html

Spyglass Board Games Achievement Guide

Okay, I've written up a short little achievement guide for the Xbox Live Arcade game "Spyglass Board Games". It can be found at:

http://www.gamertagblog.com/get/333/SpyglassAchList.txt

Enjoy!

What Geeks Do On Holiday

I'm currently on holidays up in the Kooteneys of beautiful British Columbia, Canada. Specifically, I'm hanging out at the in-laws place in a small town called Kaslo. However, I wanted to share with the world how us geeks do things differently. Most people when visiting a summer town in the month of July enjoy the sunshine, go swimming, hiking, enjoy the beautiful outdoors (and believe me, the scenery here is truly breathtaking).

Geeks, like myself, however instead spend their time writing documents on lambda calculus to appear in their master thesis'. Or even more so, when they get tired of actual work, they decide they want to play some Xbox.

However, the router that my father-in-law uses to connect to the Internet is in a different room than the TV I get to use for my Xbox. But wait, I want my E3 downloads, how can I possibly download them if I cannot connect my 360 to the Internet?

If you're a non-geek you go out and fork over the $100+ for the Xbox 360 wireless adaptor. If you're a geek, and you have a laptop with an Ethernet jack and a wireless network adaptor, an old 10BaseT hub, and a few network cables, you jerry-rig your 360 to connect through your laptop. :)

I'm writing this while sitting in a small bedroom with my 360 hooked up to an old VCR which is hooked up to an old 22" or so TV. The 360 is also plugged into an old 10BaseT network hub, a hub which my laptop is also plugged into. I'm using all 4 sets of power outlets in the room (because there's A) so many devices I have floating around in here, and B) because most of them have big power plugs/adaptors which limits the ability to have more than one device in a wall outlet). There's wires all over the floor.

BUT, I'm also writing this blog entry, while downloading the Halo 3 E3 2007 trailer on Xbox Live. In short -- this is paradise!

When the holiday ends is in a half hour or so when my wife comes downstairs to watch her show (Men In Trees) on the laptop. "Sorry hon, but you can't take the laptop upstairs -- I'm downloading on the 360!"

My 360 is dead.......

Well, it would appear that the Xbox gods are not smiling upon me as I am now getting the dreaded 3 rings indicating that my 360 has failed about 3 days after the spring dashboard update. I know it's a bit of a logical fallacy to assume that because the failure occurred after the update that the update was the cause, but it really is hard to not assume that this is the case.

So this morning I called MS's customer service, and I gotta say I was actually pleasantly surprised. It was one of the most positive experiences I've ever had with a customer service department. I was on hold for at most 5 minutes, and the person I dealt with (Auriel?) was very helpful (even if she was a bit hard to understand at times). I've heard some nasty horror stories, but mine (at least so far) has been great.

When my first 360 died I had to deal with the replacement via the store's extended warranty policy and *THAT* was a nightmare (took about a month from the time I took it in to the time I got it back, it voided the extended warranty, etc). For the record that was Future Shop (which is essentially the Canadian version of Best Buy since they are now owned by the same ownership group).

I am wondering though how alone I am, how many people out there have also had their consoles "brick" after the spring update?

Marvel Ultimate Alliance Downloadable Content Achievement Guide

As some of you know a set of new characters was released for Marvel Ultimate Alliance for the Xbox 360. This DLC also added 12 new achievements so I wrote up a short little guide to getting them. Click here for the guide....

100 Straight Days of Xbox Love

So as you might have noticed by the entries on the right-hand side, my Xbox 360 has it's own blog at 360voice.com For those unfamiliar with the site, what happens is the site uses the feeds from Microsoft which keep track of what games you play, which achievements you got, etc, and reports them in a blog-like format. In addition various "badges" and stats are reported. Yesterday was a big day for my Xbox, as it was the 100th consecutive day I played at least 1 game with it. In addition there were a few other highlights:

• 100 straight day of playing
• Passed the 17K gamerscore mark
• Another 1000+ gamerscore change day (I played through TMNT, as well as got a couple Gears achievments)
• Completed a retail game (TMNT), which should give me the 10 retail games completed badge for 360Voice
• New personal high for most achievements in a day (26)
  

My only beef about the entry was that achievement for Marvel wasn't actually earned yesterday, but on a day when there were no entries built (but I did play Marvel yesterday so it appears in the list).

Anyways, quick link to my 360's blog:

http://360voice.com/blog-view.asp?id=18240502

And for those of you with Xbox's, go sign up for a blog for your 360, it's a hoot to read!

NHL 2K7 Achievement Guide

Forgot to post this, I wrote it a couple of months ago. It's an achievement guide for NHL 2K7 for the Xbox 360, and outlines some easy ways to get most of the achievements. Click here for the guide...

Xbox360: Heavy Weapon Achievement Guide

I'm over on the http://www.achieve360points.com website, and came up with an achievement guide for Heavy Weapon Atomic Tank, and thought I'd put it up on here. You can find it by clicking here

My Xbox misses me

I'm currently on holidays up in the Kooteneys of British Columbia (actually I'm here to get married, but that's a whole other story....), as a result while my 360 is with me and has been getting used, it hasn't been hooked up to the Internet. My Xbox's blog is getting pretty comical, check it out at:

http://360voice.com/blog.asp?tag=Pedle%20Zelnip

(360Voice.com is a cool site which gives your Xbox a blog which reports things like what games you played, achievements earned etc)

GamerCard Python script

Thought I'd share this with the world, I wrote a simple little command-line script in Python that given a Xbox gamer id shows the data from the user's gamercard. For example, output for my id (Pedle Zelnip) would be:

Your gamertag is Pedle Zelnip
Your GamerScore is 2510
You are a Silver member of Xbox Live
Your zone is Recreation
The last few games you've played are:
- Geometry Wars Evolved
- GALAGA
- King Kong
- Hexic HD
- Cloning Clyde

No, I'm not a member of the XCDP, this was all done just by examining the public http://gamercard.xbox.com/YOURGAMERID.card URL (of course as a result if MS ever changes the format of gamercards, my code may very well break). If you want to check it out, you can grab it from:

http://www.csc.uvic.ca/~aparkin/python/gamerCard.py

Usage is just "python gamerCard.py userid" where userid is the user you want to check out.