About

I read a book once called Zen and the art of motorcycle maintaiainece. The premis of the book is

“In the book, the Narrator describes the “Romantic” approach to life of his friend John Sutherland, who chooses not to learn how to maintain his expensive new motorcycle. John simply hopes for the best with his bike, and when problems do occur he often becomes frustrated, and is forced to rely on professional mechanics to repair it. In contrast, the “classical” Narrator has an older motorcycle which he is usually able to diagnose and repair himself through the use of rational problem solving skills.”

This is very much how Tom and I treat Xbox Media Center (or XBMC, as it shall be known from this day forth). Tom likes to hack, take shit apart, get the soldering iron out to pop a few LED’s in, if theres a chip for it he’ll install it. LMAO Mr Modchips once told him after he complained about a dodgy Goob pro for the Gamecube “You’ll never buy another chip on the internet again”. Needless to say a few weeks later he sourced a very hard to get panasonic Q

It’s basically a Gamecube with a DVD player built-in. Poor Tom got it off eBay for about 200 notes. He decided to put a Goob in it. Well if you’ve ever taken a gamecube apart you’ll know its bastard. Theres a lot packed into a small space with umpteen ribbon cables connecting a modular system. Well the “Q” is all that and a DVD player. We hunkered down with a Soldering iron. We’d run out of Braids so I was on solder sucker duty. I can’t quite remember the chain of events. I’d probably been drinking and smoking and I may have accidentally solder suckered a micro resistor. Which may or……. may not have led to the demise of a RARE Panasonic Q

I’m different. I’ve tried tho, don’t get me wrong. We’ve modded XBOX 1′s and sold em on eBay. Even had a customer outside with his mum while we kack (look it up) handedly soldered an Xecuter chip in a box bought from cash generators. But I’ve mellowed. I don’t wanna fuck around. I want it to work out of the box, to up date. I NEED my Mrs to be able to swith it on, find what she needs and play it with having to call IT.

Not long after we got into modding our xbox’s we realised you could have XBMC as the main dashboard. It was pretty obvious that it was leaps ahead of anything else for playing media in the lounge. And this 5 yr ago. We onaly got into it during the last year or so before the 360 came out. There are still people using that same build of XBMC we flogged em “back in the day”

The next media center that entered the home was a popcorn hour A11o. It pretty much plays anything. You can hack it up a bit by installing a web browser and even get an AEON like skin to display. Tom got his Revo 3600 and donated it to me. It’s now an SMB file server waiting for a shiny new 2TB drive.

I finally got my 3700 a couple of months ago and havent look back since.

This blog is gonna be about our experiences with this stunning hardware/software combination and other hackish type shizzle from two somewhat different angles. Oh and don’t be fooled our name doesn’t suggest we watch our media centers at 420p its more a reference to our herb. We are both passionate about cannabis and its medicinal qualities. We’ll try to keep a lid on it but it may get a bit political around here and we may drop the odd cypress track!