ben is on the inter.net

Using my G5 as an external hard drive, originally uploaded by bburbank.

After about 1.5 years of minor graphics card artifacting and the occasional failure, my G5 of 2 years finally killed itself the other day, in the form of permanent heat damage to the graphics card. Yes, this once mighty Xbox 360 dev kit (for about a year before I owned it) would have found its only hope in a new graphics card, which looked like it would have run about $350 (yay, now-ancient AGP-bus).

While my PCs still work fine, I looked around some more and there just isn’t anything that would get me my video-editing-and-music-busting-out abilities like I’d get on the Mac (Final Cut Pro and Garage Band, honestly). I opted instead to replace the G5 with a Mac Mini (came to $700 after my $100 iPhone credit).

For a computer that is roughly 1/20th the size of the G5 tower, I’ve been unreasonably impressed with it so far. I find it pretty incredible that with Connect360 I can stream Xvid off of my smaller-than-a-wii computer to my Xbox 360, which is like, way over there. I’ll just have to do The Right Thing and bump up its hard drive and RAM (although I won’t do this soon if it will void my warranty).

At the moment, I’m using my G5 as a firewire hard drive, which is DEFINITELY the weirdest computer to external hard drive size ratio I’ve ever seen.

Jack and I each picked up copies of Guilty Gear X2 #Reload or whatever for Xbox because we found them in a store. I also have Juls’ copy here, so I’ll give that back to him. Anyway, this game still works on Xbox Live, so we should all play it and stuff. Oh yeah, and I got sick at the end of last week, and some of the reviews I was writing for my Top 10 were pretty awful and confusing. Expect more soon, I guess.

Jack and I played the demo for this game quite a bit last night:

It’s a really good game, and were it being released in the US this year, it would have made my list. It’s called “yuusha no kuse ni namaikida” if you can’t read fixed-width japanese, with English translations ranging from “Cheeky, Despite the Hero” to “They’re Audacious Even For Warriors.” I don’t want to talk about it too much, but if you want to play it, and are one of the people that I can’t loan a PSP to, google it, play it, enjoy yourself.