I updated the firmware on the WRT54G router today to the latest release of Sveasoft’s code. Dyndns updates are working again, after being broken in Alchemy 5.2.

I modified the firewall to block the XBox’s access to XBox Live (ports 88 and 3074), since I don’t want my son connecting to it by accident. I had blocked all access to the Internet from the XBox, but that also broke the weather lookup in XBMC, which is becoming handy as we move into fall.

Part of the process for filtering XBox Live involved defining new services through the web interface. I kept getting errors on the page when I tried to apply the updates. After a fair amount of searching, mainly because I didn’t make a good choice of keywords, I found the problem is a bug, or limitation, of IE. Apparently it can’t handle Java variables of 2.3K in size very well. Repeating the process in Firefox worked perfectly.

I had planned to hack up an Xbox for a friend to give as a wedding present (what else does one give a geek who hasn’t registered for china and silverware). Of course, since we’d talked about it on and off for a year, he decided the week before he gets married is a good time to go out and buy one, leaving me having to shop for art or something.

Since he was placing an order for a chip to mod the machine, I had him order me another as well so I can put a second unit together to go either in the office or living room. I’m on the hunt for an LCD module to put in the unit as well, since it will likely go in a location without a TV on all the time. The Crystalfontz LCDs are nice, but I understand the PCB is a bit large, making installation troublesome. I’ve seen one hack where the author trimmed the board and connected traces with jumpers, but that would be a last resort for me. On the other hand, the LCDs that do fit tend not to have finished faceplates.