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Fixing Microsoft’s Mistake With Solder!

Microsoft recently stopped making Kinects.  Since it was never a loved product, this decision made total sense.  Why keep making something no one is buying.  However, they also stopped making the Kinect Adapter for the Xbox One S and X.  This was a dumb decision.  The Xbox One X just came out, and a lot of the people buying an Xbox One X are upgrading from the original Xbox One, meaning they have a Kinect.  A Kinect that they are going to want to hook up to their new console.

I mean if you go and look on eBay the Kinect Adapter for Xbox One S and X is going for well over $100.  That is insane for what amounts to be a power adapter and a USB cable.  However, you will also notice there are ads for modding your Kinect for around $50.  Well I figured if someone can do it for $50, I can do it for cheaper, and I did.  All I had to do was watch a couple of YouTube videos.  The one below was the most useful:

If you have the tools, you can make your Kinect work with you new Xbox or PC for less then $20, and if you need to buy the tools, you have probably still spent less than $40.  Better yet, if you click through to the YouTube page of the video above he has links to Amazon for the stuff to get this mod working in the video description.  It took me a couple of times to get the solder on right, and the mic on my Kinect is a little finicky now, but hey, I can play Dance Central again and tell Cortana to turn on and off my Xbox. Which I couldn’t do before, and I wasn’t willing to pay $300 to make happen.

Listen, obviously doing all this voids warranties, and you are damaging a power cord, so I can’t actually recommend that you do this.  However, I did it, and It is working great.  The shot on the top of the page is a shot of my success.  Plus it was a lot of fun to pretend that I am some sort of electrical engineer.  So to Microsoft who screwed over all their fans, I guess it is up to us to fix your problem with a little solder.

P.S. I am also going to include a link to site that has a better shot of what the soldering should look like when you are done, here.

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Black Mirror Gives Us Our Twilight Zone Fix!

Do you like strange stories with kind of a horror bent to them?  Black Mirror might be just what you are looking for.  Technically it is a series, but every episode is different and has different actors, though there are Easter Eggs and references to other episodes if you are looking for them.  If this is sounding like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, you would not be far off.

The biggest difference between Black Mirror and those other shows is that Black Mirror’s episodes all deal with technology gone wrong, or pushed to its limits.  Usually social media, but cell phones, surveillance, and other tech are all represented as well.  You will question how much you like all your devices by the end of each episode.

For the most part these episodes mostly just make you think about the state of technology in our lives, but some can be hard to watch.  The very first episode is famously graphic.  It is about a Prime Minister who has to do something unthinkable to save the life of a royal princess.  While it never actually shows anything, it is a rough watch.  It was kind of like the producers were saying, “If you can get through this, the rest will be a cake walk.”

Not all of Black Mirror’s episodes are great, but most do make you reconsider posting that picture of your bagel, and we are at a time when considering how much we let technology in to our lives is a hot topic for a lot of us, so if you need some ammo for why you think social media is bad, or you just miss The Twilight Zone, give Black Mirror a try.

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Shmee Rides With 12 Strong!

Post 9-11 Afghanistan war movies generally fall in to two categories, critiques on America’s wars in the Middle East, or super patriotic action flicks.  12 Strong is definitely the latter, but it tells a compelling story about the first boots on the ground after The World Trade Center attacks, and their stunning victory.  I am not sure how much of Jerry Bruckheimer’s war tale is true, but it shines a light on some of America’s recent forgotten history.

12 Strong starts on September 11th with Captain Mitch Nelson (Chris Hemsworth) settling in to his new home.  The towers fall and he is in to his military base getting ready to head out.  The job he and his eleven squad-mates are tasked with is aiding the Afghanistan Northern Alliance by calling in air strikes on the Taliban.  They are riding horseback against heavy odds in extreme conditions, but they get the job done.

12 Strong never lets you doubt these men are going to succeed, which ruins some of the tension, but it is amazing to catch a glimpse of what they had to go through to destabilize the Taliban so soon after the attacks.  It is a shame that so much of what these guys did was classified for so long, but I guess aiding a rebel group against former allies probably needed to be handled with some discretion.

They got a great group of actors for this movie: Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, and Michael Peña just to name a few.  They were all believable in their roles, even if Hemsworth did seem too pretty to have spent three weeks in the dessert, but this is a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, so everyone has to look great all the time.

My biggest critique of 12 Strong is that it is about thirty minutes too long.  Some of the movie felt a little redundant, so they could have done some editing to make this a much tighter and better movie.  Still, as it is, it is pretty enjoyable.

For a movie that was dumped in to the January wasteland of feature films.  12 Strong is a decent war movie.  It is not overly stirring, and it will not make you think about the complex politics about what is going on while these guys are riding their horses against overwhelming odds, but not all films need to.  Some movies, 12 Strong included, just need to show our military out there doing their job, or at least a Jerry Bruckheimer-ed super-explode-y approximation of it.

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What Fortnite Needs To Do To Beat PUBG!

Epic’s Fortnite has been in development a long time, and then late last year they gave people the chance to enter the beta for the game if they paid $40.  This seemed like a bad deal to me.  $40 to play a free-to-play game early?  I wasn’t the only person who thought so either.  It wasn’t doing very well, plus the fun base building game was walled behind a bunch of F2P mechanics (that your currently have to pay $40 for), so Epic smartly pivoted to something they knew they could do well, copy PUBG and give it away for free.  It worked.  40 Million downloads and 2 Million concurrent players later Fortnite is a hit, but it still is not king of the Battle Royal hill.

PUBG has less downloads, not surprising since Fortnite costs you nothing and PUBG costs $30, but PUBG frequently has over 3 Million concurrent players on Steam alone, and who knows how many Xbox players the game has at a given time, but it is a lot.  In other words, PUBG rules this game space for now, but I think Fortnite can change that, if they are smart.

First they need to ditch all the F2P garbage they have been developing, and then just let Fortnite have three game modes: Battle Royal (PvP), Survive (Base Defense, PvE), and Explore (Minecraft, PvEvP).  Then give it away for free like Battle Royal and sell tons of skins and hats, like a lot, a lot.  Ding, Ding, Ding! Winner, Winner Chicken Dinner!  Epic would then have a complete game with three fun things to do, and an easy monetization scheme.  AKA sell tons of digital crap for their three very fun game modes.  No city building or cool down nonsense.

If they do that, I bet more of those 40 Million people would play the game instead of just trying out Battle Royal once and figuring out that PUBG is a bit better.  They would keep playing because there is more to do, and those things are fun.  Meanwhile, PUBG will still only have its one, admittedly great, game mode, so if you get sick of that, you stop playing the game, and there goes selling all those loot box keys.

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Poor Justice League Returns Are Not Slowing Down The DCEU!

After yet another critical failure with the Justice League, the heads of the DCEU rolled once again, and now Walter Hamada is in charge with apparent complete control, but that doesn’t seem to be slowing down the DCEU.  Casting is almost complete (it may be now) for the new Shazam film, and it is coming out April 19th 2019, but the biggest news is that The Flash movie now has its third and forth directors.

The guys that wrote the very funny Spider-Man: Homecoming, John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein, are now writing and directing Flashpoint.  It is interesting that they will be adding so much comedic talent to a movie that will have no-doubt far reaching implications for the DECU, but it is still the best sign that even though Warner Brothers is not slowing down their superhero output, that they are indeed changing the tone of their films.

I love the cast of the DCEU movies, they just need to start making GOOD movies with them.  Hopefully they get things turned around with Aquaman, Wonder Woman 2, Shazam! and Flashpoint because I need to have a good Justice League movie.  I NEED IT!!!!! … Anyway, we will see if these movies are what the doctor ordered, or if that is the end of the DCEU as we know it.