Ever since all of the “current” generation of consoles — Xbox360, Wii, PS3 — have been released (sure, the PS3 has partly been released, but it’s out there) people have been working hard at making them do things the designers never really intended.

For the Xbox360, someone has converted it to a “laptop”, people are trying to get Linux on the PS3 (and indeed, all the consoles) which interests me as it’d make a good media centre, and people are hacking around with the Wii remotes.

One person has managed to make some software which allows the Wii remotes to be used as a controller on a Windows machine. You can configure the controls to work how you wish (i.e. set the joystick as either a joystick or keypresses, the motion-sensing can be used as a joystick or a mouse) and since it works over Bluetooth, it all functions pretty smoothly and is easy to setup.

Using GlovePIE, there’s very little required to get it up and running. After a little bit of tooling around, I jumped into an FPS game and was using the Wii remote in place of a mouse and the joystick in place of the WASD keys. The mouse was super-sensitive but able to be reduced in-game, and was a bit “stuttery” and the sensitivity made things difficult to aim, but I can definitely see that it’d work — if someone has the guts to at least offer this option in a game.

Now that Justine is “one of us”, I’ve let her in on what I call “The Hewett family curse”. Of course, in the time we’ve been together, Justine has already fallen prey to the curse without even knowing it. This curse has befallen my father and I, possibly my grandfather, and will probably be passed on to the next generation, should they survive in the bleak wasteland that will be future Earth.

The curse is one that brings disappointment and sadness to all the family, but I can’t bear to keep it a secret any longer. Any time one of us discovers something we really enjoy — usually food, but drink can be involved — it is soon after taken from the shelves as the product is no longer produced.

Past examples include Cheese Burger Rings (Dad), Ariba brand Beef Burritos, Flamin’ Hot Twisties (me), UDL Vodka raspberry & lime (Justine) and now recently Kangaroo Valley Fudge (Justine and I).

There are likely countless other times the curse has threatened to tear our family bonds asunder, but remembering these past tragedies has already brought me to the verge, the brink; so I shall discuss it no more.

Yesterday, Justine and I decided to pay a visit to see Dad and Cheryl (it’s also close to USA Foods, which is no coincidence). Seeing another opportunity to evangelise the Wii to yet more unsuspecting people, I packed my Wii into it’s bag (that I got “free” for pre-ordering, but didn’t think I’d ever use) and took it along.

Sadly, Cheryl has done a bit of damage to her back, which makes playing games like Wii Sports a bit of a stretch, so she sat this one out, but we gave her a great show looking like complete fools.

Dad loved playing Wii Sports and was able to compete with me on a pretty level playing field. That’s probably one of the best things about the Wii (or at least a well-developed game on the Wii), it removes the difficulty for non-gamers of having to co-ordinate moving a joystick while pressing a button which has no bearing on what’s happening on screen.

We must have played for 3 or 4 hours and it only took a few short minutes in each of the the Wii Sports or Wii Play games for Dad to get the hang of it, though most of the Monkey Ball mini games are dreadful and not worth mentioning.

Everyone who’s played the Wii thus far (admittedly not a huge amount of people) has expressed interest in owning their own in the future; it seems to be hitting it’s mark as far as demographic is concerned. Wii Sports alone seems like it could be a massive system seller, and it’s a pack-in game (then again, Super Mario Bros was too)!

This afternoon I went to the bathroom (great start for a post, isn’t it?) and after washing my hands was drying them with some paper towel.

I grabbed a second piece to finish the job that the first could not, and upon chucking it into the big heard a small “donk” type noise. Wondering what it was I turned away and quickly realised my wedding ring was not on my finger. Uh oh.

At least I knew where it was; after some grimacing and steeling myself, I dug into the used-paper-towel bin and quickly found my ring. Another couple of minutes of washing later and all was happy. No idea how it happened, but it could have been far, far worse.

Well, the new Nintendo Wii launched on Thursday and since I have never done it before, I decided it might be fun to attend and purchase my Wii at a midnight launch Wednesday night.

Justine and I both went down to our local shopping center, had dinner, made our way to our local EB and grabbed a ticket; number #14.

We went back home for a couple of hours and when we returned to the store at about 11:45, I was surprised to see that there were around 60-70 people milling around the store. Not all the people were there to buy, there were quite a few people there for … something to do, I guess.

As the clock struck midnight, the store let two people in at a time to buy their consoles. After around fifteen minutes I walked closer to the front of the crowd to see what number was being called as it was difficult to hear from where we were sitting. Just as I approached and was about to open my mouth to ask, number #14 was called. Convenient.

I picked up all the stuff I’d ordered (except for the component cables, which weren’t in stock yet, what a pain) and we hurried home — OK, I hurried home and Justine sat next to me yawning.

We quickly setup the shiny new system and played a few games of Wii Sports before Justine went to bed and I attempted to get the wireless setup to work. A quick change of wireless channel and I was away… to bed… at 3am.

I’m not sure how I did it, but over the course of Thursday-Sunday (I had Thursday and Friday off), I managed to sink 25 hours into Zelda (and I didn’t play much Thursday), and I’m not even half way through the main quest, let alone all the side quests and bits and pieces you can do.

The Wii is a pretty cool system, but my hopes of it being great for FPS games were a bit dashed because the infrared pointer is a little bit laggy, so not quite accurate enough. Games that use the accelerometers though (twisting, turning, tilting the remote) are great and it’s extremely responsive.

The actual user interface of the system seems rushed and not quite finished; touted features such as web browsing, news, weather are not yet available, and the interface is inconsistent with regards to navigation — things that work in one aspect of the system don’t work in another.

I’d also really love an option to have it start up a game directly rather than having to wait for the system to boot up, then recognise the game, then have me click on it, click Start and then wait for the game to load. The DS has the option, why not the Wii?

Ahh yes, I nearly forgot. After dealing with Harvey Norman for almost a week, we finally have the new TV unit in our house, and it’s all functioning properly (finally).

Our new unit has “feet” which at first glance look like metal but are really just cheap shitty plastic. In addition, the unit was a bit too high with our new TV, so I removed the feet and replaced them with some felt (I got it at Bunnings, before someone tries a “where do you go to get…” joke) which I think looks a lot better anyway.

Only took almost three weeks to get a TV unit, what a pain. And thanks to Justine who pointed out to me that I wrote some of the stuff in this post that I wrote the other day, blogging can be a difficult thing sometimes. It’s not the first time I’ve written a post twice.

In case you are wondering about that virus problem we had on our servers recently, it appears that it was caused by a recently-patched vulnerability in Windows servers.

When searching for possible solutions, this patch seemed to fit all the criteria but we were surprised that the local SUS server (basically a Windows Update server) hadn’t patched our servers.

This is because the guys that ran the SUS server decided to roll out the new WSUS server without telling anyone, and thought it would be easier to leave the SUS server on but not download any updates. They also told me that it wouldn’t work with our servers, but I got it working anyway.

After reconfiguration, sure enough, 10-20 minutes later all but two of our servers had downloaded and were ready to install the patch. The virus has not appeared and the problem has not occurred since. So much for communication.