Has your Xbox gone from a gaming powerhouse to DOA? Here’s how to get it fixed.

What does the red ring actually mean?

- 3 lights = dead Xbox

- 4 lights = a/v cable not connected

- 1 light also means hardware failure

Why did this happen?

- The Xbox 360 was rushed to market, improper testing, MS wanted to be first out of the gate

How many units were affected? What did Microsoft do about it?

-at first denied it, said within consumer standards

last year buckled and extended a 3 year warranty so you can get your 360 replaced for free

-no official stats, rumour is 33 percent affected

What to do if you get a red ring?

-go to xbox.com, go to support tab, go to “register and repair”

-register, or call the 1-800 number

-answer questions, get sent a box

-follow packing directions exactly

-wait

How much did this cost microsoft?

-more than a billion dollars

-also offer a free month of xbox live once you get the console back

Public reaction: understandably miffed, but not out of control

Effect on console wars: not much, all three consoles have their own niche, and PS3 took forever to get to market

I am a bit of a font nut and I love fine typography. When you see a carefully chosen properly set line of type can suddenly turn me into a fan of a typeface I had previously overlooked or never heard of. After seeing it I seek it out trying to find out what it is, who designed it and if they've designed anything else. It's a sickness, but as far as sicknesses go, it's not a bad one.

Check out this blog post I made based on the fonts of one of my favorite TV shows: http://blogs.macmerc.com/rick/?p=232

Different kinds of them

Sometimes it can seem like the non-font-obsessed only see 3 typefaces: Times, Arial, and Brush Script. It's probably not a coincidence that those three fonts constitute what is basically the 3 primary "colors" of fonts: Serif, Sans Serif and Script. There are more styles than those 3, but those are the most basic. With the exception of maybe Dingbat fonts, typefaces in all the other styles (Old Style, Transitional, Modern, Slab Serif, Blackletter, Display, Monospaced, etc.) can be categorized as one of those 3 basics.

Serif faces are those whose strokes end in little decorative features called, predictably, "serifs." Times Roman, Bodoni, Palatino, Bookman, and Garamond are all examples of serif typefaces.

Script typefaces generally look as if someone, with better penmanship than I, grabbed a nice pen and scrawled them out freehand…and yet with precision. They can be cursive (i.e.: the letters are made so as to connect) or non-cursive. For example, Brush Script is cursive, while Comic Sans is not, but both are examples of script faces.

Sans Serif typefaces have none of those decorative serif dealies and are not made to appear handwritten. Arial and Helvetica are the most familiar examples of sans serif fonts.

Where to find them

Free fonts are not at all difficult to find online. But be warned; downloading and installing fonts indiscriminately can lead one's computer to contract a TTD (Textually Transmitted Disease). While not an actual virus, a TTD can cause your computer to bog down and become unstable. If you think about it, because of the graphic user interface of your PC or Mac, every application (including the OS) uses fonts to display messages and many of them offer access to installed fonts to customize the application's documents. That means if you install an improperly created font, it can negatively affect your entire system.

With that warning out of the way, here are a couple of sites where you can find a wide array of typefaces:

http://www.dafont.com/

http://www.1001fonts.com/

http://www.identifont.com/free-fonts.html

How to identify them

Okay, so, you're looking for a particular font, you know it's a sans serif face, but you don't know what it's called and the prospect of sifting through all 1001 fonts at 1001 fonts doesn't sound too productive to you. You could narrow the search by imagining the font in its native habitat. What I mean is, does it look like it would be best suited for an airlock door on a spaceship or a wanted poster on a saloon wall? Would it be more at home on a love note or ransom note? Most font sites allow you to search and browse by keywords and themes.

Sometimes the font you're looking for isn't a font at all and it's important to figure this out up front or you'll spend a lot of time looking for something that doesn't exist. If you have a sample of the font you're looking for, see if there are one of more letters that repeat themselves in the sample. If, say, the lowercase "e" repeats itself, see if that letter is identical each time. If it is, it's probably a digital typeface. If it's not, it might not be a font at all (I say "might") but hand lettering or something that started out as a font, but was skillfully crafted to be less "predictable." See the example below and how each "L," "e," "a," "h" and "t" is different?

If you have a sample of the font you're looking for, you might try Identifont (http://www.identifont.com/). If you have a few letters of the font, type them into the field under "Restricted set of letters" and click "Identify." The site will ask you a series of questions about the font and will give you a list of possibilities based on your answers. Unfortunately, it is limited to the fonts represented by Identifont (http://www.identifont.com/publishers.html)

If you have a digital sample of the font--maybe a photograph or a screen grab--you can isolate that font and upload a small sample to What the Font? (http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/) and help the software to identify what each character is.

Once you submit this, What the Font will do its best to return with fonts as similar to the one you uploaded as it can find in its database. It's pretty smart, but you need to provide an "ideal" sample as it has a hard time separating joined letters or letters that are too close together. OpenType Fonts

Remember how I said that if the font you're trying to identify shows different examples of the same character that it might not be a font at all? Well, the example I showed you--the scripty looking "The Lab with Leo Laporte" with its uniquely different "L's," "e's," "a's," "h's" and "t's"--is, in fact, a font. It is an example of a fairly new breed of fonts called OpenType fonts that can offer all kinds of variations of letterforms under the hood. The one shown here is Candy Script from Veer (http://www.veer.com/products/typedetail.aspx?image=UMT0000254) and retails for USD$99. Veer has an awesome selection of such fonts and all of the ones I've tried have come with fun alternate characters to make your creations more organic… (http://www.veer.com/products/gallery.aspx?gallery=1682)

Other font sites

Fonts truly are art and though art can be free, fine art rarely is. That doesn't mean that all free fonts are garbage or that every font you pay for is, by that merit, better. But I do recommend supporting the art of artists by buying your fonts from reputable vendors. Here are a few of my favorites:

http://www.veer.com

http://www.houseind.com/

http://www.emigre.com/

http://fonthead.com/index.php

http://www.pizzadude.dk/home.php

http://www.p22.com/

http://www.comicbookfonts.com

http://www.blambot.com/

http://www.chank.com/

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS

http://www.identifont.com/

http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

http://www.veer.com

PRODUCTS SHOWN

Candy Script, by Veer

USD$99

MacBook Air
www.apple.com/macbookair
$1799 and up

Pro
- extremely light
- very very thin
- beautiful industrial design
- gesture-based trackpad control
- solid state drive option lengthens battery life
- LED display backlight to extend battery life
- illuminated keyboard
- install software from other computer’s optical drive (even Windows)
- durable aluminum design

Con
- only one USB
- no FireWire
- no built-in CD drive
- can’t change the battery yourself
- version with Solid State Drive is expensive!
- can’t use your old power adapter easily
- integrated graphics only

Form factor
You’ve probably all seen the unveiling of the MacBook Air (or the commercial): the notebook is so small you can actually slide it into a manilla envelope. It’s .76 inches thick at the thickest portion, and only .16 inches thick at the thinnest – a bit of a tricky number because there’s nothing much happening at that thinnest edge beyond a tapering of the bezel. But still – the thinness of this machine is extremely impressive, especially when you consider that it’s using a 1.8GHz Core 2 processor inside…not exactly the undercharged processor you often see in ultra-thin machines (in order to keep the temperature down inside the case).

Otherwise, the machine is full-sized – they keyboard is the same width as the one you’d find on the larger MacBooks…and the trackpad is actually LARGER than the ones you’d see on the other machines…but more on that in a bit.

One sacrifice that had to be made is the quality of the built-in speakers…the smaller design means that the speakers are fairly quiet compared to the ones found on the larger MacBook. If you want higher-quality audio you’ll probably want to use the headphone jack.

Gesture-based trackpack
The larger trackpad on the MacBook Air isn’t just designed to give you more space to wiggle your fingers around – it also gives you more multitouch capability, allowing gesture control like Apple introduced on the iPhone: pinch, zoom, rotate, and more.

Connectors
When you slim down any notebook, one of the first things company start doing is removing things from a traditional notebook design, especially the external connectors. While other entries into the MacBook line have two USB ports and at least one FireWire port, the MacBook Air strips the external connectors to a single USB port. Sure, you can use an external USB hub with the computer, but hauling along a USB hub kind of defeats the purpose of buying a notebook that’s so small. So the upshot is that you’ll only be able to connect one device at a time unless you want to carry a hub too.

More problematic is the lack of any FireWire at all – not only can you not boot from an external FireWire drive (or back up to one), you can’t capture footage from a DV camera…so the MacBook Air is most definitely NOT a good choice for video production people who need to capture in the field. Those who want to edit previously-captured footage located on an external USB drive may have more luck, but the lower processor speed means it’s still not the best machine for editing in the field.

The MacBook Air also has no Ethernet port so if you ever have to use the Air in an office environment without WiFi, you’ll have to spring for a USB Ethernet adapter.

The only other ports on the unit are the tiny external video adapter (your old adapters for the MacBook won’t work here) and one headphone jack). That’s it, unless you count the power connector. No, there isn’t even a Kensington lock hole…so stay alert.

Remote Disc
Another thing that a lot of people seized on as a major potential problem with the MacBook Air is the lack of an optical drive – while Apple is offering an External SuperDrive for only $99, that drive will use up the only USB port on the machine. Enter Remote Disc, a way to install software by “borrowing” the optical drive of another machine on your network, either Mac or PC.

The easiest way to set it up is to go into the Apple menu, click “System Preferences” and then go to the “Sharing” section. There is an option for “DVD or CD sharing”, which you should enable. Now on the MacBook Air, the other computer’s drive will appear when you click on the “Remote Disc” option under the Devices section in your Finder’s sidebar. In the Sharing preferences for sharing your optical drive, you can set it so that you must give permission on that machine before other computers can read from your optical drive…once permission is given, you can then use the disc in your other computer’s drive as if it was on your MacBook Air….

…well, mostly. While that disc now shows up as a usable disc on your desktop, the process can be very very slow, because all of the data is now going over the network. The software will take a bit longer to respond to your commands, and the whole thing will take just that much longer.

If you don’t have one of the external USB drives, you can still reinstall the OS if you have to – when you hold down the option key during boot-up, you’ll also get a WiFi networking option, which will allow you to reinstall over the network. Slow, but it works.

Solid state drive
The MacBook Air is the first product in Apple’s stable to officially offer up the new solid state drive as the main storage disk – the upside is much faster performance because the drive can access all of the data it needs very quickly instead of having to wait for a hard drive to spin into the right location for the head to read the data. Also, there’s less heat generated because there are no moving parts, and the SSD will use much less power than a spinning drive….meaning longer battery life. The downside: much higher cost and a smaller capacity. Currently, the SSD option for the MacBook air is only 64 gigs (compared to 80 gigs for the old-school drive), but it adds $1000 to the price of the MacBook Air.

If you want the MacBook air with the faster 1.8 GHz processor, you don’t have a choice about the drive—you only have the SSD option…but if you’re after performance that’s a better choice anyhow, because the old-school drive on the lower-end model is only a 4200 rpm drive..again, making the machine a less-than-optimal choice for those looking for snappy performance.

Sealed compartment – the battery problem
The number one problem that many users have with the design of the MacBook Air is the fact that users don’t have access to the battery – as with the iPod and the iPhone, the battery is built right in to the Air, which is a huge problem for anyone that will need to spend a lot of time away from an electrical outlet…with other notebooks (even subnotebooks), users have the option of simply powering down the computer, swapping out the battery for a fresh one, and then rebooting the machine.