1. Stay With Me The Small Faces

   So, in the mornin’, please don’t say you love me
   ‘Cause you know I’ll only kick you out the door
   Yeah, I’ll pay your cab fare home, you can even use my best cologne,
   Just don’t be here in the mornin’ when I wake up.

2. So Ghetto Jay-Z

   You’ll be wearing a black suit a long time
   I put your crew in hard bottoms
   The priest is like, “God’s got him
   He never did nuttin to nobody but them boys shot him”

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Last week, I installed a modchip in my XBox.

The process itself was pretty simple. I went with the Xecuter-3 chip, which I guess is the latest-and-greatest, but really, they all seem to do the same thing. The hardest part of the whole deal was finding a Torx-20 and a Torx-10 screwdriver with which to open up the box. While I was in there, I also installed a quieter, larger fan and a quieter, larger hard drive.

One of the nice features of the new modchips is that you can upgrade their firmware over the web. The modchip arrived with a stub BIOS that allowed me to load a real one via my web browser (I ended up having to use Safari, as Firefox and IE both crapped out in different, maddening ways).

What can I do with my new, modified XBox? Well, I can copy games to the hard drive and play them directly from there, instead of the (slower, noisy) disc. Using the XBox Media Center, I can watch movies and listen to music stored on my home network’s server. In theory, I’m also able to download ripped games from the internet and play them, but this seems to only be possible if you’re 13 and wear saggy jeans.

…then don’t pick anything back up.

The Guardian publishes a great essay on the virtue of idleness. So, so great. My favorite extract:

When the sickly velvet-coated dandy Robert Louis Stevenson fell ill in 1873, aged 23, the diagnosis was “nervous exhaustion with a threatening of phthisis” and the prescription was a winter on the Riviera, “in complete freedom from anxiety or worry”. Once upon a time, we knew how to be ill. Now we have lost the art.

(via Crooked Timber)