Stare into the voided warranty long enough, and the voided warranty begins to stare back at you.

Last night Jon and I set out to install modchips on his and our buddy Paul's XBoxes. For those who're scratching their heads: mod chips let you override the XBox's BIOS, and with it the unit's factory-specified hardware limitations. This effectively turns the console into a general purpose computer that happens to have a great interface for games and video output. After you've chipped an XBox it can be used to watch movies, play old NES and SNES videogames or even run a webserver.

Paul couldn't join us for this fun-fest -- he lives in San Francisco -- but he bought some of the components while he was in town for the holidays, then shipped the rest here so that I could do the install.

Well, 7 seven hours later I'd managed to break both modchips by improperly upgrading their BIOSes. God dammit. This seemed much easier when I did it to my own XBox. The situation is fixable, but it'll be a pain. The only worthwhile product of our efforts yesterday? Some pictures of the apartment with electronic entrails spread throughout.

More after the cut.

in honor of the iraqi elections today, i made my patented Middle Eastern Freedom Chip Cookies. just kidding. i actually made them for a smoked meat bbq at kriston's tonight, pre-arcade fire show, but i figured they could commemorate the elections as well.

recipe behind the cut. slightly modified and adapted from the famous neiman-marcus chocolate chip cookies.