That line, “Hello, Universe!” reminds me of an iPhone development tutorial I just did a few days ago. I believe this was the tutorial… yeah, that looks like it. I must have had a typo or maybe the code isn’t compatible with the new SDK, but that tutorial ended up not working for me. I’ll write more on that later.

Anyway, here are a few updates on what’s been happening. I started a new 30DC site, but it took a lot longer for Google to even index it than it did for my first site. So I didn’t make my $1 in the challenge this year. The site is now indexed and ranking fairly high, but not high enough to get a lot of traffic, so I need to create more content! The subject line for this post was originally titled, “I need to write more,” but I made some changes to it.

I kind of feel like I’m spreading myself thin when it comes to coming up with new content on my main ranking vehicle because I used a lot of good content on the other publishing platforms. Hopefully I can start churning out more good stuff and ranking higher.

What’s kind of weird is my first site which isn’t ranking well for its main theme keyword is still getting more hits than my new site. Still no conversions from that site yet, but I’ll check my analytics and write new articles targeting the keywords that people use to find my site. I’ll keep plugging away at both sites.

I briefly mentioned this above, but I’m also learning how to make iPhone apps. The book I’m reading is this, but maybe I’ll subscribe to this site for a month or so just to see a few of their videos.

While I’m not new to programming, I am new to Objective-C and using Xcode. It’s a bit different than using Visual Studio, but Xcode is pretty awesome. Even though I am going through and typing each example by hand and leaving a lot of comments in the code, I don’t think I’m actually learning much Obj-C because once I try to do something simple using what I’ve learned so far, I end up having to go back and look up a lot of stuff. What’s nice about taking an actual class is that they give you assignments that help you reinforce what you’re learning. I do like that approach, but sometimes get bored during lectures and just want to start coding.

I started off trying to look for sites to learn from, but most of them are out of date and not really up to speed with tutorials for iPhone 3 SDK. I think what would be even better for me is to have someone locally who could teach me this stuff. I’m a quick learner, but don’t know anyone who would be willing to teach this for free. That’s understandable, so….

If any of you are iPhone developers in the San Diego area and need help putting your iPhone app together and are willing to teach a newbie iPhone programmer, leave a comment! If you can take the time to teach me, I will help you out with any two iPhone projects you need help with – as much help as you need on them for free! It probably won’t be limited to just two projects, but maybe when you need help in general and I can spare the time. I would definitely try to take the time for someone who was willing to take their time to help me learn.

Like I said, hit me up in the comments and maybe we can work something out! Or if you’re a mobile app development company in the San Diego area who wants an intern developer, leave me a comment for that too!

I kept the hard drive anyway since I planned on getting an external enclosure for it, but then I realized I could revive my ReplayTV in a different way, sort of by playing musical chairs with a few hard drives. I have a 120 GB Maxtor hard drive in my modded Xbox. I know for sure that Maxtors work in my Replay, so I figured I might as well stick the 250 GB drive into the Xbox (which is way more space than I need for it, but oh well) and then take the 120 GB drive and stick it into the Replay.

I’d rather have the 250 GB drive in the Replay to record more hours, but unfortunately, I can’t do that. At least having 120 gigs would be a nice upgrade from 80 gigs.

While I know the process for upgrading a ReplayTV hard drive, it’s been a long time since I modded my Xbox to put XBMC on it, so I don’t remember how to upgrade an Xbox drive. Gotta do some reading up on that first before I jump right into it since I’m not even sure if my BIOS will support a drive bigger than 120 GB… might need to upgrade my BIOS first. And I need to make sure I have enough space on my PC to temporarily back up the files on my Xbox.

All this Xbox stuff just to save my Replay. LOL. I haven’t really touched my Xbox since I got the 360. Instead of using XBMC now, I just use TVersity on the 360. I tried out MediaMall’s PlayOn to watch videos from hulu and other places, but that didn’t work out so well since it kept giving me some sort of connection errors and wouldn’t play anything once it did connect.

Anyway, time to go rescue my Replay!

But, the good news is that at least the old 80 gig hard drive seems to be working again. I’ll just stick with that one for a while, but if anything goes wrong with it, I’ll just swap it with the 120 gig drive that’s in my original Xbox since my Xbox doesn’t even need all that space at all because I can stream media to it from other devices instead of needing to store it on the hard drive.

Time to do an upgrade again, but I forgot the procedure on how to do it since it’s been so long since the last upgrade, so I’ll need to look up that info. It also might be a good idea to clean up any dust that might have built up inside while I have it opened up.

I found a sweet deal on a hard drive yesterday. Target had a Western Digital Caviar EIDE 250 GB hard drive for 75% off, so it was marked down from $99.99 to $24.98. I was so stoked since I didn’t want to spend more than 50 bucks on a new hard drive, so that was an excellent find! After this upgrade, my ReplayTV will be able to record up to 250 hours of TV on normal quality. I can save a lot more episodes of shows that way.

This’ll be fun for me though. I haven’t taken anything apart in a while, so it’s nice to finally have another opportunity to do so.

I’ll be submitting my other article pretty soon and writing up a few more articles. This second article was a lot easier for me to write since it was similar to me answering a question when my friends have asked me about it. So it’s really easy and faster to do when you’ve already written about something before.

I’ll be tracking my progress tomorrow to see if any results come. I don’t expect anything to happen within a day, but who knows?

My goal is to write at least one article every other day. Hopefully, as I get better at this, I’ll be able to write a bunch more articles in a lot less time.

Today is the first day that I’ve actually put anything into action. I’ve chosen my niche, signed up for a Clickbank account, looked at some products, registered a new Blogger URL, and now I’m currently writing one of my articles.

The article writing part is the part that I’m kind of stuck at. I suck at writing “articles” – hopefully, this will get easier as I write more and more.

I’ll post my progress, earnings, success or failure. For now, I just need to get over my writer’s block.

I’m following along with the tutorial from dev-scene.com. I got Visual C++ Express all set up and it’s compiling my code properly.

I still don’t really understand makefiles, but hopefully I’ll learn more as I go along. Once I reach Day 5 of the tutorial on dev-scene, I’ll switch over to this DS programming manual since the one on dev-scene is still being written.

When I went to school to get my CIS degree, I was stoked to start my Internet Programming class. But I was completely let down that it was mostly taught HTML with just a tiny bit of CSS, XML, Javascript, PHP, and Dreamweaver mixed in. I already knew HTML, so it sucked having to do all of these lame exercises in HTML.

Contrary to what some people may think, HTML is NOT programming! It’s a markup language (hence the ML in HTML). Think of it as notepad vs Word… with notepad you get plain text, with Word you get a bunch of formatted text. HTML is just a way to format your web pages… and the result is a STATIC website. You can’t do anything DYNAMIC with just HTML alone. Things like a guest book, shopping cart, calculator, forums, login page, etc. all require more than just writing up some HTML. You’d need a scripting language (PHP, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, etc.) to be able to do any of that interactive stuff.

I know you need to know HTML to work with the other Internet languages, but I had to re-learn it anyway. That’s kind of what I didn’t like about where I went to school. Even if you already knew what you’re learning, you were still required to take every class anyway. Intro to PCs and Networks was especially boring too because everybody in my class was already very familiar with building computers and all of the basics, so the first couple of weeks was a drag.

I also had an SQL class in the same “mod” as my Internet Programming class. We did get a little bit into using PHP and MySQL, but that was disappointing too since we were just mostly copying from a tutorial and modifying it. I wish they would’ve integrated the SQL and Internet Programming classes a little better. Like having us make a database in MySQL and then working in our Internet Programming class to write code that interacted with it. I would have liked to have done more real world kinds of exercises like actually coding a guest book or a web store (not just a shopping cart that was more of a calculator that just added up totals).

Whoops, I didn’t mean to spend so much time ranting about that stuff. I’ll go back to what I originally wanted to write about. So, I didn’t get to learn PHP as in-depth as I wanted to, but I still really want to learn it. One of the things I’d like to write is a Content Management System. Since the previous CMS I used won’t be released publically anymore, I figure I should learn to just write my own.

The other thing that I’ve always wanted to do is make my own video game. There are six things that I can use to run my own games on. My PC, GBA, DS, Xbox, web browser (even though a browser is part of a PC, I still think web games are in a different category than PC games), and maybe my cell phone (but I hate playing games using my phone). That’s being very general, of course since I have multiple Game Boys, more than 1 DS, a couple of Game Boy Players for my GameCubes.

So, starting today, I want to either learn PHP or start writing a game. I did go through this webcast before, but I want to code something from scratch. If I go with PHP, I’ll be working towards making a CMS. I’ve also narrowed my game programming down to making a DS game since a friend of mine would also be able to play my game since he can run homebrew on his DS too… and I just think it’d be cool to be able to take my game anywhere. The type of game I would make is still undecided.

I think I’d be much happier trying to code my own game. Even if it’s hard to set up with VS .NET 2003, I’ll probably go the Visual Studio Express route since that seems to be documented well and I would have no problems when I get the full version of VS .NET 2005. Once the setup is all done, I don’t think I’ll have very many other problems. And as much as I want to make my own CMS, it might be a while before I have a firm grasp of PHP and SQL Injection to be able to write something that really sanitizes user input.

Game on! I’m making a DS game!

Well, right now I have this PSOne LCD screen that I want to use for something. I’m just not sure what I want to do with it yet. But I know it’s possible to use it with more than just the PSOne, I was able to hook it up to my GameCube to test it out…

What I’ve thought about using it for:

• A digital projector
• A portable/handheld GameCube (I have an extra Cube that I can take apart for this)
• An in-car TV for using with a DVD player or my extra Cube, or anything I wanna hook up… I would either do some kind of visor mod or stick it to the back of one of my headrests or where the center console is
• Or I’d integrate it into my Xbox somehow… doing what? I don’t know yet.

I really like the projector idea. I have lots of blank wall in my room that I’d be able to project on, but it seems like I’d have to buy a lot of parts and would need power tools and stuff to do that. I don’t have much money for that right now… or for the Xbox idea either. I’ll probably end up doing the visor/headrest mod, but I’m still not sure how I’d do that. I need to come up with some plans/designs that will hold it in place in my car.

A cool, new feature that I like is the movie trailers thing. You can download the trailers from apple.com and play them directly through XBMC.

There seems to be a problem with rewinding Real Video files… it would say 2x or whatever and show the << that it was rewinding, but it would actually be fast forwarding instead of rewinding. Maybe that’ll be fixed with the next update. I didn’t try to rewind any other files, so I don’t know if it’s just a problem with Real Video or if it’s every file.

I like the new OSD for when you’re viewing zoomed in images. They turned down the opacity of it so you can see what’s behind it. It was kind of annoying before having the blue bar up there and trying to read manga.

And if you’re wondering how my Gentoo networking with my XP PC is going… well, that worked out great! I was just too lazy to post any updates, but it didn’t take long at all.