Tag Archives: parental controls

New Xbox 360 Dashboard

I have played with the updated Xbox 360 dashboard for a few weeks, and really am enjoying several of the new features.  The new additions that I like are better support for using an Xbox Live account on multiple Xboxes and improved support for  new video content sources.

Multi-Xbox support

We have two Xboxes in our house.  The second Xbox is upstairs, and has been used mainly as a Windows Media Extender and as a way to watch Netflix and Hulu content.  We haven’t used it to play games because it was too much of a pain to either recover our Gamertags or copy the profile and saved games to a USB thumb stick.

With the new Dashboard update, Microsoft added two features that help with users with multiple Xboxes.

Roaming Profile

Microsoft renamed “recovering” profiles to “downloading” profiles.  With this you can “download” a profile on multiple consoles, with specifying the live.com password.  This allows you to use the same Xbox Live account on multiple consoles (though not at the same time.)  With this functionality, I am able to play a game on the upstairs Xbox while my wife or kids are watching something else on the downstairs TV.

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January 26, 2012 0 Comments Short URL , , , , , , , , , , Electronics, Games

Parental Controls in Windows 7 Media Center

Our kids are getting old enough to be able to use our Media Center, so I have enabled parental controls to prevent them from seeing content that is inappropriate for them.  When we had used a TiVo DVR, we had used the parental control and were pretty pleased.  The Windows Media Center implementation of parental controls has several peculiarities:

  • With parental controls enabled, every time you start playing content, that has a rating higher than the specified threshold, you will get prompted for the PIN.  This happens even if you press stop, and then play on the same show.  (I like TiVo’s implementation, where once you enter the PIN, parental controls will be disabled for a time, or until the DVR is turned off.)
  • While in the PIN entry screen, content is playing in the background.  So if you take a while to enter the PIN, you will have to rewind to not miss any of the content.
  • The parental controls setting is not applied to playing Netflix streaming content, even though Windows Media Center has had support for Netflix content for a while.  So it is possible that inappropriate content could be view through Windows Media Center’s Netflix interface.  (One interesting thing is that the Xbox 360′s Netflix streaming implementation respects the Xbox’s parental controls setting.)
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March 8, 2011 0 Comments Short URL , , , , Computer

Parental Controls and SqueezeCenter

We have installed Squeezebox Booms in each of the kids’ rooms.  This works great to be able to access all of our music in their rooms.  The kids like it as the presets are set to various childrens music, so they can easily listen to any of their music.

The problem is that our son is starting to explore our music. Some of the content is rated as “explicit”, and we really would not want him coming across the music.  Now I am going to try and find a solution that would let me specify a list of artists that shouldn’t appear on a given Squeezebox.  If this doesn’t exist, I will look at writing a plugin to create this.

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August 31, 2009 2 Comments Short URL , , , Computer

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