SecretGeek rips into Windows XP’s Search dog with hilarious results: Award for the Silliest User Interface: Windows Search

Why is a dog asking me questions?
Who’s been putting the mescaline in the Microsoft kool aid?
What if google used this approach?
Would google still be number one?

Brian Livingston has a wonderful article in his latest Windows Secrets Newsletter entitled Firefox 1.0 Secrets, which describes some changes you can make to your Firefox installation that will gain you noticeable performance improvements. This is pretty amazing, since Firefox is already by far the fastest browser available, but these tweaks are well worth the time it takes to put them into place. You can find the newsletter article here.

While I’d love to take partial credit for this, I’m sure I had nothing to do with it. Regardless, I’m really happy that Robert has decided to change his link blog back to full-text entries, or at least is in the process of deciding to. I hope J.P. Stewart finds a way to allow Scoble to keep reading his blog, and posting J.P.’s stuff to his link blog, but I think Robert’s decision to unsubscribe from those that do not wish to be linked to makes perfect sense. Way to go, Scoble!

Brighthand, a well known PDA-centric site, has an article bemoaning the loss of Toshiba from the Pocket PC space: Bye-Bye Toshiba! We’ll Miss You!

I say good riddance. The editor at Brighthand says that Toshiba was treated unfairly by consumers. From the Brighthand article:

Toshiba might have recovered from its troubles, but some people can hold a grudge for a long time. There are still those who go on the Brighthand Forums and tell people to not get Toshiba models because of what happed with the e740 and e330. This despite the fact that Toshiba realized the error of its ways and was one of the very few that put out Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition upgrades for its more recent models.

Frankly, I think Toshiba has been treated unfairly. Yes, it made a mistake with Windows Mobile 2003 upgrades. However, as I said, it mended its ways.

Recently, HP and Dell both refused to release Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition upgrades, but they got off practically scott free.

I well remember how people talked after the e740/e330 mess. You’d have thought Toshiba shot their dog. On the other hand, the complaints about HP and Dell’s decision to not offer OS upgrades have been, at worst, politely indignant.

All you people who publicly swore you’d never buy another Toshiba, if you’re going to be honest, you have to swear that you’ll never buy another iPAQ or Axim. (Looks like ASUS and MiTAC are in for a rush of new customers.)

The problem is, Toshiba’s customers felt burned when Toshiba continued to sell their e330 and 3740 model Pocket PCs through retail channels right up to and past the release of the new Pocket PC operating system, Windows Mobile 2003. Sales reps in the field, going on Toshiba information, were telling consumers that they would be able to upgrade their e330s and e740s to the new OS when it became available, and in fact Toshiba released new models that were technically identical to these units, but contained the new OS, but never released an OS update.

Personally, I was one of those consumers that was burned, and I’m still angry about it. I knew the new Pocket PC operating system was coming out soon when I bought my e330, but was assured by the sales rep that I would be able to apply the operating system update as soon as it became available. He told me this based on the best information he could get from Toshiba - they may not have told him that this was the case, but they did nothing to inform retailers that it wouldn’t be the case. It could practically be assumed since the specifications of the new model - the e350 - coming out pre-loaded with the new operating system was identical to the e330.

I managed to exchange my e330 at the retailer I purchased it at for the new e350 model about three weeks after my original purchase, and I received $50 back in cash because the new model was actually cheaper than the older one. Had they offered the OS update, I’d never have bothered with the exchange, which was not easy, by the way. Yes, I realize it was the retailer that lost out in this deal, but only because of Toshiba’s poor choices. The retailer should learn their lesson: maybe it’s not worth dealing in Toshiba merchandise.

Brighthand believes that Toshiba made good by learning from their mistake, and the huge outpouring of vehemence towards them, by being one of the only companies to offer an OS update to their latest models. Too little, far too late.

Toshiba, good riddance. I have to admit I still covet your m200 Tablet PC, but only because nobody else makes a similar tablet with a screen that has a resolution as high as the m200. But you can bet that I probably won’t buy one from you.

So, in my previous post, I linked to the article I read on boingboing.net about how to get this working. I was so excited to finally find instructions to make this holy grail of RSS combined with bittorrent a reality! Unfortunately, the site that boingboing linked to had exceeded their bandwidth limit, and was unavailable. It is currently still unavailable, but in case it comes back, here’s the direct link.

Google to the Rescue

Of course, my first thought was that if this page was indeed that popular, Google had probably cached a copy of it, and indeed they had. The instructions found there are mostly correct, but one crucial link to the RSS plugin is incorrect (pointing to a similar plugin, but not the one the instructions were written for), which caused a bit of difficulty until I was able to sort it out.

So here is a repost of what was posted at pealco.net, with the incorrect plugin link fixed. I hope it works as well for you as it is for me - and, of course, your mileage may vary.

In this post you will learn how you can never miss an episode of your favorite shows ever again. This will be accomplished through the magic of BitTorrent and RSS.

I’m bad at watching TV. I always miss my favorite shows like The West Wing and Enterprise. I can never remember when they’re on and when I do, they’re already three-quarters through. My solution thus far has been to go to Suprnova and download the torrent. This, of course, requires that I remember that to do that, and then I have to wait three hours. Wouldn’t it be better if the morning after the show aired a high quality copy of the show sat sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to watch it? The answer is yes, yes it would.

There are many solutions to this problem, but this is how I do it. Basically what’s happening is that the BT client checks an RSS feed for torrents that match certain criteria. When it detects those criteria, it begins to download the torrent. The result is something like TiVo, but free.

The how-to:

1. You will need to use Azureus. It’s a pretty good BT client and I’d recommend using it anyway. It is a Java application and works on most platforms.
2. You will also need the RSS Import plugin for Azureus. Installing it is a matter of dragging the unzipped folder into the plugins folder in your Azureus directory and restarting Azureus.
3. In Azureus, go into the preferences and expand the plugins tab. Choose RSS Importer.
4. Check the Activate RSS Importer Plugin box.
5. Enter http://www.tvtorrents.net/rss.php as the RSS Channel to import.
6. In the next text box, Filter …, enter a regular expression that matches the name of torrent of the the show you want to download. A quick guide to the kinds of regular expressions that are expected here is provided on the RSS Import page. For The West Wing, for example, I put in west.wing.*hdtv — which means download any file that include the letters west, followed by any single character, followed by the letters wing, followed by number of characters, followed by the letters hdtv, to make sure I get the HDTV version and not the VCD version. For multiple shows, separate them with a semi-colon, so west.wing.*hdtv;enterprise.*hdtv would download The West Wing and Enterprise.
7. Under Recheck channels… I would recommend putting in 60, so as not to bombard the TV Torrents server with more requests than necessary.
8. And you’re set. Don’t worry about the other options. Now you just have to wait for the next episode to air. You should have it in your downloads folder the next day.

And now you never have to worry about re-runs again.

Thanks, Pealco. Now I can use the great features of Snapstream - pausing and rewinding live TV, on-screen program guide, ability to record or play anything spontaneously, but my favourite progams come in perfectly optimized for how I want to watch them. This is to TV what podcasting is to radio.

After my previous post rant about SnapStream, you might think that this post would be about a new, different Personal Video Recorder package. In fact, I’m still using SnapStream’s older and more reliable Beyond TV 3.4. But now on some serious steroids.

You see, I read about someone that had finally figured out how to subscribe to RSS feeds of bittorrents of the latest TV shows and download them automatically. If that was gibberish to you, please, stay with me.

I’ll back up:

What I’ve been able to successfully do is to install some software on my PVR computer (the computer running Beyond TV that sits in my living room and is connected to my TV) that watches for new files of my favourite shows that become available to download from the Internet, automatically downloads them, and puts them into a folder where they show up automatically in my PVR software. It’s like Podcasting for TV shows.

These shows arrive in much higher quality than what I can record from my regular cable subscription, in much smaller files as they’ve already been very well compressed - up to 90% smaller - so I can store many more shows without worrying about running out of space, with the commercials already removed, and these files arrive within hours of the original airing of the episodes.

With the commercials already removed. I know - that caught your attention, right?

You see, although nobody wants to freely admit it, the ability to conveniently skip commercials is probably as important a reason for using a PVR as the ability to “timeshift”, or watch shows on your own schedule. We’ve been able to timeshift since the day that VCRs became common, and skip commercials too, but PVRs make both of those things so much easier.

Some may argue that we should not download shows from the internet, but I disagree, in the same way that I feel that it is okay to download music. If I already own a CD, and I *could* create an MP3 of my favourite song off of that CD, why not just download it? I already own it. Well, I believe that logic also holds true in this case. If I was already going to record the show, and I was planning on skipping the commercials (I haven’t watched a commercial in almost a year), why not download the show instead?

If you’re interested in how I did this, stay tuned for my next post.

I’ve been using SnapStream’s Beyond TV PVR (Personal Video Recorder - think “TiVo”) software for close to a year now. I tried it back when it was in version 2, and at the time it just wasn’t ready. At the time I wasn’t too broken up about it, because I didn’t really have a spare computer to dedicate to full-time use as a PVR. When I bought my laptop last year (thanks honey!) that changed.

Beyond TV 3.4 is light-years beyond where the product was in it’s 2.x incarnation. It’s so good, that using our TV without the PVR functionality - being able to skip commercials, pause live TV, etc. - just feels wrong now. So, I was very excited when SnapStream announced Beyond TV 3.5, a significant update to the product I had grown to love.

What a huge disappointment. Performance sucks in 3.5, and reliability is even worse. We gave it a fair shot - two full weeks of struggling and cursing the living room computer. And finally, late on a Friday evening, I decided to investigate SnapStream’s forums to see if there was a fix, something I had missed, that would bring 3.5 alive in the way that SnapStream had promised.

What I discovered there were many, many more frustrated people, just like me. And the only recommendation that seemed to have any consensus was to back-rev to version 3.4. I couldn’t believe it. SnapStream has released a product “update” that is so bad, their own customers are recommending to each other and their friends that they stay on the old version. Indefinitely. Meanwhile, I continue to get marketing email from SnapStream imploring me to upgrade to version 3.5. When I reinstalled 3.4, I lost all of my settings - all of my recorded show settings, all of my performance tweaks, everything - and my PVR setup hasn’t been the same. It won’t reliably recompress shows anymore, which is one of the best features BeyondTV has going for it.

Needless to say, I’m disappointed. SnapStream offered some new features in the new version that are very tantalizing - smarter recording so that if there are two shows on that you would like to record, the system looks to see if it could record one of the shows at a different time, for example. That’s not in 3.4. But to get that feature, and others like it, you have to install the buggy, slow new version. It’s not worth it.

SnapStream, you have lost my trust.

So, while I can still recommend Beyond TV 3.4 as a solid software platform to build a do-it-yourself PVR on, I can’t say the same about version 3.5. And since 3.4 is getting long in the tooth, and there are features that PVR users have come to expect that it doesn’t have, I think it’s time to start checking out the competition, like MythTV, HTPC, SageTV, and Windows Media Center 2005, which apparently will soon be available to hobbyists like me as a standalone software product.

Sorry SnapStream, you had a great thing going, but you’ve blown it in a big way. The only way I’ll be convinced to come back is if you can offer a reasonable upgrade to your 3.4 version that performs similarly, and as reliably as 3.4 does. And, judging from your forums, there are lots of people that feel the way I do.

Time to get to work.

At one time my greatest ambition was to work for Electronic Arts on its NHL franchise in some capacity. I actually came very close, too. Reading this makes me glad I didn’t come any closer.

For what it’s worth, EA’s NHL games have not been nearly as good as Sega’s ESPN branded NHL games for the past three years. After reading the article linked to above (an account written by the spouse of an EA employee), I think I understand why it hasn’t been keeping up.

While I’d like to believe at least one of these, I fear that they just clearly illustrate how useless these tests are. At least some of the questions are entertaining… Long live Commodore 64 Basic!

Thanks to Chris for the links.

Which File Extension are You?

Which OS are You?

One more that I just came across:

You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every
book ever published. You are a fountain of
endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and
never fail to impress at a party.
What people love: You can answer almost any
question people ask, and have thus been
nicknamed Jeeves.
What people hate: You constantly correct their
grammar and insult their paperbacks.

What Kind of Elitist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

All I can say is “wow”. Konfabulator is incredible, and has some really gorgeous widgets. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, but I’ve piqued your interest, go get Konfabulated.

Commenting on my post about Scoble’s linkblog, Ross over at Rosscode.com suggests that Scoble sort his feeds by those that have given him permission to post full posts to his linkblog, and those that haven’t.

Feed permission - what a great idea! It’s too bad that we can’t just assume that content in a syndicated feed has implicitly offered permission, but if we can’t, so be it. I suspect it is a small minority of people that have a problem with their posts being reposted, and if this permission model took off, maybe they could be shown the error of their ways. I grant permission to anyone anywhere on any planet to repost my content as they see fit, as long as they do not alter it in any way, and they provide a link back to the original post. Damn, maybe we are all going to need to license our content under Creative Commons…

Wouldn’t it be cool to subscribe to only the posts on Scoble’s linkblog where permission has been granted to offer full posts? I’d subscribe to that in a second.

I just had a further thought: what if we could put a token in our RSS feeds that indicates that our content is licensed under Creative Commons? That way, the software that runs Scoble’s linkblog could automagically detect whether full content reposts are allowed or not, and act accordingly!

I’d still prefer to only subscribe to the full posts, but I’m sure that could be arranged as well.

Wow - the potential for this is really exciting! Does this idea make sense, or am I spewing cow dung?

[Update] The comments section for my original linkblog post is heating up. What do you think?

Wow! My last post got linked to by Robert Scoble - the guy who’s blog convinced me it was time for me to start blogging myself. Thank you, Robert.

Interestingly, though, I’ve been taking Robert’s advice and only retrieving my RSS feeds manually, before I go off to read them. I read my subscriptions offline, synchronizing them from NewsGator to my Pocket PC so I can read them anywhere. (Which, by the way, is an extremely cool feature that is only possible using NewsGator, but I’ve never seen them publicize that. Odd!)

But by following this advice, if it wasn’t for my referral logs I’d never have known about his link to me. Not because I don’t read all of Scoble’s posts - I do - but because he only includes the most recent 15 posts in his feed.

Robert, you’re too prolific to have such a short RSS feed! Less than 18 hours passed between synchronizations, yet I completely missed that you had linked to me. What else have I been missing?

Oh, and yes, I do realize that I can customize NewsGator to check for new posts more frequently for certain subscriptions, but I would argue that if content providers want to ensure their content is being read, they ought to ensure their feed is long enough to contain all of their recent posts. Plus, my laptop isn’t always plugged in and turned on - hard to believe, but it’s true!

Sorry Robert, it sounds like I’m complaining about you a lot, and I don’t mean to. Like I said, you convinced me to blog, and for that I’m thankful. I guess you just get more attention because you’re a high-profile blogger - sort of like IE and XP get more attention from hackers because they’re the highest-profile software in their spaces.

The cost of being popular, right?