FARK Contest: Areas Google Could Infiltrate

I don’t usually post FARK Photoshop contests - in fact, I rarely even look at them. This one had me in stitches though, and I had to share.

I’m in love with a car. This car:

My dad knows I’ve long had a thing about the original Mini, and he sent me the link to this article at Car & Driver where they take my dream car for a test drive. This thing is just flat insane, and it’s even in my favourite race-car colour! As Eric Cartman would say, “Kick Ass!”

If you have a WordPress blog, I highly recommend Elliott Back’s Spam Stopgap Extreme plugin. Super simple to install, and you just stop getting comment spam, simple as that. I’m sure, eventually, that the comment spammers will get sophisticated enough to get around this method of blocking, but until then, this is my spam blocking plugin of choice.

Someone has decided to capitalize on EA’s terrible reputation with these new shirts at CafePress, sporting the phrase “I worked 90 hours a week at EA, and I didn’t even get this t-shirt.”

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.

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.

I first heard this on Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, then Dave Slusher linked to it.

I gotta have more cowbell!

Jason Calcanis is giving away 100 free versions of X1 search. What a great way to get the word out!

Well. After having extensively tested X1, Copernic Desktop Search (previous post) and FileHAND as alternatives to Windows XP’s completely pathetic search functionality, I settled on Copernic’s offering as the best of the free tools. X1 is the best functionality-wise, but I can get 85% of the way there for free, so I can’t justify spending $75 USD for that last 15%. Plus, X1 had some sort of strange problem where it would lock my PST file when my computer booted, and I would be unable to open Outlook until I shut down X1. I’m sure I could troubleshoot the problem, but I figure if I’m paying for a product that has formidable free competition, it’d better be perfect out of the box.

Enter Google, the 300 lb gorilla of the search space.

I have yet to work with it extensively, but Google’s new Desktop Search utility is very compelling. Having your desktop search results appear alongside your regular web search results is so intuitive and comfortable that I suspect I will soon start wondering what it was like before this existed.

That being said, I have one beef with Google: their single-minded focus on Internet Explorer. Google’s new desktop search has the ability to search through your browser history, so that you can now search in Google for “that site I saw a few days ago” and have a much better chance at finding it. That is, as long as you use IE as your browser.

True, IE has the lion’s share of the market, but that market share is dropping, FAST. Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, Mozilla’s Firefox browser has become what IE should have become by now. And Internet users are figuring that out in droves. Firefox renders pages faster than IE, has less security issues, and once you’ve used tabbed browsing, you’ll never go back. IE is a dinosaur, and the days where anyone with a web presence could afford to only support one browser are gone.

Google, good show! Great product, now make it support full functionality with Firefox!

X1, Copernic, FileHAND, Microsoft search - nice to have known you. Good luck.

I kept hearing references to the Kleptones in different blogs I read, but when John Battelle posted about them, I thought it’s time to check them out. I was hesitant at first, since they are a “mashup” or remix band, and their music is in fact illegal. My understanding is that they don’t have the rights to use the samples they’re using, so they can’t get a record contract.

For some reason, I thought that this would mean their music would be somehow less than professional. Boy, how wrong can you be? I seriously recommend you check this out. Don’t let the title A Night at the Hip-Hopera scare you away, if you’re not a hip-hop fan. These guys pull from so many cool musical places that you will be entertained.

Art like this just underscores the fact that our copyright laws are seriously flawed.

Check out the Kleptones site, or download their album from one of the sites listed here as hosting it.

[Updated October 6, 2004 - see update at bottom]

A period of intense change is going on right now, and a fight is brewing. The fight is between traditional broadcasters of television and radio content, and their consumers who want more control over how they consume that content.

You might say right now that there are two kinds of people: those that have used a TiVo or similar Personal Video Recorder to watch their television content, and those that haven’t. For those that haven’t heard of them, think of a PVR as a VCR on steroids. You can record all of your favourite shows very conveniently, without ever having to change or rewind a tape, and you can fast forward past commercials or change shows at the click of a button. You can rewind or pause live TV - something that becomes second nature and then a necessity very quickly. Basically, you can watch what you want to watch when and how you want to watch it, not when and how the network wants you to watch it.

There are many, many solutions already available for PVRs for television, and the courts are full of battles about them, as you can well imagine. But what appeared to have been overlooked until now was the “other” broadcast medium, over-the-air radio. Video may have killed the radio star in the livingroom, but the radio star just packed his stuff up and moved to the car.

That’s the thing - you can’t watch TV when you’re driving. But look at our highways packed with commuters. How do they occupy their brain “cycles” while stuck in traffic? Radio.

But traditional over-the-air radio is broken in many ways even more than television is. An average listener does not have particularly good odds at finding something relevant to them on the dial, due to the limited number of viable radio frequencies. Satellite radio helps in this matter, but all it really does is introduce more of the “99 channels and nothing on” possibility.

What does this have to do with blogs and iPods? Everything. Adam Curry may be best known as an MTV VJ from a few years ago, but what he should be known for is being a cutting edge Internet broadcaster, or what is increasingly becoming known as a podcaster. His ipodder software is the first in what will likely be a long line of audio content aggregators. He is working closely with Dave Winer - the father of weblogging - on this stuff, and what they’re doing so far is mind-blowing.

But I’m not doing this subject justice. If you want to know more about the coming revolution in audio broadcasting - podcasting - check out this article by Doc Searls.

We’re in for a wild ride.

[Update]

From James H in the comments comes this great link: How Podcasting Will Save Radio

An analogy to the perspective the writer, Tod Maffin, takes in this article might be stated as “How the Automobile Will Save Carriage-Makers”. I think both perspectives are compatible - those in the traditional broadcast industry that embrace podcasting will be saved by it. Those that don’t, won’t.

Great post! Oh, and how cool is it that this comes from a fellow Canadian that works for the CBC?

iloveradio.org <- subscribed.

This is a wonderful, annotated page of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons celebrating what the site authors believe to be the top 25 Calvin cartoons of all time. The thoughtful comments just add to the experience. Just go see it.