Marriage of BitTorrent and RSS
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
Salon has a decent story on the marriage of BitTorrent and RSS for television programs, which I’ve talked about before (and am a fan of).
Firefox extension Sage
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I recently installed the Firefox extension Sage, which is a lightweight RSS and ATOM feed aggregator. I’m all about efficiency, and Sage assists me in hitting all the news sites (multiple times) daily. I had never used a news aggregator before as the ones historically available were desktop based and I didn’t want to have yet another application to run and maintain. The integration with Firefox is slick and very easy to set up. After installing Sage (Tools->Extensions->Get More Extensions) and restarting Firefox I went to View->Sidebar->Sage which popped open the Sage sidebar. I then created a Bookmarks folder called “Feeds” and configured Sage to use that folder as its feed folder. Next I added all my favorite sites RSS urls (Slashdot, OpenBSD Journal, SecurityFocus News, TaoSecurity, Dilbert, Salon, BBC News, Economist, NPR) which then show up in the top pane of the Sage sidebar. Clicking through the feeds show the news items in the bottom pane and by clicking on the news items they show up in the browser pane. I like the tooltips on the news items. I disliked the “Render feeds in content area” option within Sage and turned it off. I also added the Sage toolbar icon by going to View->Toolbars->Customize. Overall, very cool extension to a very cool browser.
Home entertainment upgrades
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I recently bought an Onkyo TX-SR601 receiver and a pair of Paradigm Mini Monitors. These components sound absolutely awesome together (especially considering I was replacing a Sony compact stereo system I’ve had for 6 years). I’m planning on building out a complete home theater system by adding a Paradigm center channel (CC-370) , a couple Paradigm rear surrounds (Atoms), and a Paradigm subwoofer (PDR-12). Also on the home entertainment frontier, I recently subscribed to Netflix which absolutely rocks for DVD rental. For music, I’ve been utilizing the local library as it is conveniently just a few blocks from my apartment. The area library system (7 counties total) has a decent web-based interface for the entire library catalog that allows me to search for and request CDs which will be shipped to my preferred pickup library and held. The library system used to have a telnet interface (which was pretty neat!) to the catalog but according to this FAQ entry it is being discontinued.
BitTorrent is usable now
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I tried BitTorrent quite some time ago. I was unimpressed. First off, the linux BitTorrent client I was using (and *the only* BitTorrent client at that time) was rather crude and difficult to get working. Add that to the fact that once I did get the client working properly I found a general lack of torrents. I decided to give it another shot recently (primarily for the new Sopranos episodes). I found a java based BitTorrent client, Azureus, that’s pretty slick in a KDE-ish sort of way. There is also a wealth of torrent sites now, such as suprnova.org, that make finding what you’re looking for extremely easy. Therefore, I’m impressed by BitTorrent now. Some of the freshest thinking though is combining RSS with BitTorrent. This would involve subscribing to an RSS feed of say, Sopranos, which would start automatically downloading all new episodes when available. I actually found one site who has made that idea a reality.
Are you being a good netizen?
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
From the United States Department of Justice: Are You A Good Netizen?
Portable MP3 players
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra or iRiver iHP or Dell Digital Jukebox or iPod. That is the question. One of the most important requirements for me is that the device will work under linux (I quit that Windows habit almost 3 years ago now). This page contains great information on portable music players interoperability with linux. It appears that all except the Dell Digitial Jukebox have support under linux. It also appears that the most mature software exists for the iPod with the handful of software developments for the Nomad Jukebox Zen being in beta stages and only one software development existing for the iRiver. In searching google I find a lot of success stories such as this and this about people using an iPod under linux. The common application that they use is named gtkpod which is a GUI frontend based off of gnupod. Now if I do purchase an iPod, I’ve read that the latest generation is for Windows and Mac (filesystem format is the point here) and that it comes HFS+ formatted by default. The first time someone uses their iPod under Windows the conversion to FAT32 would be performed invisibly. In my case HFS+ support under linux is limited so either a Windows PC can do the conversion to FAT32 or it can be done under linux with fdisk, dd and mkfs.vfat. Also, here’s a graphical comparison between iPod generations that’s neat.
Widescreen vs Pan and Scan
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
Upon receiving a DVD as a present during the holidays that was full screen (opposed to widescreen) I had to explain the difference. I found a great webpage comparing widescreen and pan and scan versions of the same movie at the Letterbox and Widescreen Advocacy Page website.
DJB’s advice on buying a computer
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
D.J. Bernstein has advice on buying a computer workstation.
The Slashdot trolling phenomenon
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
The slashdot trolling phenomenon. I rarely read comments of /. stories, usually only security specific or OpenBSD related posts, but this article is dead on for the different trolls that always pop up.
addall.com
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
http://www.addall.com is a a site that searches over 40 booksellers for the best price. I found the current book I’m reading, The Puzzle Palace by James Bamford for 5 bucks with their search engine.