TechAgility

Now this may seem a bit hypocritical, but first let me state that I don’t condone this, but in quite a number of ways the TV Stations and the Cable Operators are responsible for setting our (and our Spouses? expectations quite high in the first place and then clearly not delivering.

Why the present system is not working

Example 1:

Here in Australia Foxtel would like you to sign up for their premium service and use the IQ (similar to UK’s Sky+ Service) however here in Australia there is a wealth of content still delivered by the main Free to Air (FTA) Stations and yet this is only available **IF** you have the service delivered by Cable - NOT if it’s delivered by Satellite.

Apparently that would require a retransmission fee that the TV Channels are not prepared to pay for - so although you see the lovely shiny adverts for Foxtel’s IQ Service… come to think of it there haven’t been that many lately, then it won’t work for the majority of Australians who would expect to pause and timeshift TV Shows from the main Stations.

Example 2:

Related to above, my Wife starts getting interested in the TV mini-series Damages on Channel 9 at 9.30, only to find that 5 or 6 episodes in they decide to switch it to a 10.30 slot that is too late for her.

Example 3:

Channel 9 advertises "New Series" of CSI - as soon as it starts I can see it’s essentially a rerun of Series 7. But now that my interest has been piqued I check the details for CSI on www.tvrage.com and find that yes CSI is now in Series 8 and it first started airing back in Sept. 2007….  sheesh!!

Example 4:

My wife is a very big fan of X-Factor in the UK and yet this show never makes it to the Foxtel supplied UK channels, so we step outside this and download them from the Internet and generally watch them a week after they have aired in the UK.

Can anyone else see the similarity with the Music Industry?

The main point here is that the RIAA have spent the best part of the 5 years or so trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle with regard to MP3 downloads and they are clearly fighting a loosing battle. It would be far better for them to approach this from the point of view that it is extremely hard to stop and or eradicate, so how can we make this experience much simpler, easier for the Customers/Public to the point that they will all flock to RIAA approved web sites for their content? Or even take on board some of the suggestions that they organise a royalty payment mechanism with the ISP’s?

At the moment the Video content is still quite questionable in a number of cases and you never really know what it will be like until you view the file after it’s downloaded - so there is still a lot of potential for the TV Stations/TV Studios/Film Studios to learn from the RIAA’s experience and start building a consensus and/or business case of how the future might look? There will be plenty of people who will argue that it can’t be done because of the myriad number of vested interests - but my point is - look at where the RIAA is now, technology will advance, ADSL is getting faster and more ubiquitous….

And don’t forget from my example above, even though it might be a complex and time consuming exercise, every time I get stiffed by one of the "vested interests" above when they change scheduled times, or do reruns as "new series" etc. I revert to form 

It would be great to think what it might be like in another 3 - 5 years from now when you sign up on a TV Channel’s web site and get updates via email that your new show/episode is ready for download? And would you possibly interested in these other similar shows in the Archive? And don’t forget we will be debuting a new show that you might be interested in next month…  Would you like to schedule these downloads automatically?

If you make it simple and easy people will flock to it - then just add advertising to make it pay?

Anyway, that’s my 2 cents for what it’s worth, and below I have outlined how it is possible to make it reasonably simple enough that my wife is now able to get things without involving me

Downloading TV Shows and Movies from the Internet

Great places to search for these downloads are:
Pirate Bay - www.piratebay.org
Mininova – www.mininova.org
Newzbin – www.newzbin.com

Both of these are structured somewhat differently:

Mininova uses bittorrents that requires a bittorrent client like utorrent to facilitate the download, where as Newzbin simply searches parts of Usenet to locate the groups of smaller files that have been posted that make up the larger TV show or movie.

Mininova:

For example search mininova for “CSI series 8” and you will get a result like this

This brings the result like…..

Click on the link at the top of the seeds column, and this will rearrange the list so that those torrents with the most seeds is at the top (more seeds means that more people have the complete file being offered up to others)

Now look for the particular episode that you are looking for – these are typically named in the format like s08e04, s802 or 808 – what this is referring to series 8, episode x.

BTW (By the way) it’s worth mentioning now that a typical 1 hour TV show is actually only 40 mins in length once you have removed the ads – this is then typically compressed down to an *.AVI file of only 400Mb – so be aware of this when checking the size of the download, too little or to large could be a cause of concern. If it is a DVD then it would be appropriate to be of 4.5Gb in size

If you are in any doubt it’s always worth checking www.TVRage.com for the actual title of the episode – Films can be checked at www.IMDB.com (The Internet Movie Database) – these are both very good resources to check any details regarding TV shows or Movies

Click on the link you need – here I am looking for s08e01

So here is the link details

So in the above example you can see the mouse is just hovering above the link to download the utorrent client – if you haven’t installed a bittorrent client yet then I’d suggest you download and install this now

So just run this, no need to save it anywhere as it’s quite small, and we’ll install it straight away

So here Windows is asking you to confirm that you actually want to install this – just click on “Run”

Just accept the defaults and click on Yes

Change the “Connection Type” to whatever is appropriate

So at this stage just click on OK

In progress….

Newzbin:

Newzbin is a service that you have to pay for – more information can be found at:

· 1 Site Questions

o 1.1 What is the purpose of Newzbin?

o 1.2 What exactly can I do on Newzbin?

o 1.3 How do I download from Newzbin?

· 2 Email Questions

· 3 Premium Membership Questions

· 4 Legal Questions

· 5 IRC Questions

How much does it cost? 50 US Cents a week – what do you get for your money?

http://docs.newzbin.com/index.php/Newzbin:Premium_Membership

So once you have paid, here’s how it works

Search for “CSI 8x” gets you the following:

It’s worth noting that the date matches closely the first screening date as described in tvrage.com as well as the title, although that there are a number of different file sizes – this will probably come back to the compression routines, alogrithims or config details used when compressing the original recording down to the *.AVI file

I would always tend to go for the 400Mb or so as this will typically = 1 hour of TV? (i.e. 40 mins of program minus the 20 mins of Ads) and treat anything else as potentially suspect – but that is only my personal opinion

So when you attempt to download something from Newzbin you will be asked to open or save an *.NZB file

This needs to be opened or downloaded by the Newzbin Client (the best is probably NewzbinPro)

This will then download the components on your behalf in to folders.

Typically this will be a load of small files that will need to be re-combined using WinRar, and if there are any missing files they will need to be recreated by using QuickPar.

Happy Watching

written by dcaddick

As it often happens when browsing the web, you start out looking for one thing, and invariably you find something else entirely that you have been looking for a few weeks or months ago?

I have been looking for a decent Media Streamer device that can act as the intermediary between the PC/Server and the TV and I have been looking with these ideas (courtesy of "She who must be obeyed" ) in mind:

• Must be white or silver
• Must be quite small (Desktop PC won’t cut it, needs to be more like a DVD player or smaller)
• Must make no noise (or very quiet - this rules out the Xbox360, etc.)
• Ideally HDMI output
• Would very much like it to be able to record TV (Digital Video Recording) in HD
• It must simply work, not bleeding edge device!

So I did have another scout around the web and find things like TViX that really come very close with their M6500a based on what appears to be the latest Sigma 8635 chipset and this is a very neat unit that can also include the optional T430 HD Tuner to add HD recording to the mix - awesome, check out this thread for peoples opinions at The official DVICO TViX M6500A Discussion the only downside for me is that I can’t get one in Silver or White <see above> although I have considered buying one and painting it

The other thought I did have is to "borrow" a HP T5730 (with WiFi) from work and see if I can’t get a 16Gb USB drive formatted to run XP SP2 with Media Centre (or Media Portal) straight from the USB drive just to see what the performance might be like as it does have a 1Gb of RAM and AMD Semperon +2100 CPU, but the best bit is that the DVI output will support wide screen to something like almost 2056 x 1600 so this might just work?
(Although the sound output with this will not be brilliant, but I could always add the PCI expansion slot and add something else to it?)

And then yesterday I came across this little beauty and I’m starting to wonder if it might be a bit too early to see if it’s possible to pick one up while I’m in Houston in a few weeks time?

Anyway, I’m hoping to have a play with the idea of modding the T5730 next week and then see what happens? 

gPC Mini and Mac Mini Battle for the Bookshelf

By Rob Beschizza February 26, 2008 | 3:45:21 PMCategories: Apple

Apple’s Mac Mini hasn’t had much competition in the last few years. Shuttle and Aopen both make vaguely similar machines, but neither is as small (or as inexpensive) as the six-inch wonder. Enter the forthcoming Everex gPC Mini, a linux-powered lilliputian with similar specifications and displacement.

Lining up the stats makes for an interesting choice: the Mac Mini is still a little bit smaller (84.5 inches cubed to 99.4) and is more powerful, but has less storage. GOS Linux is no OSX, but with the gPC mini, you’re not paying for it either.

Think Mini [Everex]

gPC Mini and Mac Mini Battle for the Bookshelf | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

written by dcaddick

So it’s a pity that I can’t do anything to upgrade my Netgear 834G as with the new ADSL2+ service I’m currently only able to get about 5 - 6 Mb out of it - but essentially these hacks are not meant to improve speed or performance - more like gaining added features from products that have now been left behind by the developers as they now work on the latest gear?

Still, I though this useful to share if you were looking for a fix for these products?

Supercharge Your Wireless Router With Open Firmware

From Wired How-To Wiki

A Linksys Wireless-G broadband router (WRT54GL). Image courtesy of Cisco Systems

Consumer-grade wireless routers — your standard Linksyses or Belkins — do their job well enough much of the time. But there are some juicy features offered by high-end commercial routers that just don’t come with the home package. We’re talking features like quality of service (QoS) management, adjustable transmission power, and support for IPv6.

If you need (or just geekily crave) these features, you can shell out cash for a pro-grade router, or you can get them for free by installing new firmware on a cheap home router.

Got extra advice? Log in and add it.

Contents

[hide]

• 1 What You’ll Need
• 2 Customize Your Router
  • 2.1 Find a Compatible Router
  • 2.2 Get the Firmware
  • 2.3 Install the Firmware
  • 2.4 Use the Firmware

more at source…
Supercharge Your Wireless Router With Open Firmware - Wired How-To Wiki

written by dcaddick

So is there anything you can’t do with the iPhone now? I might even have to reconsider and get one myself to see what all the fuss is about?

Video of the iPhone Pwned project in action

Posted Mar 29th 2008 8:38PM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: Cellphones

Those crafty kids on the iPhone Dev Team have already hacked the 2.0 firmware, but now they’re getting ready to release the oh-so-creatively-named PWNED tool, which takes iPhone hacking to the next level by patching the bootloader to let you load any firmware image you want — even images not signed by Apple. That means custom patched firmware can now be loaded directly from iTunes, which simplifies the jailbreaking / unlocking process tremendously, and also means that a patched version of the 2.0 firmware is coming soon. We’re putting the tool through its paces right now and we’ll have a hands-on with it (and the Dev Team’s patched 2.0 firmware) as soon as we get it all working, but check out some highlights after the break, and hit the read link for more info.

Video of the iPhone Pwned project in action - Engadget

written by dcaddick

So for some while now I have been waiting for the right technology to be incorporated in to a device that actually looks good, makes sense and does what it says it’ll do.

When I first noticed this unit from Sony it looked like it might tick all the boxes but it was quite some time before we saw in the flesh in a Sony store while I was in Las Vegas for last years iForum - even then the price of USD$350 was a bit steep (even more at AUD$500 here in Australia) and there is limited built-in memory - but once Natalie (the missus) saw the unit in White she was all for it.

So just prior to Xmas I managed to find one on eBay at DFJ (Direct from Japan) and secured one via Japan for a Xmas present for the wife - the only issue was that the LCD menu screen was in Japanese - but this was resolved via the seller and the details are:

1. there is [setting] button to the right side of screen
2. push the [setting] button
3. you can see menu on the screen
4. you select [各種設定] category by up&down button which are left side of [setting] button, and push [enter]
   [各種設定] category is second category from bottom (maybe?)
5. you select [言語] category by up&down button, and push [enter]
   [言語]category is third category from bottom (maybe?)
6. you select [English] category by up&down button, and push [enter]

So far I have been quite pleased with this device, although it might be useful if it had more internal memory so that it would make more sense to update the internal memory with a couple of dozen favourites and then you could take this to a BBQ, the beach etc..

But, all that aside, it’s quite neat - now the price is dropping it’s looking better and better?

BTW, I have simply set it up to connect via the Netgear Wireless Access Point - very neat solution  

Model Number: VGF-WA1/W

VAIO® WA Wireless Digital Music Streamer VGF-WA1/W

Carry the party from room to room or stream your music collection from your PC throughout your home with the VAIO® VGF-WA1/W wireless digital music streamer.
Save $150 instantly. Original price $349.99.

In stock. Estimated ship date: 01/28/2008.

SonyStyle.com | VAIO^® WA Wireless Digital Music Streamer VGF-WA1/W

written by dcaddick

Well this is clearly a joke targeted to DBA’s in particular - but even though I didn’t have an idea what DROP TABLE does before reading this - I do now

Thanks to Dave Oliver

Silly …

Silly …

written by dcaddick

I’m just checking that this isn’t April 1st? I’m sure we all wish it was true? especially says me when I realize I forgot to pack a power adaptor for Singapore and I’m now at 64%?

Scientists Invent 30 Year Continuous Power Laptop Battery!

Posted by Steven Bink

Finally a breakthrough we all have been waiting for!

Your next laptop could have a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge thanks to work being funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The breakthrough betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source. As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years.

Although betavoltaic batteries sound Nuclear they’re not, they’re neither use fission/fusion or chemical processes to produce energy and so (do not produce any radioactive or hazardous waste). Betavoltaics generate power when an electron strikes a particular interface between two layers of material. The Process uses beta electron emissions that occur when a neutron decays into a proton which causes a forward bias in the semiconductor. This makes the betavoltaic cell a forward bias diode of sorts, similar in some respects to a photovoltaic (solar) cell. Electrons scatter out of their normal orbits in the semiconductor and into the circuit creating a usable electric current.

The profile of the batteries can be quite small and thin, a porous silicon material is used to collect the hydrogen isotope tritium which is generated in the process. The reaction is non-thermal which means laptops and other small devices like mobile phones will run much cooler than with traditional lithium-ion power batteries. The reason the battery lasts so long is that neutron beta-decay into protons is the world’s most concentrated source of electricity, truly demonstrating Einstein’s theory E=MC2.

The best part about these cells are when they eventually run out of power they are totally inert and non-toxic, so environmentalists need not fear these high tech scientific wonder batteries. If all goes well plans are for these cells to reach store shelves in about 2 to 3 years.

Bink.nu | Scientists Invent 30 Year Continuous Power Laptop Battery!

written by dcaddick

I picked this up from bink.nu and it was simply too good not to share… 

The Ballmer Peak

By Ryan Hoffman on Steve Ballmer

My favorite web comic, xkcd, has a new strip out today that is related to Microsoft!  If you like it, go check out some of the past comics.  Be warned, you might be laughing and wasting time!

written by dcaddick

So this site is a little hard to navigate considering it’s in Chinese but it is worth a go, and you can always refer back to Google’s translation if you need some pointers? Still if you persevere you can generate a neat Cartoon based on a photograph of your self for IM etc.

MSN Cartoon (Beta)

written by dcaddick

I’m currently looking for advice on how to make Ubuntu look like Vista, but in the meantime I also came across this very nicely detailed guide on how to get Linux/Ubuntu to imitate the OSX look and feel - very nice work.

Linux desktop imitating OSX

This is my second article about how to modify your Gnome Linux Desktop to look like OSX desktop. My first article is one year old and since that, there has been many changes in both, my knowledge and availability of the software and themes. This article is not written in such a detail than the first one. Remember that you can always take a look at the old article too. And I have also written Orange-look guide for Ubuntu which contains some good tips. This article answers better to question WHAT than HOW. What do I need if I want to imitate OSX? And not so much "how can I change my wallpaper" stuff.

Original design of the user interface that is
imitated here was created by Apple inc.

you can discuss about this article and OSX-modifying in general at Ubuntuforums in this thread. There is also a discusson thread in Finnish.

I decided to write another guide, because my first guide became surprisingly popular. There are about 1000 unique visitors per day on my site and 26000 unique users per month. That is a lot more than I suspected and ever hoped. Thank you all!

Why I wrote this article?

Ok, there are almost always misunderstandings when people modify their OS to look some other OS. This is NOT about "I want a mac" or "I want OSX". If I would want a mac, I would go and buy one of those. No, this is simply about having fun by imitating and finding the limits of Gnome desktop. I often read that Gnome is considered very plain and not very configurable. I can’t agree with that. Gnome is usable and simple, but yet very powerfull and it is possible to modify Gnome into anything you want. Now, I challenge KDE and OSX users to do the same. Can you make your KDE to look OSX as well as Gnome can imitate it? Or can you change your OSX to look Gnome, KDE or Windows? I doubt it, but I love to be proved wrong!

Just to be clear, I don’t want that OSX-look would be the default look of the Gnome. Gnome is beautiful with Tango icons and it should continue to follow it’s own clean and usable style. I’m glad I made that clear. Now, let’s begin…

Desktop Effects

OSX has some nice desktop effects like expose and magic lamp. Those not only make your desktop look good, but also improve usability. Of course, not all effets are good for usability and that’s why Linux gives you a choice of which effects to use. Recently Compiz and Beryl were merged back to one project that is called Compiz Fusion. Compiz Fusion is a program that creates those amazing effects.

Screenshot illustrating "magic lamp" effect when window is minimized to the dock.

Basic elements of the OSX desktop

OSX has a desktop with icons as almost all desktop environments has. What gives OSX it’s unique look is a dock that works as application launcher and taskmanager at the same time. Another element is an application menubar that is located on the top of the screen. This bar displays current application’s menu and some system tray icons, clock etc. This differs from all the other desktop environments as fas as I know.
Emulating OSX Dock

Screenshot of Avant-window-navigator emulating OSX-dock.

There are many open source projects that aims to offer OSX-dock style dock for Linux desktop. There are KXDocker, Avant-window-navigator, kiba-dock and Gnome-dock (which is actually a techology demo). My favourites are Neil J. Patel’s Avant-window-navigator and Gnome-dock that was written by MacSlow. In the screenshot above you can see Avant-window-navigator that is my current choice. It can be easily modified to look like OSX-dock and it works as application laucher AND taskbar. There are also nice plugins for it that allows applications to change icon on dock. This allows Gaim to use status icons on bar and Rhythmbox to display alubm art as icon.

Screenshot of Avant-window-navigator emulating OSX-dock.

Screenshot of Gnome-panel that is modified to look like OSX menubar

• Background for 800×600
• Background for 1024×768
• Background for 1280×1024
• Background for 1366×768
• Background for 1440×900

Now that we have a panel with nice and shiny look, it’s time to add some gnome-applets to it. To imitate OSX I recommend you to use clock applet, notification-area applet, deskbar-applet, macmenu-applet and some menu-applet to add that apple logo. Deskbar is a user interface for Tracker and Beagle that you can use for desktop search. Macmenu-applet is the trickiest one here. Gnome doesn’t support this kind of behaviour for default so you’ll need to patch GTK-librarys with some code that AqD provided to the community. You can read more about macmenu-applet and patches at Ubuntuforums. System tray icons are based on the current icon theme. So the correct way to change them is to change the icon-theme.

There is deb-packages for Ubuntu Feisty users available at Ubuntuforums. Just see this post. There is a download link and installation instructions. These packages improve AqD’s patches even more. For example, underscores ‘_’ are removed from menuitems.

Boot screen

I couldn’t find a decent OSX-look-a-like bootpslash theme for Linux. So again, I did it myself. This is the great thing with the Linux. You can always do things by your self if it’s not provided already. I created an usplash theme that tries to imitate OSX boot screen. There is one difference though. In real OSX boot screen there is a nice round animation and in my theme there is a progress bar. Maybe in the future I’ll learn how to make that animation to Linux boot screen. I think that it’s possible to do it with usplash.

I’m not a usplash theme guru yet, so this theme is not perfect. Especially it doesn’t support widescreen resolutions. If you have 4:3 resolution monitor then everything is ok. If you have widescreen resolution then there will be black bars on both sides of the bootimage. If you know how to fix this, please contact me. Below is a screenshot of my current usplash theme, which you can download from here.

Screenshot of my usplash theme. This image is lacking the progress bar.

Wallpaper and desktop icons

Wallpaper isn’t really a part of OSX, because everyone can change that. It still creates a nice illusion if you use the wallpaper that is used to see on other OS. That’s why, if you want real OSX-look then you should also use OSX-wallpaper. Get the wallpaper from here.

Well, I don’t have much to say about desktop icons. There are only few and there is nothing special about them. Just create desktop icons as you have used to.

Screenshot of clean Gnome desktop that is modified to look like OSX.

Fonts

OSX uses Lucida Grande font. You can download this and other mac fonts from here. Below is a screenshot of my font settings. I also recommend you to add this .fonts.conf file under your home directory. It improves font rendering after X has been restarted.

My font settings on Gnome.

Login screen

Gnome uses GDM as a graphical login screen. There are many nice OSX-looking themes available, but none of them was good enough for me. So I took the best one and modified it a little bit. Only a little, but it’s all about details. You can download GDM-theme from here. It’s not perfect, but I really don’t care. It’s about 5 seconds on my screen and that’s it. This theme is based on AppleLinux theme.

Screenshot of GDM-theme.

System themes

I didn’t find GTK-theme that would imitate OSX as well as GTK allows. That’s why I decided to create my own theme that I based on Glossy P theme, which was a good starting point. I used some of the graphics directly from Glossy P and some I did by myself. It’s not a prefect copy of OSX, because there are some limitations in GTK that I can’t get around. You can download my GTK-theme from here.

At the moment I use Beryl compositing and it’s emerald window manager. There is a great OSX Tiger theme for emerald which you can download from here.

Application specific themes

Unfortunately, not all GTK-applications uses icon-theme icons. For example Gaim, Terminal Server Client and Liferea has their own icons, which cannot be affected by changing the global icon-theme. Also Firefox and Thunderbird has themes that are out of the scope of global Gnome themeing. I don’t have time and energy to write guide to all of those programs, but you should read my two previous articles, which discuss this in more detail. Here I will just offer few links and that’s it.

• iFox theme for Firefox
• Apple Mail theme for Thunderbird
• OSX-theme for Gconf-editor
• OSX-theme for Liferea RSS-reader

Icons

Icons are essetial part of the desktop design. OSX has nice glossy icons and Gnome has… well… gnome has icons. I’m glad to see that Gnome started to use Tango style icons which is a huge improvment, but those doesn’t really fit to OSX look that we are trying to imitate here. I have created a nice and full covering icon-theme for Gnome that uses real OSX icons and other cool icons made by talented people. Only the problem is, that I don’t have copyrights and I’m uncertain can I release them here without gettig problems to myself.

I advice you to create your own theme by collecting OSX-style icons from the internet. There are plenty of icons available for example at DeviantArt.

Polishing user interface

It’s all about details. Espesially when you are trying to imitate something or someone. So here are some final tips that I recommend you to do. First remove that gnome-splash screen. There is no use for that and it’s not very elegant. Below is a screenshot where "Show splash screen on login" is unchecked. Do the same. Notice that in latest Gnome this has to be done with gconf-editor since it’s not an option in session window anymore.

Another thing that I did is that I removed icons from menus. This gives a cleaner look, but it also might make your desktop less usable. At least in Gimp those icons are very handy. Anyway, here is a screenshot of my menu & toolbar settings.

All in all, keep things simple! Do not add dozens of icons to your desktop.

Emulating OSX menubar
OSX has only one menubar on the screen at the time. This menubar is displayed at the top of the screen with clock and system tray icons. Gnome doesn’t have this kind of bar at default, but it is possible to make one. What you need is gnome-panel that is 24 pixels high. Use OSX-like background image for your panel. You can download it below. Just select the one that is correct to your resolution. If there is not version available for your resolution, it’s not difficult to create one with GIMP.

I won’t discuss installing and configuring Compiz Fusion in this article for two reasons. First, there are dozens of HOWTO-guides, which tell you how to do that. Second, it depends a lot of which graphics card you have, which distro you use etc. So, I recommend that you take a look of OpenCompositing forums for more information.

Linux desktop imitating OSX - now if I can only find the Vista Theme?

written by dcaddick