Category Archives: Culture

Geek culture

Gatesy-baby! Argh! My eyes!

Well, I think we now have proof that Bill Gates is not a crazed megalomaniac billionaire. If he was, he’d have had all copies of these pictures destroyed, and anybody involved killed.

Bill Gates in Teen Beat, 1985Bill Gates in Teen Beat, 1985

Apparently these pics were taken for a magazine called Teen Beat, around 1985.

(Via Monkey Methods, whose commenters are debating whether it was 1983 as first claimed, or if the fact that there’s a Mac in the background means it must have been after 1984.)

Update 19-Oct-2005: Snopes says these were publicity shots taken for the release of Microsoft Windows in 1985.

Comment spam vs nofollow

More comment spam hitting us at the moment, but curiously the comments don’t seem to have URLs with them, so I’m not sure what the point is. They’re all purporting to be from non-English-speaking e-mail addresses, and many in broken English, with a generic compliment about how marvellous your web site is. Odd.

Meanwhile, Google have come up with a new <rel=”nofollow”> attribute for links to help fight comment spam. And they’ve got a bunch of blogging heavyweights to back it, too, including the MT/TypePad, Blogger (duh), MSN Spaces and the WordPress gang, which might well cover a good proportion of blogs running today.

Now, W3C ratification, anybody? Oh pah, who cares?

The Most Basic Guide Available To Downloading Television Shows With Bit Torrent

A little while ago Jennifer de-lurked to ask about downloading television shows so she wouldn’t be at the mercy of our networks.

What follows is a completely non-exhaustive, unofficial, as basic as you can get guide to getting what you want on your telly, when you want it.

What You need

First off you need a broadband connection.

You can do this on dial up but when you are dealing with files about 350MB you won’t be answering the phone for a very long time. If you don’t have a broadband connection yet go to Netspace and tell them ‘caffeine’ sent you.

A Bit Torrent client.

BitTorrent is what makes this whole thing possible. I’m not going to explain how in detail, you can get that from the BitTorrent Introduction page. Put simply you get bits of the file from different people and in turn you share the bits you already have with other people. You can see that the more people accessing file, the more choice of downloaders you have and the faster it should go for everyone.

Bit Torrent is free. Don’t pay for it. You can use the original BitTorrent client from www.bittorrent.com but this tends to confuse people ’cause nothing appears to be installed after you install it. There are other clients around – Bit Comet for Windows and even Mac users (Hi Rob and Rob) can get in on the action with the Java based Azureus.

Torrent files for each episode.

The shows are downloaded via torrent files. These tell your client where to start looking and how to share your download. These torrent files are listed on web sites and here Google is, as always, your best friend. Googling ‘torrent desperate housewives‘ should return you a list of pages with torrent files for Desperate Housewives.

What I Use

So what do I use? I use Bit Comet as my torrent client and do most of my searching on www.isohunt.com to search for shows or go straight to www.tv-swarm.com or www.tvtorrents.tv and search from there.

How I Do It

This is the simple part. Once you’ve installed your client and found the show you’re looking for you click on the torrent file link. Your client should start up and then, after a few seconds, start downloading and sharing at the same time. It’s that simple.

Things I’ve Found

The show names. I always go for those marked HDTV_LOL – these are great qualities .avi files, wide-screen and around 350MB per episode (42 minutes of show time). I still have no idea what the LOL bit means but they always work for me. One I downloaded had some obscure sound format that needed a codec, which all became too difficult so I downloaded a different file. I think most are encoded with mp3 so Windows Media Player plays them no problems.

Those marked HDHR are High Resolution files and look stunning – but are twice the size and hence take twice as long to download.

Some are encoded with surround sound too, just look at the file name and it should be obvious which ones these are.

Variations in download time
This is the killer. Some files have taken 14 hours to download, and just last night one took only 4 hours. The time taken depends upon many factors from how many peers (those holding the file to download) to net traffic, to which way the wind is blowing. I’ve found it really helps to download new episodes the day after they are aired, when demand is greatest. Older episodes – even those a month or so old – can take significantly longer to retrieve.

As for old old shows, such as the first season of Carnivale that screened in 2003 in America yet is only getting it’s first airing here, you can almost forget it.

Watermarks
Most shows ripped (or capped) from television will have the network logo watermarked on it. Ads are always removed and sometimes end credits can be missing too.

Sharing
Don’t leach. Make sure you keep the torrent available for as long as you can – remember there are others like you probably wanting the same episode and the longer you keep it open, the more people can share and the better (quicker) it is for everyone. BitTorrent depends upon many people sharing the same file.

And that’s pretty much it.

In summary :

  • Get a bit torrent client
  • Find a list of torrent files
  • Download or click on the torrent you want
  • Open this file, or it should open automatically
  • Download, share and enjoy

Oh yeah, you may want to invest in a DVD burner for your PC so you can watch them on your television.

iPod Shuffle

Not the mini-mini-iPod, oh no. And not the iPod Lite. Or the Tiny iPod. No, it’s the iPod shuffle, a new model with just 512Mb (A$149) or 1Gb (A$229) of space.

Though I notice Apple’s AU web masters appear to have just copy/pasted from their US site… the Alt text for the advert proclaims “from $99” … anybody going to try and take them up on that?

Trillian 3 feature

Happy new year!

One Trillian 3 feature that seems largely pointless is that it does Wikipedia lookups of some words. Hmmmm. I suppose it could occasionally be useful, but I don’t know how it chooses the words to lookup, and Wikipedia may not always be the first choice for finding what the word means in context.

For instance:

That would have to count as one of the most out-of-context, inaccurate and pointless definitions I’ve ever seen. Thus, I’ve turned that option off.

iPod goes mainstream

It’s one thing for us techno-fetishists to be praising the iPod, but quite another when those in music join in. Today’s Age EG “Sticky Carpet” column pays homage to the device.

Yes, 2004 was the year Sticky went out and bought an Apple iPod.

In flashy campaigns, the people at Apple market this revolutionary technology as a must-have fashion accessory, when they really should be saying: you no longer have to spend hours a week organising your CDs, because this little helper will do it for you without complaint.

… and reflects on its influence on the traditional track/album structure:

It’s getting further and further away from the days when albums were treated as a distinct singular entity, to be played from start to finish.

Part of the progression I suppose. Once upon a time it was track/side/album. Sides went when CDs took over tapes and vinyl. Perhaps the iPod will speed the progression to individual tracks being the new way people buy music.

A few brief things

Some people aren’t so happy about Google suggest… certainly not Eric Rice, who gets his name listed with words like “child molestor”. Wouldn’t be delighted about that, myself. (via the G’Day World podcast)

New version for WordPress (minor fixes) (hopefully it fixes the thing where if you forget your password and need it mailed to you, it sends it in some incomprehensible encoding format that can’t be read… at least not on any web or Windows email client I have access to).

New version for Trillian (major new release). Haven’t had the chance to try it yet… no time Bellamy, no time.

Why Trillian rocks

Was listening to the latest G’Day World Podcast, interesting stuff as always guys, keep it up. Noted the discussion about Trillian, ICQ, and MSN Messenger.

Until about a year ago, it seemed to me like most Australians on the IM circuit were on ICQ. I’ve been on ICQ so long I have a 7 digit UIN (though I forgot about it for a while, and subsequently have an 8 digit one I use more often, in the 26-million range, if that dates it).

But it became apparent that (like Hotmail) MSN Messenger was bigger than I thought. Even among people I knew, there were a number of people who I didn’t IM with, but who used MSN. Ditto Yahoo Messenger (which has some popularity with corporate users, since it’s long been usable through firewalls using HTTP). I understand AOL Instant Messenger is huge in the States, due to the vast numbers of people who use AOL as an ISP, but virtually nobody in Australia uses it.

When I realised I knew people who were on MSN but not on ICQ, I moved over to Trillian, which of course works with all of these. Although Trillian isn’t perfect with every protocol (some older versions didn’t do well with ICQ’s file transfer, for instance) even the free version is pretty damn good, and on my aging 2000-era PC, I’d rather not be filling my meagre 256Mb RAM by running lots of clients.

But even when I do get my brand spanking new super-duper fast-as-you-like mega-PC (before too long), I won’t want the hassles with clicking around on multiple windows just to talk to everybody. That’s just silly.