Dodge it mail
I was flicking through some of my feeds today and came across Kevin rose's Dark tips. Thought I'd check out a few of the sites while I was waiting for something else to be done . DodgeIT – free email with no login
caught my eye, and I thought this is going to be some rip off mailinator service. But to my great suprise – this one offers RSS as well! Damm, how good is that? I love mailinator but this is so barebones and quick and the rss is the final knife in the heart.
Dont let this happen to you?
I was browsing around today and found this page for unixness.
This page has been removed because it was being stored on an unliscensed Linux server.
Dont let this happen to you!!
For information on purchasing a SCO liscnese for your Linux server, click here.
For information regarding lower-cost alternatives to Linux, click here.
I'm wondering what the hell? Is this for real or somekind of joke. And if its for real did the ISP upload the page or what? I've never seen this before, anyone else?
abio comes home at last
Just incase you dont know what an aibo is…
“AIBO” is the name given to the Sony entertainment robot. Developed to encourage human and robot
interaction, AIBO creates and introduces you to new pleasures and lifestyles.The name “AIBO” is coined from the words “A.I. (Artificial Intelligence),” “eye” and “robot.” In Japanese, the word “aibou” means “partner” or “pal.”
First up I have to say a great thanks to John's great girlfriend Hanna from the Twin cities. I will paypal you what I agreed and a little more soon as you email me back. Thanks for John and Sarah for being go betweens, my mother in-law Thelma and her friend (?) who actually brought it with her to London this week, i wish i could have met you in person to thank you again…
I'm already checking out the aibo hacking scene. Control my aibo via my ipaq? Humm I wonder if this will work via a smartphone too? And dont get me thinking about Bluetooth and a aibo! Generation5 looks very up to date and not so spooky as the others. The official guides are also useful of course.
The Summer Olympics, people downloading it now
This Wired article Let the web games begin
. Working at the world service on Friday I recieved a call from a guy in Denmark quite upset he couldnt hear the BBC world service news online. Anyway I quickly realised from others that we were blanking all programmes which could be classed as breaking copyright with NBC. Now this is only my own view, not of the BBC but I can not believe NBC own the rights to all internet broadcasts from inside the Olympic village, how on earth did some a deal get done without anyone questioning it? So in actual fact – if there was an act of terroism in the olympic village (i really hope there wont be), the bbc realisticly could not use video or audio from the olympics online (my own thoughts not the BBC). Even though its a news story not a sports story. This is something else, i think you'd agree?
Anyhow, we (the bbc) officially replied with this official page on Friday lunchtime.
The whole debate over is it technically possible to restrict Internet broadcasts within specific geographic boundaries?
is a difficult one, as the internet is not about geographic boundaries and it makes regional seperation questionable. Proxys are very common just like web scraping…
Moving away from Proxys to Bit torrent just like in the wired article. I've already noticed postings of the Olympic Opening Ceremony in Athens, only problem is its not live. And theres some serious demand for live webcasting! Sure some enterprising person with bandwidth and linux video capturing working will setup a proxy and start the cat and mouse game of blacklists and proxies. *Smile* let the games begin indeed…
Palmtop readable pdf
I wrote a email to Dan Gillmor the other day, thanking him for his great new book we the media
, which I am currently reading. I also wanted to ask Dan if it was ok to distribute his book in a different form – aka tagged pdf. I already noticed the book is under the creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence, but i thought it would be good to ask anyway.
Anyway Dan's fine, and is interested in the url, maybe so he can post it up with the other derivative versions, like the audio version which is currently being worked on.
And it looks like I was just in time, Danny already asked for a version to read on his pocketpc. Well here it is for all to read. The free culture ebook is also there to download, if you havent read it yet. Oh and if anyones after more stuff to read on there palmtop, check out my little selection of tagged ebooks. Enjoy…
Pocket Wireless AP
Yes its very much like the Apple Airport Express but have you seen the price of this Asus Wireless AP? 27 pounds compared to 90 plus pounds. Yes it doesnt have airtunes and it isnt 802.11g, but who cares? It does everything else I'm after. I'm specially interested in its,
But, Ethernet Adapter mode looks pretty useful if I do move to a larger house.
Upgrade path
Things are looking great on the Torrent scene recently. Dave pointed me at UKNova which is a torrent site just for UK programmes. And its seriously a great torrent site, always full and well updated. Its so good I am considering upgrading my broadband just so I can stuff quicker. The linux change over has put my ati all in wonder card out of order just recently (seems very tempermental, even though the tv feature works now and then). So I cant record my usual uk stuff easily. But theres almost no need with UKNova. In the short period of time I've been using UKNova, I was able to get the new series of Derren Brown all the Spy's up to this date. Theres also Hollyoaks on there but I've kind of given it up recently.
Anyway I'm thinking rather than get TopupTV or Cable TV, I could spend the extra money on a higher bandwidth connection or a second one (cable and adsl into the smoothwall firewall will do the trick). A higher bandwidth connection would also mean I could leave torrents running longer and when I get my all in wonder working again, I could even host my own torrents for shows I've recorded.
All this thinking has made me think about an extra element for xmltv to point at torrents. Which reminds me I need to learn or at least get to grips with Python so I can mess with xbox media centre's more advanced features. I mean I've seen scripts to do everything from email, rss and tv listings to irc download, itunes and webbrowsing. Some sites to pickup scripts from. http://www.gueux.net/xbmc-scripts/index.html | http://www.xboxmediaplayer.de/cgi-bin/forums/ikonboard.pl | http://www.xbmc.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=15
Dave’s new setup using the airport express
Been meaning to put this up for a while now. Dave got his Airport Express a few days ago and intergrated it into his setup at home. Thought I would do the same and compare the difference.
How to: Set up WDS like normal (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107454), then stop the Extreme/Main Basestation from doing NAT and set the Express/Remote Basestation to a manual IP address on the same subnet as the rest of the network.
Result
n my PCs I run Windows/iTunes and GNU/daapd so I can listen to any and all of my illegal bounty throughout the house, and the xbox connects to the net for leet-o thumbnails and weather data, and streams films from a SMB share on said Win/GNU boxen.
Best of all: No holes and cables snaking across the length of the house
My setup is based around my hub which is a simple 10/100 8port hub. The smoothwall firewall protects the network just like in Daves network, but I also put personal firewalls on each workstation and laptop inside the network. I dont have to worry so much about wires because most of my setup is in one room except the wireless access point which sits in the middle of the house, so theres wireless in the garden. The xbox is my main mediaplayer, while I could use the video output on any of my workstations. Xbox mediacentre is too good specially teamed with SMB and XBMS shares on all machines in the network.
War and Globalization
Its one of those things I have been keeping an interest in, but not deeply. Then I watched Micheal Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. I felt it was ok, but not enough. So i watched a couple of torrents called fear or love: 9/11 the great illusion
and The truth and lies of 9/11
. The first one was very good but highlighted alot of theories that I had heard on the net before. The last one was great and far better than all the others. So anyway I need to keep a better eye on the project for a new american century, the new world order and the grand chessboard.
So anyway tons of links which I hope to move to my bookmarks or (the wiki) in the future.
Educate-Yourself
Information Wars
Guerrilla news network
Truth now
911-strike.com A wakeup call for non-violent political action
communitycurrency
Stand Down
From The Wilderness
what really happend
questions questions A review of independent perspectives on current events
Centre for Research on Globalization
911Truth Only the truth will set us free
And something positive to leave the blog with. Taken from BoingBoing and Lawrence Lessig's blog. The video stream is available here too.
If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief-I am my brother's keeper, I am my sisters' keeper-that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, one.Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America-there's the United States of America.
There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.
There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
Trying out ZOË
A week full of Linux
Ok my move to Linux is going better than before. I've actually made a lot of progress, till I decided to try the Gatos ATI drivers again. After a few days I worked out that X wouldnt start because it thought the TV output was the main monitor. So now when I start up Linux I have to unplug my composite out then plug it in again. Luckly I'm not using the TV-out no more because of the Xbox media centre, so I just leave it unplugged.
However since using kxconfig
, the display seems to be stuck on 16bit which goes really funky when you load up Mozilla, Firefox or Thunderbird. The screen goes Purple and Green and makes it very difficult to see my email.
On the Samba front, I still cant get other machines (pocketpc, xbox or windows pc's) to connect via samba. But with tests I've also found I cant even connect via samba to while on the exact same machine – hence somethings wrong with my configuration.
By the way I've also started adding parts to my experimental wiki to do with learning unix and linux.
Freecycle.org
Freecycle is basiclly made up of many individual groups across the globe. It's a grassroots movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns.
It sounds great but doesnt pull it off in the same way as for example meetup.com does. or maybe I was thinking of meetup.com but crossed with the concept of giving away stuff. Oh well maybe it will mature (saying that there's already 300 people signed up in London alone). I certainly dont want to be joining up to any more yahoo groups thank you.
Installing Bit torrent on GNU/Linux
I found I could Apt-get Bit torrent using the stable Debian packages but never knew how to get it running till I came across this page.
First do a – apt-get install bittorrent
If you get no errors and all goes to plan, you can grab your .torrent file from where ever. if like me your using KDE or Gnome then find the file and open with. Then type bittorrent.
From a shell you can do the same by typing – btdownloadgui /home/yourusername/thefile.torrent.
You may get a error like me about a Python lib not being present you can fix that by – apt-get install libwxgtk2.4-python.
GNU/Linux force upgrade for the second time
I come home from Berlin and switch on my workstation to find Windows is pretty messed up. Well actually I have a hardware problem where the memory shown is only 256meg not 1024meg. But I solved that and windows was still messed up. So I decided to make the real move to Linux and not to fix Windows. I mean why bother? I booted up knoppix 3.4 to check if I could see the Hard drives ok, and sure enough I could see them. So I installed Knoppix. I expect I will document alot of experience of trying to get Linux working like windows from now on.
My todo list for linux
Thunderbird/Mozilla Mail.
Gaim.
VLC.
SMB Client sharing.
SMB Server sharing or XBMSP sharing.
Bit torrent.
CD/DVD burning.
SSH access.
External access VNC or/and Remote Desktop Protocal.
Gatos Video Capture and TV view.
FTP client for XBMC.
XMLRPC client for quick blogging.
ActiveSync replacement for PocketPC and Smartphone.