I have a new concept, situation - whatever - that needs a word. It’s a curiously 21st Century phenomenon, and one I encountered earlier this evening…
What is it called when your phone rings, and you’re enjoying your mp3 ringtone so much that you let it ring, and ring, and ring until you’ve heard the entire tune? I feel that there ought to be a word to describe that.
How many people do you think have started playing the lottery with the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 since Lost aired?
A quick look at the National Lottery results checker shows that you’d not have won anything… certainly not anything close to Hurley’s 114 million dollars!
If you listen to Radio One at all you’ll probably have heard a tune called Slam by Australian drum n bass outfit Pendulum. I think Annie Mac first gave it airplay but the rest of the station’s DJs have been playing the sh1t out of it too - and with good reason - it’s an absolutely storming track. However, it’s not the best track on the album! The album Hold Your Colour is full of great tracks but my favourite has to be track 4: Fasten Your Seatbelts an absolute belter of a track
If you’ve ever liked any kind of dance music I guarantee that you’ll have a smile on your face when this track kicks in at about 1 minute and 1 second. And you’ll have that bass line drumming itself into your brain for the rest of the day!
A recommended drum n bass/techno purchase: go get it!
Whoa.
No really, read that again and imagine it in Keanu’s voice.
Whoa.
If you thought the Lost you’d seen so far on Channel 4 was confusing, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Having rattled through the first season in a number of weeks (all hail the great God BitTorrent) I’ve been eagerly awaiting the start of season two in the States. The first episode aired over there last night, and I downloaded it today and, well, like I said: Whoa.
I’ll not spoil it for anyone because it is well worth watching, but for those looking for answers to all the questions raised in the first season… unlucky! I’m even more confused now than I was half way through the first season! The final scene will have you scratching your head and as long as the show is still able to deliver fantastic moments like this, who cares whether it explains everything or not?
I expect Richard to blog about this in more detail (or at least with more insight) but I really liked the idea of the 100 Minute Bible.
I actually bothered to read the entire Bible about 5 years ago when I realised that having dismissed it when I was about 11 with logic like “Church is well boring” I’d not really spent any time thinking about it since then. I figured that if I were to venture an opinion on organised religion in general, and Christianity in particular, I ought to have read the thing! (I read the Koran a few years later for similar reasons.)
As the Times article points out, the Bible starts well but you rapidly get bogged down in people begatting other people and it all gets frightfully dull. This 58 page version can be read in one sitting and contains all the important events written in concise contemporary English. I’m sure a good number of traditionalists will cry that it ruins the poetry of the original text but if it acts, as the author hopes, as a “gateway to the Bible” maybe that’s not such a bad thing?
That’s not why I’m interested in it though; it appeals to me just for it’s use of English. Taking stories and verses that have been rigidly defined for years and re-writing them like entries in a brevity competition:
David achieved a wider fame when he overcame the giant Goliath.
or, on the Ten Commandments:
Other more detailed laws governed diet, dress, personal relations, worship and every aspect of daily life.
Perhaps I really like it because it reminds me of Monty Python’s game show in which hapless contestents had to summarise Proust… maybe that’s next on the authors list?
Due to a corrupt POP3 mailbox, I had to delete and recreate the howard alias. I thought forwarding was pushing everything to another account, but it didn’t quite work how I’d hoped. If you’ve sent anything to my address in the last day or so there’s a strong possibility I didn’t see it. If it was important, please resend it!
First ever trouble I’ve had with Gradwell!
That’ll teach me to have a load of custom junk in my Wordpress install. It’ll be a little while before this looks like it did - going to have to build a new style Wordpress template for my old layout. Grrr!
…as I was doing here, how’s this for geekery?
Yup. That’s OSX86 running in VMWare inside Windows XP. File under pointless but cool.
As an aside, the drive image of this installation will happily boot natively on my Inspiron 9300 - as long as the drive is installed internally. If you boot off the USB drive, it won’t play (OSX86 doesn’t like the USB drivers).
Goal: Stream the contents of Tivo’s “Now Playing” to any machine on the network (wireless too!).
Tools needed: A network enabled Tivo (telnet, FTP, Tivoweb), the Tivo vstream binaries. A copy of VLC for your OS of choice, the tystream plugins for your version of VLC.
Bonus Settings: Configure “1-click” playback from your browser (IE on Windows).
I’m assuming at this point that you’ve already installed a network card in your Tivo, and that you can telnet to a bash prompt, FTP to Tivo, and have got Tivoweb installed. If not, go and read this excellent guide.
On the Tivo
You need to install the vserver software. You can get this from the tivo-mplayer sourceforge page.
I used this link: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/tivo-mplayer/vserver-1.2.tar.gz
Installing vstream:
Hacking Tivoweb:
Tivoweb is great, and you can use it to work out which ty stream to connect to (vstream takes urls of the format: tivo://tivo.ip.addr.ess/tystreamid) but wouldn’t it be nicer to just click a link in Tivoweb and have VLC just load and start playing? Of course it would!
In your tivoweb-tcl/modules directory you’ll have a ui.itcl file - this contains the code we need to mess with - specifically the code that generates the nowshowing list. Somewhere around row 2880 is a line:
You need to add a line before that. This whole chunk is towards the end of a function, the next function is action_nowshowing, if it helps you find it! So, the line you’re adding before that if statement is:
Note where I’ve lazily hard coded my Tivo’s IP address. I could have done this properly with a variable, but really couldn’t be arsed. Change this to whatever IP your Tivo has!
Save ui.itcl, and do a full restart of Tivoweb - the now showing list should have your View link now:
On your PC
You’re now in a position to test it. Open Tivoweb and the Now Showing page. Right click the View link and copy the link to the clipboard. Open VLC and hit open file, paste the URL (It should start tivo://). Click Open, and it should start streaming video to your machine! Horrah!
Finally:
Here’s the registry settings to get Internet Explorer to open “tivo://” links in VLC. Double-click the .reg file to import it into the registry. Restart IE, and now clicking that View link will launch an instance of VLC and play your chosen video. Yay! Job’s a good’un. If anyone can work out how to configure helper actions for Safari or Firefox on OSX, let me know!
Update 15/11/2006:
Thanks to helpful folks in the comments, I realised that in cutting and pasting the example Tivoweb code above, I made an error (now fixed). Hope that didn’t cause too many people any hassle!
Richard took some photos at the last lanparty. This would be last friday which finished with Fuller and I crashing out at about 4am after an evening (and morning) of vodka and Redbull fuelled games. Suffice to say it was a fairly quiet Saturday!
I don’t think we put off newcomer Pete too much, so hopefully the next games night will be just as well attended!
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