Pirating TV Shows
Posted by Stretch | Filed under Internet, Technology
People love their TV shows. But there aren’t too many good ones left. And for those of use that have jobs while those TV shows are on, we have 1 “legal” option. Buy a DVR. So now I have to speed $40 a month to get my cable, and another $150+ to be able to watch my favorite TV shows. This means I am not a happy camper. I want to be able to watch Scrubs at 1:30 in the morning, when I can’t sleep. Or watch Family Guy at 2 in the afternoon when I’m on my lunch break.
But TV networks are dictating that I can’t, and if I want to watch Family Guy, I have to do it at 8:00 at night. If I miss a show, I have to hope they do a rerun, or wait another 12-18 months for it to come out on DVD. This is where torrents come in. You can watch your favorite TV shows whenever you want to.
People are getting used to on-demand content. They simply want to watch their favorite shows whenever they want, wherever they want. To give some more insight into this growing phenomenon, and because Nielsen is not counting BitTorrent downloads, we decided to start a weekly report of the most downloaded TV shows on BitTorrent.
The data is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites. The timing is a bit unfortunate, since popular shows like Desperate Housewives, House and Greys Anatomy just had their season finale last week, but we are aiming to publish an updated list every week from now on.
Hopefully sometime in the near future today’s media companies will understand the basic user. We want to be able to dictate what we watch, when we watch it, and where we watch it. The TV isn’t all that any more. With portable media players and laptops, and with people always on the go, we, the users, should be getting the choice of “what’s on TV tonight?” We have already proven it isn’t up to the network execs anymore, now they just need to accept it, and give us what we want.
Via Digg
iTunes Remote Control
Posted by Stretch | Filed under Mac OS X, Music
If you have a Mac, and it currently hosts your iTunes music library, you can control it from any other computer or cell phone with minimal setup.
iChat has this nice little applescript built in, just waiting to be activated. All it takes is a quick text to your hosting Mac, and iTunes will do as commanded. This comes in very handy when I’m using my Kubuntu laptop while sitting on the couch. I can skip songs, found out what’s playing, and pause all remotely.
I also edited the Applescript because my iMac is always on AIM, so if someone messaged me, they would get an automatic “Unknown Command” response from the script. Now when I get a normal message, they aren’t wondering what is going on with the unknown command.
Current Desktop
Posted by Stretch | Filed under Desktop
Recently started using Spaces. Having a small screen on my laptop, and since Ubuntu comes standard with multiple workspaces, I started using them. And what do you know, they come in pretty handy.
Desktop Release: The Tenth
Posted by Stretch | Filed under Desktop Releases, Downloads
Found this wagon sitting in front of Bennington Pottery in Bennington, Vermont. It was just begging for a few shots.
Ubuntu Audio
Posted by Stretch | Filed under Other OSes
I’ve finally gotten audio to work on my laptop. It took several hours of searching the internet, and trying many different things. The command that finally got it to work?
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-generic
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
then add the following line to the bottom of the alsa-base
options snd-hda-intel model=hp
Its nice to have audio working again, and thanks to the Ubuntu forums I finally found my answer.
