Software
My show downloading stack
I love watching TV, and hate it. Regular show schedules are horrible, commercial breaks are annoying, and the ability to rewind is very important. I love Hot’s VOD service (and happily pay to watch the shows I enjoy), but my true favorite for getting my entertainment is everyone’s favorite not-a-dumptruck, the internet. In this post, I will describe how I do it.
Everything I describe in this post can be done using miro. It’s a neat piece of software, which lacked polish in version 2.4 (2.5 is out now though), but there are a few things I don’t like about it:
- You have to be graphically logged in for it to run. Among other things, this means that if someone reboots your computer, there’s no way to get it to start automatically. (I’ll be very happy to know if I’m wrong about this)
- It doesn’t give you as much control as I’d like over torrents.
- Its BitTorrent client doesn’t perform as well as rtorrent.
However, Miro does one thing which I haven’t figured out how to do myself yet: It keeps track of your position within watched shows. That is, stop watching a show -and next time playback will resume from the same place.
Easy Hebrew LyX guide
I’ve added a guide for setting up Hebrew in LyX using a small script I wrote.
Sour chewing gum
On an online board, friends posted a photo from a party a while back, as I’m chewing some extra-sour chewing gum:
I find this suitable for use in macro form. For example, in the Computer Security course, we’re going to compromise a windows-based server using a buffer overflow vulnerability. Unfortunately, this means we’re going to have to use (as per the course’s demands) Visual Studio 2003. My response: 
Really liking this git thing
I’ve been a very big proponent of Subversion so far, especially as a tool for collaborating on coding homework. However, I’ve recently been trying out Linus’s git. It’s very nice so far, and really seems to be catching on. Some good points:
- Fast as all hell (much faster than Bazaar, although I haven’t given that the proper attention)
- No need for a central server; hell, no need for an internet connection at all, everything can be done over USB keys or whatnot
- No real need to configure any special server; just install git on it
- Very nice alternative to configuring write-control for all of the users
- Very easy branching and merging, finally! SVN really shows its weakness here
One thing I couldn’t find out how to do is limiting read-access to git repositories without special server configuration. It would be nice if git had support for .htpasswd-compatible authentication, those are pretty easy to use.
Two reasons Apple suck
First of all, new iPods won’t work on Linux. Now, while it’s very obvious that the idea is to block competition against other music vendors, that makes it even less legitimate. Good thing we’re starting to see some very nice cheap players out there – I’ve been rather impressed with the Meizu M6 MiniPlayer.
Secondly, they didn’t think of this: Indexed search within the “Open” dialog. It’s in Ubuntu Gutsy, and really makes desktop search (implemented with Tracker in gutsy) worthwhile. Especially when attaching files in GMail 
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