Tips
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.
Using Jabber from within the Technion
A very neat find for those of you who want to use Jabber from within the Technion, but with your client of choice rather than a web-based one: Many Jabber servers, including Google Talk, support using Port 443 over SSL. Since the Technion does not block outbound SSL connections, this will work there as well. Be sure to mark the appropriate ‘Use old SSL protocol’ option in your jabber client (that’s what it’s called in gaim and pidgin, at any rate).
Internet in Haifa Bay Central
In the Haifa Bay Central bus station (מרכזית המפרץ), it’s possible to get an internet connection. HTTPS works automatically, and setting the proxy to proxy.technion.ac.il:8080 works for HTTP. I was unsuccessful in using corkscrew to get SSH connections to tunnel over it as well, but perhaps there is still a way.
Pmount-hal + cd
If you’re like me, and don’t use Gnome or KDE, then you probably use the pmount or pmount-hal applications to mount removable media. Here’s a neat thing to add to your .bash_aliases:
function pmh {
pmount-hal $1
UDI=`hal-find-by-property --key block.device --string $1`
cd "`hal-get-property --udi $UDI --key volume.mount_point`"
}
About Me
