I’ve described how one can use rss and bit torrent as an alternative to a monthly cable television subscription before and even pointed to a few implementations. I figured it was time to update the list after a conversation with my brother where he wasn’t quite clear on how one might use the Mediagate MG-25. In brief, the model is this: you use a bit torrent client to download content, and you use RSS feeds to inform the client what content you’d actually like to download. Just like a tivo with the season pass, the RSS feeds can be used to tailor a very specific selection of shows/movies/whatever that you’d like to see. A couple of tools that facilitate doing this which I haven’t blogged before – RSS Feed Scanner for the superb java-based bit torrent client, Azureus. If that’s too complicated for you, give Videora a try instead – a task specific (ie get video from rss feeds via bit torrent) client which is somewhat easier to configure.

No, make that three. I’ve blogged before about the excellent firefox web developer extension – anyone doing web development should have it installed imo. Today I happened across two other most excellent tools. First, check out the Mouseover DOM inspector, a bookmarklet (favelet if you’re an IE person, though if you are I’d be surprised to know you’re doing web development) that works in most of the major browsers and gives you a fabulous tool to look at the structure of your pages. This is the most comprehensive tool of this sort I’ve come across. Even so, aardvark is also worth a look as it enables editing of the reviewed content as well as a slightly less robust exploration of the structure if the page.

Check out powerfolder, a free java-based file sharing and synchronization utility. I’m using it to synch the subscription list for my feeddemon RSS feeds so the stuff I read at work doesn’t show up at home and vice versa. It takes a little twiddling to set up (and on the mac I had to use the webstart version, the download version failed to run) but it’s worth the trouble for file sharing and synchronization and free is a great price.

Two weeks ago or so saw the launch of ourmedia.com. Now we have another entry in the ‘free media hosting’ sweepstakes – Open Media Network. This one is from Marc Andreesen, of Netscape fame. So far it supports windows/ie only (ugh…they’re doing a tv-guide wannabe interface and used activex, it seems) but Firefox/other OS versions are promised. If you’re looking for more legitimate content to fill you Mediagate box (see recent posting) with, here’s another service for you to check out. Or maybe you’re convinced the world is ready to see those wedding videos. Whatever it is, here’s another place to stash that content.

A brief slightly related aside – anyone else noticing a recent flourishing of free web services? It’s evocative of the whole dot.com boom of years ago. I seem to remember Robert x Cringley speculating this was going to happen a few months ago, guess he was onto something.

Let’s say you’re interested in playing media back to your television/home theater setup, but you’re unwilling to go through the trouble of building/maintaining a media pc and you don’t necessarily want to record stuff, you just want playback of materials you’re grabbing off the net, whether it’s legitimate stuff from, say ourmedia.com or archive.org’s live music archive, episodes of your favorite BBC show you’ve downloaded off p2p, or a rip of a DVD you borrowed from a colleague. Whatever it is, I just happened across a fantastic way to get this stuff into your tv for relatively cheap. Check out the Mediagate MG-25. $130 plus the cost of a 2.5″ hard drive gets you a fantastic, extremely versatile little media playback box and a remote control. It’s only slightly larger than an Ipod, it supports pretty much every video and audio codec you would reasonably expect it to, and it’s damn cheap. I can actually envision a use for these at work (instructors moving content around via sneakernet instead of relying on our flakey and overwhelmed network) and am going to try and get one in-house or buy one for myself. You can check out a review at akihabaranews.com as well.

[update]

A little digging has revealed that they have a new model coming, the MG-35, that handles 3.5″ hard drives and has an ethernet port. Even better! So far it’s not available in the US and appears to be a bit more expensive (~$220 or so) but the extra features are more than worth it.

Check out these excellent demos of javascript enabling drag and drop functionality in your web browser. Pretty cool stuff, and it works (with a variety of small glitches) across the major browsers. Use the link at the bottom of the page to see other examples of this at work. The slideshow you can rearrange and re-title is probably the coolest of the bunch.

Just a brief mention, again, of ecto. It was updated again this week and it just continues to improve. It costs, but it’s worth every penny. If you’re blogging from a mac you owe it to yourself to check it out.

If you don’t know the first thing about the unix command line and want a quick, easy way to learn the basics, check out the freeengineer.org’s learn unix in 10 minutes guide. Concise, easy to understand and free for the bookmarking. Next time you can’t figure out how to change file permission on a set of subdirectories, check this site.