Category Archives: Internet

Internet, Television

The Internet TV Survival Guide

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So the writer’s strike is raging and there’s less and less scripted TV to watch. And the cable bill is past due, and the TV is broke, or at the very least, it’s all the way in the other room. Too much damn walking. What to do, nephew?

I have cataloged here all best the ways to legally obtain video entertainment on the Internet. So no jackbooted stormtroopers from the MPAA will kick down your door and haul away your computer. And your children.

Note: As much as I love Firefox, I find most embedded video players perform far better on IE. Many won’t work at all in Firefox, even with IE Tab.

Crack TV!
The Crack Team has been pointing you to great videos since this site was launched. Through the miracle of tagging (and the back-breaking labor of back-tagging over 400 posts), you can now see an archive of all video posts on TCT. Try to find good stuff sites like YouTube and you’ll end up slogging through one mediocre video after another – even when you stick to the popular and highly rated ones. Save your time and watch Crack TV!

Netflix
Netflix is awesome. Without a doubt the biggest DVD selection anywhere, including HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.1 They also have a streaming service. While the selection of downloads is limited, it’s still good. I just finished season 1 of Dexter and next is Dead Like Me. They also have several NBC shows and a bunch of crap shows from the 70’s and 80’s. Best of all, they now allow you to download as much as you want! The quality is high, too. I’ve had no problems since signing up several years ago and they even give me an early adopter discount.

Broadcast
If you can, you’re probably best served by getting a good TV tuner card2 and using DVR software like Windows Media Center. This way you can get everything and skip all the commercials.3

All major broadcast networks have some video content online, but vary widely in the quality, selection, and commercial content. It’s a great way to try new shows now that so little new stuff is produced. Journeyman would be a great example, if you didn’t watch it before it was canceled.4 You can now watch the entire series. Similarly, I recently discovered Life at the suggestion of a friend and now I’m all caught up.

Cable networks are much more conservative, choosing to only offer video clips like you might see on YouTube. Full episodes (for the cable channels I watch) are nonexistent.

Fox
Most TV shows I watch are on Fox, and they’ve done an awesome job with Fox On Demand. The selection is great:

New shows appear 1-8 days after airing; it depends on the show. The videos are high quality; some are even in HD. I find that cranking up the resolution to 1280 x 1024 on my 21″ monitor gives a great HD image for shows like Terminator.5 And most shows are commercial free! Rupert Murdoch is my homeboy.

NBC
NBC is the #2 network for online viewing. The video quality is excellent. The bad news is that all their shows run commercials during the normal spots for commercial breaks. The good news is that they only run one 15-30 second spot. The bad news is that it’s the same commercial, over and over. Better than watching it live, but not as good as a DVR. Like Fox, NBC also has a great selection:

ABC
The only ABC show I really watch is Lost, but they seem to do a great job with it. Amazingly, they have all 4 seasons online in HD (1280 x 720), and when I boosted my resolution, full screen looked fantastic. Lost is easily the best looking show on the Internet. I thought I might try Pushing Daisies, as I heard that was good, but I found they only offer a few episodes of their other series.

CW
Smallville is one of my longtime faves, due in no small part to Kristin Kreuk. And Reaper is great. But CW’s online video offering is weak sauce. Very few full episodes and what they have is low quality. I have to admit, I am surprised they put online the director’s cut of the next new Smallville episode before it even aired. But it still wasn’t enough to get me to watch.

CBS
It sucks. First, I didn’t watch it when I had a TV. CBS has picked up Dexter, which is an awesome show, but they’re just airing censored versions of the Showtime series. When it’s all on Netflix, what’s the point? The only current CBS show I’m interested in is Jericho, as it was recently suggested to me by a few friends. When I went to watch past episodes, however, I found the video quality sucked. Full screen is almost unwatchable; it’s just stretching the original size, which is only 9″ diagonal on my monitor.

Headline News
I used to watch this more often to get a quick feed of major stories. This is still possible online through their Prime News segments. Personally, I can’t stand Nancy Grace, and don’t often bother with their other shows.

Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet
Decent quality full episodes, but very few shows (3 total at this time, none of which I watch), and only a couple episodes per show.

Comedy Central
More of a video clip outlet with no full episodes. Do you really need to see every second of The Daily Show or Colbert Report? Maybe not, especially now that the strike is affecting them. But I would like to see full episodes of South Park, Reno 911, and, should they ever return: Chapelle’s Show, Dr. Katz, Stella, Strangers With Candy, and Upright Citizen’s Brigade. I won’t be holding my breath.

Cartoon Network
They’ve produced some fantastic animated series, especially their superhero adaptations (Justice League Unlimited) and Adult Swim (Harvey Birdman, Sealab 2021). But the site seems very much geared towards kids, and only provides video clips. Nothing to see here.

  1. If you tell them you have either player, they just automatically send you those. [↩]
  2. Make sure it’s ATSC for HD [↩]
  3. Except for the upcoming Agent Mystery-produced So You Think You Can Dance. Be sure to watch it live and soak in all the commercials. [↩]
  4. Thanks for killing a great show. [↩]
  5. They do force you to download a proprietary video player, but it seems harmless. And yes, I know it’s a tragedy to watch Terminator on anything less than a 50″ 1080P screen. [↩]
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Books, Film, Humor, Internet

DM of the Rings

I’ve been really enjoying the web comic DM of the Rings by Shamus Young. It tells the tale of a dungeon master leading a group of typical players on a Dungeons & Dragons adventure based on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Only the players have never heard of LOTR, much less MERP1.

Yes, a little far fetched considering D&D stole heavily from LOTR, and I can’t imagine a gamer who hasn’t seen the LOTR movies. But no matter, the comic is very funny, and the actions of the players are uncannily similar to every group I’ve ever gamed with.

The real ingenuity is that it’s “illustrated” using only screencaps from the films with some occasional Photoshopping. The looks on the characters’ faces is often priceless. By the time you’re halfway through the series, you’ll be convinced Viggo Mortensen went through the whole trilogy with a blank stare.

  1. I actually owned MERP some years ago, but never got around to playing it, or meeting anyone else who had. [↩]
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BTW, Internet, Television

Heroes, 30 Rock, The Office Hits Netflix

Variety reports that Netflix will be offering Heroes, 30 Rock, and The Office the day after being broadcast. It appears you’ll be able to view them on your PC through Netflix streaming or rent them on DVD. You can already view them at NBC.com, but with commercials you can’t skip (and rewinding will play them again). I’m assuming the Netflix versions will be commercial-free. I already watch these via DVR, but it’s a nice backup plan if I miss one.

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Internet, Music

Music from the Motion Picture Almost Famous (A Rhapsody Playlist)

Almost Famous was the first and last movie I saw in the theater alone. I’m one of those people who believe movies are a social experience. You grab dinner, see the movie, and then talk about it over coffee1. I’m pretty sure I’m in the majority. When Almost Famous was released, of course I wanted to see it with friends. But either everyone had seen it, or nobody wanted to see it. Normally I’d just wait for it to be released on DVD, but something told me I had to see this movie in the theater. So after meeting friends for dinner at the Santa Monica Promenade2 and failing to convince them to join me, I bought a ticket and went in alone.

It was practically a religious experience.

Seeing Cameron Crowe’s journey into the world of rock and roll at the age of 16 seemed like a wakeup call. A big “what the hell am I doing with my life” kinda thing3. The film immediately became one of my all time favorites.

And the music. Just fantastic. Complementing each scene so that hearing them again allows us to invoke Crowe’s memories as our own.

Of course, I bought the soundtrack right away. But even at 17 songs it only covers about a third of the music in the film. At one time I had ambitious plans to collect all the albums the songs had appeared on, allowing me to experience it the same way Crowe did. Luckily, procrastination sometimes saves you work. Eventually I discovered Rhapsody, which saved me from tracking down all those albums on half.com. And the good volunteers at the IMDB painstakingly entered the music credits4. All I had to do was find the tracks on Rhapsody and play them.

Unfortunately, Rhapsody doesn’t have the best search capabilities. But eventually I was able to find all the songs or determine if they weren’t available. When faced with duplicate tracks, I chose the one that appeared on the original album if it was available. This saves you the trouble of having to track it down, if you’re a purist like me.

In addition, I have listed below all the songs that were missing from Rhapsody. The great tragedy for this soundtrack is that Rhapsody doesn’t really have any Zeppelin5 . Considering that the fictional band Stillwater is a composite representing Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers, and The Eagles, it is a real loss. Or a great excuse to buy a bunch of Zeppelin albums.

I hope this inspires others to do the same, as there are many movies with great music, and only one of me. However, this won’t be my last – stay tuned!

Music from the Motion Picture Almost Famous (A Rhapsody Playlist)

Continue reading Music from the Motion Picture Almost Famous (A Rhapsody Playlist) →

  1. No coffee after a movie makes me sad. [↩]
  2. Back when it was cool, not just some clone of The Grove [↩]
  3. Unfortunately, my powers of procrastination and laziness are still as strong as ever, but at least I know I’m capable of being motivated for short bursts. [↩]
  4. As I count 48 songs, I’m not sure if it’s missing any since I heard there’s over 50 in the film. However, it does look to be very thorough. [↩]
  5. They must’ve really took “get the Led out” to heart. [↩]
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About, Internet

Crack Team 2.5

The server migration is complete and I’ve added lots of cool stuff. While this isn’t as drastic a change as when I switched from Movable Type to WordPress, it’s the biggest change since then. Here’s what’s new:

WordPress 2.3.1
I was way behind, but now we’re on the cutting edge. The upgrade includes tagging and auto-save, among other things. It also has a better visual editor.

Tarski 2.01
The latest version of this theme, which includes a new header image that nicely demonstrates The Crack Team’s plans for world domination. Most other changes are invisible to users. Mainly it’s compliant with WP 2.3 and supports tags. Of note to bloggers is an option to reverse your page title, so the post title comes before your site name. That’s good for search engine optimization.

Subscribe To Comments
When you comment on a post, you can request to be notified by email of any follow-up comments.

Social Bookmarking
When you view a single post, you’ll now see a row of icons to bookmark that page to del.icio.us, Facebook, Google, etc. Let me know if one you use is missing.

Footnotes
On longer posts I love to use footnotes, so this is great for me. You just wrap the footnote in double parentheses. For example1. Just make sure there’s a space before the opening parentheses.

Contact Form
I added a simple contact form; you can see it at the end of my profile page. It uses both CAPTCHA and Askimet to prevent spam. I know CAPTCHA isn’t foolproof, but as far as I can tell Askimet is. It’s saved me from over 5,000 spam comments since I switched to WP. If any author wants, I’ll set up a form for them.

In addition to the software upgrades and plugins, Inmotion keeps separate server logs for each domain and subdomain I host, and separates out webmail. This means AWStats will report more accurately. Granted, I’m sure I won’t want to see them since they’re artificially inflated right now. But that which can be measured can be improved.

Hopefully all this is useful and not just a novelty. If you have any suggestions, just leave a comment. Thanks.

  1. Here’s a footnote [↩]
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About, Internet, Technology

Server Maintenance

Well, it’s more like server removal. I’m switching from a self-hosted server to one at Inmotion Hosting. It was fun while it lasted. Ok, so it wasn’t really fun, because I hate system administration. And that’s why I’m switching it out. Some things get worse when they’re out of my hands, but other things like regular backups, security and bug fix patches, etc. get way better.

They’ll be handling mail as well, and as a result I will be getting rid of my CrackTeam.org email address. I technically have 6 email addresses and by far the Crack Team one gets the most spam. Not that I see any of it – I have excellent spam filtering. It’s 97% accurate and has protected me from over 69,000 spam messages to date. I don’t know that Inmotion will be nearly as accurate though, since they use SpamAssassin, and I use the BayesSpam plugin for SquirrelMail. Anyway, I was worried about getting rid of it until I realized that almost none of my friends use that email; it’s mainly used to register for web sites. I can use my Yahoo account for that, since their spam filtering is excellent as well. If you were using my Crack Team email, please switch to one of my 3 main personal email addresses.

Anyhoo, the point is that the site will be going down, perhaps tonight, so don’t be surprised. Hopefully the whole thing won’t take long, and we’ll be running on WordPress 2.3.1. There should be some nice new features.

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Internet, Technology

Personal Do Not Call List

I’ve joined a few different social networking sites, and when I join I want to quickly add my friends who are already on the site. Many have a nifty feature that allow you to upload your Outlook contacts file, which they use to generate a list of existing users. Sounds harmless, right?

The problem is that some sites can be a bit aggressive about it, and if you’re not careful, they will sent invites to your whole contacts list. We often forget who we have in that list. People we haven’t spoken to in years, or those who we had one short conversation with. In short, people who might be little taken aback to find you still had their contact info. And even more creeped out that you want to add them as “friends” on whatever social site du jour. I just installed the latest version of Skype, which includes your Outlook contacts in your Skype contact list by default (you can turn that off, thankfully). It would suck to accidentally call some girl whose phone number I should have purged years ago.

So I created a personal Do Not Call List. I moved every contact that I’d feel embarrassed about contacting accidentally. As I’m a bit of a data pack rat, I cleared out 37 (!) old contacts. I still have them just in case, but I can now export my current contacts without fear. It also makes finding contacts a bit easier.

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Internet, Technology

Photosynth: Bladerunner Becomes a Reality

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Thanks to Assassin for forwarding this. It’s a Microsoft technology that allows real time photo data mining. Remember that part in Bladerunner when Harrison Ford is watching a video like:

type type type
Enhance
type type type
Enhance
type type type
Enhance

(Yeah, they did it Super Troopers, too.) Well this is kinda like that, only with tons of photos instead of video, and a better interface. It’s seriously badass.

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Everything Else, Internet

Thoughts on Facebook

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Now that Facebook is open to the public, I’ve joined up and wandered through. I’m a social software buff, so I thought I’d share my thoughts.

Networks and Exclusivity
Facebook started out as an exclusive network for college kids, and that still shows. It is still divided into networks based on schools, workplaces, and geographical regions (the last of which anyone can join). To get into the school or workplace networks, you need an email address that proves your affiliation. I don’t have one for my alma mater, and I’m not terribly keen on adding my work affiliation.

Profiles and Access
The clean profiles are more reminiscent of Friendster than MySpace. On the one hand, there’s less customization and personalization. On the other hand, you’re not constantly pulling up some garish vision of Hades, a cacophony of top 40 vitriol that will forever haunt your dreams. So you got that going for you. The message seems to be, “We’re a bit more civilized over here, a bit more mature, as evidenced by the many photographs of my alcohol drinking escapades, which is what grownups do.”
     You can only see the full profiles of your friends and those in your networks (and there are ways to further restrict your profile). To clarify, you can verify the existence of just about everyone on there, using browse and search features. But if they’re not in one of your networks, you only see a thumbnail and are limited to sending them a message or adding them as friends. So even though there are millions of members, I can only see the profiles of those in my regional network, which has about 50K people. You can switch regional networks, but only once every 60 days. This is especially annoying for those like me who live on the border of another regional network. I can switch, but I can’t be in both.
     This is probably another reason why Facebook has been called a “walled garden” and the AOL of today. In addition to the general Internet public being kept out, virtual walls exist between the different internal groups. It seems I also can’t see the profiles of those in my regional network who are underage. There are various search/browse filters that can weed them out for you, but I still appreciate the extra layer of protection, because you really can’t tell by the photographs anymore, and Facebook is filled with HS kids.

Identity
Once you start browsing profiles (or just looking at your own), you realize there is virtually no anonymity. Just about everyone goes by their full name. It also makes it much easier to find people by name, especially when compared to sites like MySpace.
     I think this also affects how you craft your identity on the site. You’re probably a bit more cautious. Not as cautious as you would be on LinkedIn, but still… Age, of course, is a factor; the younger the person the “riskier” the profile. This happens a lot: you’ll see a thumbnail of a hot chick in a bikini, instinctively click on it, and see the profile is blocked because she’s in high school. Perhaps this behavior stems from when the virtual walls kept all non-students out, most importantly parents and younger siblings. Or maybe there are just a lot of young girls with poor decision making skills, as Masterchief would say.

Social Focus
The user base skews young, as you’d expect from a site that was students-only until a few months ago. I’m pretty far from ancient, but after uploading my Outlook contacts file it only found two friends already registered. I’ve also seen other user data that shows most members are in school or within 5 years of graduation. You also see a mix of people like me with very few connections, and college students or recent grads with over 100 friends. You hear a lot of buzz about how this is going to be the next big network, but if so, it’s going to start with students and move forward. A lot of people will have more friends on MySpace, and that will continue until the current teens and 20-somethings start aging.
     It also has more of a dating feel than MySpace (closer to Friendster, I guess). Probably because the basic profile questions are similar to sites like Match.com. At the same time, it doesn’t go nearly as far as a dedicated dating site, and seems a little strange to use it as one. I did find a rather brilliant 3rd party application called Matches. It allows you to anonymously communicate your interest to someone. They get notified they have a secret admirer, but your identity isn’t revealed until they indicate they’re also interested in you. If this sounds familiar, I blogged about this feature earlier when American Singles added it.
     Perhaps because of the dating feel, it feels weird to include work related info – like mixing business and pleasure. I’ll leave the professional networking to LinkedIn, which I’m also on.

User Communication
There are a few ways to interact with other users without resorting to messaging them. Networks have message boards and something called “The Wall”. Walls are like MySpace comments, and your profile has one too, but you’re not prevented from writing on your own wall – a nice improvement. And there are groups, but they’re listed alphabetically, so it’s hard to find popular, active groups, unless it’s a top 10 group in your network. That’s included in the basic network stats.

3rd Party Apps
Garnering recent buzz in the developer community was the Facebook Platform, which allows you to create plugins (“applications” in Facebook parlance) for Facebook users. So far the popular ones include those that display your music playlists, what states/countries you’ve been to, a virtual white board for visitors to scribble graffiti, and the aforementioned Matches app.

Conclusion
It’s interesting, and I can see how it’s a must for college-oriented people. As these people continue to enter the workforce and interact with older peers, membership will grow. Right now, I’m not sure that all regions have reached the critical mass to offer a real community experience, and you may find you want to switch to an outside region just to have access to more people. Or you can just stick with MySpace until I build something better for the rest of us.

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