Free Streaming TV and Movies

In America every computer is hooked up, we are all connected to the machine. most people know that much of life moved online with the advent of accessible social networking, free blog sites included.

What isn’t quite as well known is the current access to a near infinite supply of streaming media. Of course everyone knows about YouTube, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

What I am talking about are sites like SideReel, SurfTheChannel, and Watch-Movie-Links which index videos hosted at sites like MegaVideo, Tudou, and ZShare, and make accessing shows and movies easy.

There are even sites like OVGuide and all2c which index and make searchable the content of all these video indexing sites, making it even easier to find what you are looking for.

Even people who refuse to break the law, no matter how absurd and generally ignored it becomes, have some good options. FOX, NBC, USA, and many other networks have begun streaming full episodes of many shows online, albeit with short commercial interruptions and usually the day after they air on TV.

Additionally, there are many movies and shows avaliable legally from Hulu, once again with the only price being a few short commercial breaks.

Maybe all I’m trying to say is that people should stop sitting in front of their TVs all day. They should get out there, use the Internet, and watch the same crap through a medium of lesser quality.

Or maybe I’m just providing information, and you can decide what the heck you want to do with it.

The Open Mobile Future

Recently the mobile phone market has undergone a radical transformation with an explosion of open source initiatives and projects. Here is a brief description of some of them.

Openmoko

Their product is the Neo FreeRunner phone running the Openmoko software platform, and it is by far the most ‘open’ of all the mobile projects. Not only is the software totally open source and completely customizable, the CAD files for the physical phone are avaliable as well.

Unfortunately this phone is really only for the uber geek, since its primary value is in customizability and openness. If those aren’t your main concerns, you can get a lot more for less.

Update: The Neo FreeRunner has sold out in less then a week! But more are on the way. Read about it here.

Android

Created by Google for the Open Handset Alliance, Android provides what Google calls a complete mobile platform. This means that it comes with all the software needed for a mobile phone, from the kernel to the core libraries to the basic applications.

In addition to the basic Android system, the are already quite a few third party applications built, due to Google releasing the SDK early and then running the developer challange. You can find many of these early applications at helloandroid, and if you want help building you own you can visit anddev.

Aside from the current lack of actual phones, the biggest problem with Android is their implementation of Java. Instead of sticking to a Java standard, which would have allowed for possible cross-compatibility with many existing applications, they went and created their own virtual machine called Dalvik. For the reason see this article.

LiMo Foundation

As opposed to Android, the LiMo Platform does not come with any applications whatsoever. Instead, each handset manufacturer is responsible for creating all their own applications, from the most basic onward. This means that the software on LiMo phones from different manufacturers will be unique in appearance and even function.

While there is currently no SDK for the LiMo Platform, the APIs are avaliable and well documented, and the SDK is slated to come out late 2008. There are also about a dozen phones already avaliable running the LiMo Platform.

The main issue that the LiMo Foundation has is a lack of a public following and hype. While Android and Openmoko are leveraging the power of community, LiMo seems to be relying solely on the will and desire of the Foundation’s companies to use LiMo for purely technical reason. In other words, no one is clamoring for LiMo and very few third parties are writing software for it.

Symbian Foundation

After all the other open source excitment, Nokia bought Symbian and announced the new Foundation which would set it free. Despite the publicity stunt feeling this gives me, most tech news sites are at the least hopeful about the new Symbian Foundation.

Because I don’t really know all the details, I am just going to link to some of the more informative news articles.

First Symbian Foundation handsets due in 2010 (zdnet). Link.

Nokia buys Symbian, will open Symbian OS (linux.com). Link.

Other Important Articles

Android vs LiMo: What’s the difference? Link.

Crossing the chasm with Android: Can we view disruptive initiatives like Android in the context of the existing value chain? (This is a detailed and slightly hard to read analysis of the mobile market and how android might affect change). Link.

Fixing eBay Feedback

The rules have just changed at eBay. The list of changes is long, tedious, and can be found in this WordPress blog post. The upshot is, sellers can no longer leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers, giving the buyer complete unchecked feedback power.

I personally know several major sellers who are packing up and leaving eBay because of this. eBay sales have come to a virtual standstill for now. From my perspective, these changes seem like a major and possibly unrecoverable mistake.

Several articles about this new eBay policy make mention of third party services, which try and mitigate the flaws in eBay’s system. See the following Wired Blog post. But in all honesty this sort of thing should not be necessary.

What eBay needs to figure out, is what the hell they are doing to ensure a healthy marketplace for both buyers and sellers. I have a suggestion toward this goal.

———-

If eBay really wanted to correct their broken feedback system, they should make it entirely anonymous. And data should be added, to both the buyers and the sellers, regarding not only the percentages of positive and negative feedback received, but also about how much of each they have given, and how often they fail to give feedback at all.

This would take away the fear of negative feedback retaliation, without providing any opportunity for scammers. At the same time it would show who the unreasonable people that often leave negative feedback are, which would discourage giving it without reason.

In order to avoid making it obvious who is leaving the feedback I would advise a feedback posting delay. The system should wait for a certain number of feedbacks to come in or for a specific length of time to pass, before posting all of relevant feedbacks at once, in random order.

Additionally, feedback for a given sale should never be posted until both the buyer and the seller have each left feedback for the other, and they should have sixty days to do so.

Lastly, in addition to the visible statistics about failure to leave feedback, there should also be a small monetary penalty by eBay for not leaving feedback. Of course, if either the buyer or the seller fails to leave feedback, only the one who fails to do so should be penalized.

All feedback should be final and unchangeable, and that should be made very obvious on the feedback page. It should be stated clearly and forcefully that feedback should be left only after completing the transaction entirely.

Although I have more to say, I will leave it at that for now.

——–

Update: The following WordPress blog post describes eBay’s new ‘report a problem with the buyer’ page. The optimist in me almost believes that this might work. But if the response time and interest by eBay is going to be the same for this as it is for other customer interaction, it will be utterly useless.

Hacked! Why Get a Firewall?

Just several hours ago a friend of mine, who is an up and coming eBay seller, got hacked.

The first sign that his computer’s security had been compromised came when several unauthorized listing went up on his eBay account. He immediately tried to access the account and discovered that his password had been changed. Right after going through the process of recovering a forgotten eBay password, he tried to log into his email. At that point he found out that his email had been hijacked as well. After contacting both eBay and Gmail and verifying his identity, both accounts have been temporarily suspended.

His passwords were stolen by means of an unauthorized key-logger, which kept a record of everything he typed, including passwords, and later transmitted it to the cyber burglar.

The reason his computer was easily accessed by this criminal is because he ran his computer like a yard-sale. Nothing at all stood guard.

Preventing these kind of attacks is easy, and there is no reason that anyone should have to be subjected to them. All you have to do is get a good quality firewall.

I must stress however that an antivirus alone is not enough to protect you. A firewall must be used to ensure this type of protection.

I recommend the free Comodo Firewall. It will help keep you system safe and secure with minimal effort and know how.

Web Browsers

When you buy a new computer these days, it comes with Windows Vista pre-installed and Internet Explorer 7 as the one and only web browser. Of course most folks have a geek friend or two who will provide them with technical assistance and advice in this situation. And one of the most common recommendations geeks give, is to get Firefox.

To a certain extent I agree, Firefox has a whole lot going for it.

However, the fact is, Firefox has hardly any advantages over IE7 when first installed. There are many little differences. Both have tabs, but the way Firefox handles them by default is slightly less intuitive then IE7. Firefox has a few neat features that IE7 lacks, like spell checking and very easy privacy options. And so on, and so forth. No real reasons to choose Firefox.

The main Firefox advantage comes from the ability to add extensions with many amazing features. First there is Adblock Plus, which, with the addition of a subscription, will block almost every ad on the Internet. Then there is DownloadHelper which can download streaming audio and video from more then 500 separate media sites. And of course there are many many more incredibly useful extensions.

Extensions are the reason for the explosive jumps in market share that Firefox has experienced. The philosophy being, we will provide the framework and let the users build and share useful modules. While this has worked wonders for Firefox, it can also lead to instability and create security vulnerabilities.

Then there is the Opera browser. It is the best browser by far, when comparing all three as installed. It has an IE7 like intuitive tab interface, an easy option for clearing private data like Firefox, and an abundance of great unique features as well.

For example, Opera has an extremely well implemented and unobtrusive sidebar which contains your bookmarks, history, and other important sections in an easy to access layout. It also has an website speed dial feature that appears when a new tab is opened and has thumbnail links to nine sites of your choosing. And a magic wand which can automatically log you into almost any site with just one click.

Opera also has many other advantages. It consumes less system resources then any other fully featured browser. It is known to be the most secure browser, even without factoring in the vulnerabilities of common Firefox extensions. And lastly, Opera is compliant with more web standards the IE7 or Firefox.

What Opera lacks is the customizable nature of Firefox through extensions. Even though this is a problem, there are solutions which implement the functionality of some of the top extensions. In fact, this page lists many of the top Firefox extensions and their availability in Opera. For the sake of brevity, I will explain how to set up only two of my favorite Opera tweaks. Adblock, and the built in Firefox in-line spell checker.

Regarding Adblock, Opera is already capable of performing the same function, you just need to add a list of items to be blocked. My favorite list is this one, due to the fact that some of the other lists I tried blocked things that I wanted. Grab that whole list and copy it into your urlfilter.ini file (if you can’t find it, do a search), and make sure Opera is closed and not running before you save.

In-line spell checking is slightly more complicated to set up. Fortunately, this site where OSpell is maintained has a video showing how to install.

All this having been said, go and download Opera. I think you will like it.

Ascii Art

Before the days of even the most basic computer graphics there was art made from text, otherwise known as ascii art. Ascii is a abbreviation for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and refers to the the basic letters and symbols that all computers and other electronic devices use and recognize.

There are several types of ascii art, each with a unique look and feel.

The first is known as the oldskool style, which is done as an outline of what you are drawing. This is most commonly used to draw text and logos, but it can also be used for more complicated pictures if you have lots of patience.

 ___        ___  ___          __
|\  \      |\  \|\__\        |\ \
 \\  \___  _\\  \\__/_  ______\\ \  ___
  \\  __ \|\  __ \|\  \|\  __ \\\ \/  /
   \\ \_\ \\\ \_\ \\\  \\\ \\\ \\\  _ \_
    \\_____\\\_____\\\  \\\_\\\_\\\_\\__\
     \_____/ \_____/ \\  \\_/ \_/ \_/\__/
                   __|/  /
                  |\____/
                   \___/

       _,~'`.               ,~*`'*-,
   _,~'      `.           ,!~.,     `*,
,~'            `.      ,*`     `*,     l
`.           _,~'     f  ,*"`"*,  l     l
} `.     _,~'   {    f  f   f   l  l    1
{   `.,~'       }    I f    1    l I    1
 }   !         {     I I    1    I I    1
 {   !       _,}     I I    1    I I    1
  `. !   _,~'        I I    1    I I    1
    `!,~'            I I  ,~`    I I  ,~`
                     I_I~`       I_I~`

The second is known as the newskool style, where the object is filled in and shaded by the characters. And while this style is much more difficult to draw by hand, there are several programs which can convert a regular image into a newskool ascii picture.

              _
             ;$  ,
            ;$; ;$
         _,;$$$$$;
         `'"!$$$$'
           ,$$$$$1
         ,;$$$$$$$$!
      ,;$$$$$$$$$$$$	This is my first attempt at
    ,;$$$$$$$$$$$$$;	doing a newskool drawing.
  ,$$$$$$$$$$$$$$'
 $$$$$$$$$$$$"$$&	Guess what it is, and I will
$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$'	tell you at the bottom of this
!$$$$$$$$$$$! $$	post.
 !$$$$$$$$$$; $!,
  !$$$$$$$$$$&$$$.	Hint: It's not a kangaroo.
    `"*!$$$$$$$$&.
         `"*!$$$$$$$.
             `"*!$$$$$.
                 `*$$$$!
                   *$$$;
                  ,$$$;
               `'"*"^

The third style I want to talk about is one-line ascii art, which is used primarily in instant messaging and forums. I will omit the standard smileys that almost everyone is familiar with and show some of the more interesting samples.

O_o		Confused

o_~		Wink

>'.'<		Cat

>;<		Butterfly

~~\o/~~		Drowning

@}-,-'--	Rose

<GEFILTE><	Fish

Many great sites can be found by just searching Google for the phrase ‘ascii art’, but there is one site that is an amazing treasure of one-line ascii art which was a little hard to find.

One Line Ascii Art

The newskool picture is supposed to be a howling wolf. If you guessed it, let me know, ’cause I really didn’t think anyone was gonna get it.

Great Obscure Websites

mihd.net

Self described as the world’s most generous file-hosting service with no artificial limits.

Here is a list of features from their main page:

Resumable downloads!
Download accelerators are allowed.
No daily / hourly download limitations.
We do not block users by country or ip.
Split archives are allowed!
No waiting for a download to start.
Our users don’t have to install anything to download their files.

Additionally, their terms of service are short and reasonable.

I have never found a better place to host files that I need to distribute.

visit mihd.net

onelook.com

A brilliant reference and dictionary meta-search site with advanced search options. Any word you search for returns links to results from dozens of sites like Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and Dictionary.com.

Of course, the coolest thing about onelook is that it also returns links to results from fascinating sites like Rhymezone, The Phrontistery, and The Word Detective. Even science, slang, and tech results are linked to in their own sections.

This site is the easiest and quickest way to find information on every aspect of words and phrases.

visit onelook.com

kingdomofloathing.com

One of the most bizarre and unique online games ever created. It pokes fun at every aspect of RPGs and nearly any topic you can imagine is parodied.

Amusing stick drawings and entertaining descriptions adorn every situation and interaction. And each new area contains more hilarious jokes and baffling riddles.

This games must be played by anyone who likes RPGs and can appreciate awesome jokes.

visit kingdomofloathing.com

The Terrible VeohTV

VeohTV is amazingly bothersome to use, as it has a multitude of awful little problems that bug the hell out of me.

First, it is not properly cross platform. Meaning that it will not run under Linux.

It is also quite ugly, doesn’t fit with any Operating System’s visual layout, and the menu system is an mess.

Then there is the fact that simply navigating the various sections is quite slow with significant lag. Of course this is partly the fault of the fact that content information for a section is download (whether it needs to be or not) after you click to navigate to that section and must finish before the content is displayed. This is a very bad way of organizing things.

One of the most annoying features of VeohTV is the fact that when you switch to any section other then interact, the currently playing video is automatically stopped. Then, upon switching back to interact, the video automatically starts playing from the beginning.

This really ticks me off when I am watching a long video streaming. Not only does it not pause and resume the video, but it gets rid of all the video I have downloaded and restarts the download from the beginning! This is an insane way to make a program!

Even if you have the video downloaded in you library it is a pain, as navigating a video is slow and choppy.

The only reasonably good feature of VeohTV is the search, which is quite comprehensive.

Altogether, VeohTV is counter intuitive, cumbersome, and very annoying to use.

And if Veoh wants to claim that it is still in beta and has not yet been finished, they shouldn’t force everyone who wants to watch longer videos to use it.

VeohTV – Argh!

Old DOS Games

Some of the greatest games ever were made for DOS and have now been categorized as abandonware. Meaning they are made freely available. Including amazing classics like Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, Betrayal at Krondor and countless others.

Not only that, but these games can be played on any operating system by using DOSBox, which emulates an Intel x86 PC with all the necessary components for running old DOS games. This means that I can run almost all DOS game properly on Linux, OS X, or any version of Windows.

Many of the most common DOS games can be found at bestoldgames.net, but if you can’t find what you are looking for or you want to browse a huge selection, check out the-underdogs.info (very slow download speed though).

DOSBox takes a bit of setting up but there is a very nice wiki page at dosbox.com with details of how to configure things for Windows, and I found a very helpful blog page for Linux (links below).

DOSBox Website

Setting Up DOSBox
Windows
Linux

DOSBox Games
All Abandonware

Also, the DOSBox Game Launcher looks like a promising program to help organize and simplify using DOSBox.

One final word. These games were made without the benefit of great graphics and computing power, which means they had to be fun and addicting. Download DOSBox and re-live what was likely the best era of computer gaming thus far.

Firefox Extensions

Out of the hundreds of great Firefox extensions there are really only three that I find indispensable.

Adblock Plus

This is the single most wonderful thing about using Firefox. No ads.

Of course other browsers, like Opera, also have the ability to block content and lists are available which block almost all ads. However Firefox and Adblock Plus make browsing the Internet ad free much easier and more idiot friendly. Just install Adblock Plus, restart Firefox, pick a subscription (I advise Jamie Plucinski’s list) and you are set. Nothing to it.

DownloadHelper

There are plenty of Firefox extensions which claim to be able to download streaming video and audio from all sorts of sites, but in my experience they often don’t work. Sometimes these extensions won’t even work on the pages they were designed for.

The beauty of DownloadHelper is that it works perfectly on almost every site. It has a huge list of known working sites and most other sites work fine as well. No other streaming content down-loader even comes close.

CustomizeGoogle

For anyone who uses Google this extension is an amazing tool. It has a vast array of options and settings for customizing and improving every aspect of Google.

Everything from tracking and privacy, to having Google Images provide links straight to the pictures, to blocking Google ads, and much more.

Firefox, Adblock Plus, DownloadHelper, CustomizeGoogle.