Command Shift Q

JDownloader

I recently discovered the wonderful world of copyright free recordings. Hundreds if not thousands of hours of music, by some of the greatest musicians in the world—who actively encourage and support the sharing of their legacy concert recordings and studio out-takes.

But the world of ‘by collectors for collectors’ has a down-side. Many of the files which are shared on sites like rapidfind.org and drfusion.blogspot.com are hosted on one of a number of wait-and-see hosting sites, which require javascript and browser pop-ups enabled. Which means hours and hours of waiting for the separate parts of each archive file to download.

Of course you could just bite the bullet and sign-up for the premium service many of these sites offer—which would be fine if there was one download site to rule them all. But, unfortunately, the whole business seems to be carved up between 10 or more sites and signing up for all of them could be an expensive business, just for the sake of accessing perhaps one or two must-have out-of-print recordings.

Jdownloader to the rescue. A cross-platform application, it takes the pain out of waiting for free download slots on all the major hosting sites and a whole bunch of some of the more obscure ones besides. yourhostfile, ziddu, imagefap, xvideos, soundcloud, rapidgator, megaupload, filefactory, mediafire… the list goes on.

You can customise many different aspects of how JDownloader works and it is worth spending a little time in the settings pane to do this, as the default configuration does feel a little Windowsish—for example persistent pop-over balloons and seemingly endless ‘are you sure / don’t show again’ dialogue boxes.

The up sides of using JDownloader as your main download queue, however, outweigh the initial tedium of finding the one control panel you’re looking for among the many you don’t really need. For example:

• Automatic extraction from and trashing of archives into customisable folders.
• Automatic capcha reading
• Bandwidth limiter
• Clipboard monitor
• Premium password storage

Considering, on top of all that, JDownloader is free, it kicks the likes of paid for apps like SpeedDownload into the dirt.

Apart from the fact it isn’t a native OS X application (the same version of JDownloader will run on Linux and Windows in a Java VM) and ignoring the occasional hanging bug where just as your list of URLs are about to be moved from the clipboard link checker to the download queue the whole thing stops responding, all-in-all JDownloader is perhaps the best of the best queue managers there are.

Add to that the fact that it is still in active development with a vibrant user community constantly improving the way it works and performs and it’s hard to imagine how anyone could get along without JDownloader for very long.

You find a story you like on a social bookmarking site and you want to share it with your twitter followers.

You could cut and paste the link to the story manually into twitter, but if you use an automatic RSS to Twitter service you don’t need to have your favourite twitter client open. You also have the added advantage of automatically managing which of your twitter accounts your up-votes get sent to. Meaning you can have an up-vote RSS feed for work related tweets and another for friends and family.

However, for some far-too-boring-to-go-into technical reasons, it’s not always as simple as cutting and pasting your RSS feed address into one of the many RSS to Twitter services and clicking ‘go’.

More often than not the type of RSS feed your social bookmarking service churns out is pre-formatted, which means you get all kinds of error messages when attempting to re-publish your feed. What you need is some way of stripping out that formatting to convert your RSS feed into one which is compatible with a variety of reading and re-publishing tools.

Let’s set-up a basic RSS to twitter feed for reddit.com:

This will mean every 30 minutes you will automatically tweet a link to the stories you have ‘liked’ or submitted to reddit.com

• Create an account at rss2twitter.com or an RSS to Twitter service of your choice.
• Create an account at feedburner.com or sign in with your Google.com details.
• Go to reddit.com and click ‘Preferences’. In ‘Privacy Options’ tick the box, “Make my votes public”. Click ’save’.
• Click on your username and choose the ‘liked’ tab.
• For Safari and Firefox users your address bar will now display an RSS icon. Click it. When the address URL changes to something like:

  'feed://www.reddit.com/user/**YOUR_USERNAME**/liked/.rss'

  copy this address to the clipboard (⌘ + C) and switch back to feedburner.com.

• In feedburner, you will now see a box marked “Burn a feed right this instant”. Paste (⌘ + V) the feed address from the previous step into this box, removing the ‘feed://’ part. For some reason feedburner.com doesn’t like seeing this at the start of your RSS feed address. Click ‘Next’
• If feedburner throws an error, saying it can’t recognise the feed address, remove the ‘feed://’ part of the address again, as sometimes (for some mystery reason) feedburner re-inserts this part of the address automatically despite that it can’t read it. Go figure. It’s been like that for years, so I doubt they’re about to fix it any time soon.
• Click ‘Next’ again. You should now see a ‘Congrats!’ screen with your feedburner address at the top, saying something like:

  "http://feeds.feedburner.com/reddit/nkck"

  Copy this address to the clipboard (⌘ + C).

• Open your Rss2Twitter.com Dashboard, after signing in. Click ‘Add account’. This shows a link which will ask twitter to authorise rss2twitter.com to post to automatically post any changes made to your RSS feed to your twitter account. At this point, when repeating these stages if you want to add more than one twitter account, you should sign in to the twitter.com account you want to authorise first, before clicking, “Click here to go to twitter to authorize your account”.
• Once twitter.com returns you to rss2twitter.com, click ‘Add a feed’ in your Dashboard. Paste (⌘ + V) the feedburner RSS feed from above into the box marked “RSS Feed URL”. The other settings in this window should be self-explanatory, but be sure to set the “Number of updates to post” option no higher than ‘2′, so as not to spam your twitter followers with everything from your RSS feed all at once.

Hope that helps! If you find this useful please vote it up using the social bookmarking sites linked below. Thanks to @palanski for the idea.
[ad#textads_2]

Much has been written about OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard being not so much a revolutionary new Operating System as more of a gradual, natural evolution of the Mac we already know and love.

This might seem like a fancy way of saying, “no new features”. But dig a little deeper and it soon becomes clear that Snow Leopard is more than just a few tweeks here and there which only Developers can gain from.

Under-the-hood improvements to the system architecture, mean that we ordinary users can look forward to much greater stability and more functionality. Chief among these improvements is a much needed overhaul of the Services menu.

In their marketing and promo, Apple have made something of a tradition of downplaying the in-depth, more technical aspects of their products, in favour of presenting a cleaner image of an easy to use system. While this is true, and there are some sound reasons for taking this approach, occasionally this “less is more” approach to marketing has frustrated long-time Mac-heads (like me), who think Apple would do well now and then to simply tell it like it is and compare OS X’s like-for-like features with their Microsoft Windows equivalents.

The latest incarnation of the Services menu, in OS X Snow Leopard, and the way it hooks into Automator, is a perfect example of something we dyed in the wool users would shout about a lot more, were we in charge of Apple’s advertising department–not least because there is no feature-for-feature comparison built-into any version of MS Windows currently shipping which comes close to this level of work-flow customisation.

The unique selling point of Services, is that anyone can add or edit their own task to a contextual menu, available throughout the Operating System, no matter which application is currently active. OK, not the most catchy of billboard slogans, but when you see what you can do with Services, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.

History
The Services menu is one of the many revolutionary features of OS X which were inherited from the way ahead of its time Nextstep, an object-oriented, multitasking operating system developed by NeXT Computer, a company which Apple acquired in 1996, which also lead to NeXT Computer founder Steve Jobs returning as CEO of Apple.

The purpose of Services is to have a set of commonly used system level tasks available to all applications, regardless of which application is currently active. This can be as basic or as advanced a task as the user would like.

So, for example, if you want to add a bullet point to a text selection or alphabetise a list of names, you simply navigate to the Services menu or hit a keyboard short-cut and no matter which application you happen to be using, Services will carry out this task.

Similarly, if you want to view an entire content rich presentation as it would appear on an iPhone and the three main web browsers simultaneously, Services you have either written yourself, or downloaded and customised to suite, are there to help you out.

In practise, however, Services in previous versions of OS X, have been located in cluttered and esoterically labelled nested menus, with keyboard short-cuts that sometimes conflicted with those already assigned to another task in the application currently running. So Services became largely neglected–despite that they clearly showed potential as a time saving asset to workflow.

Action!
In OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the Services menu is now available from within the Action menu in the Finder. It is also contextual, meaning only Services which are relevant to the current selection are shown. This has had a dramatic effect on cleaning up the look of the menu as well as enabling a much tighter integration with Automator Action Scripts.

What’s especially neat about this, is that this replaces the similarly powerful but just as neglected Automator Actions Contextual Menu, when right-clicking a selection. Now, in place of the Actions Menu, you can see only Automator Services which are relevant to the file type, or selection you currently have highlighted.

The original system wide Services menu is still available in the Application Menu, at the top left of the screen, next to the Apple Menu. This is also where you will find the new Services Preferences Pane, which is a sub-category of the revamped Keyboard Preferences.

Video
Sal Saghoain is one of the lead developers at Apple who gave the world Automator and AppleScript.

In this series of demos, with Alex Lindsey, Sal shows us how the much neglected Services menu, in OS X Snow Leopard, has been updated into a slick new way to bring dynamic content into the Finder and other applications we use everyday.

http://www.pixelcorps.tv/macbreak235 – Part 1
http://www.pixelcorps.tv/macbreak236 – Part 2
http://www.pixelcorps.tv/node/878 – Part 3

You can serve web sites from your computer without paying for third party hosting. All you need is a permanent connection to the internet (DSL or better) and a Mac which can be left running 24/7.

Knowing this and knowing how to do this are two very different things. I set out to find out how it’s done and discovered a whole new world of technical in-speak and confusing jargon. This article is an attempt to put things into rather easier to understand language.

WARNING!
It may be against the terms and conditions of your Internet Service Provider’s contract to host high bandwidth websites from your private (residential) internet connection.

If you plan on setting up a permanent web host, with the intention of serving large files to high numbers of visitors, you’re much better off buying a solution from a dedicated third party hosting company.

Read more…

I’m a big fan of Harry Shearer’s Le Show on KCRW Public Radio, which also goes out as a podcast. You might remember Harry as the voice of numerous characters on The Simpsons and as the luke-warm bass player from spoof rock band, Spinal Tap.

Harry’s show regularly features a segment on the joys of switching from analogue TV to digital terrestrial or DVB, using government subsidised converter boxes. A great number of his listeners have written into his show with tales from the digital wonderland—with mixed opinions on the advantages and disadvantages.

Read more…

Created by fader.co.uk, iPlayer Grabber is a neat little tool for downloading the iPhone version of BBC iPlayer content, which—unlike the browser based flash and MPEG videos for desktop computers, isn’t encrypted and locked down with DRM.

To view BBC content legally you need to hold a UK licence fee. To access BBC iPlayer you need to be within the UK—and the BBC do a good job of constantly updating the way in which they detect your IP address, to ensure this is the case.

Unfortunately this often means that for Brits living and working overseas, who’ve already paid their yearly subscription, much of the content they’ve paid for is unavailable.

Thankfully, iPlayer Grabber includes settings for HTTP proxy—so if you can find a UK based proxy, you should be able to catch up with Top Gear and Eastenders, no matter where in the world you are.

Indeed the whole array of BBC content is available on iPlayer, to a certain extent—which makes the lack of a queue in iPlayer Grabber all the more frustrating, although the author adds that this function may become available at some point and there is a work-around to this as described on the fader.co.uk blog, here.

[ad#textads_2]

There are hundreds of free file hosting sites, which will offer free bandwidth up front, with the offer of more if you pay. badongo.com is but one very popular site of this kind, which I’ve used as an example, here, because of a bug in the way their servers check IP addresses which locks legitimate users out of accessing content, even before the free trial has expired.

The error message, suggesting that “your IP address has exceeded free account limits” (or words to that effect) is a familiar one to many of us who seek out rare music recordings and bootleg concert performances, who find them on these free hosting services only to be denied access because of poorly configured Java on the server side.

While generous with their storage allowances, free hosting sites are often overzealous with their free user limits. If you’re seeing these error messages because you really have exceeded your free allowance, you should sign-up for a paid account and stop moaning about it. If, on the other hand you simply want to retrieve one or two files, which should be within your free use limits, but are in fact being wrongly identified as having used your allowances, this guide is for you.

Since these false positives, statistically, must affect many thousands of users, I decided to find a way to ‘trick’ one site which was being particularly stubborn, badongo, into allowing me to download the file I wanted—with a view to sharing the information I gathered here. If anyone from badongo would like to contact me once this bug is fixed, I’d be happy to amend this article at a later date, pointing this out.

I knew, from my experience of trying to connect to the BBC iPlayer, from outside the UK, that I needed to start by investigating ways to connect to the site from behind a proxy server, with an IP range which has yet to exceed the free bandwidth limit.

There are hundreds of guides on-line with instructions on how to implement proxy connections. They range from being so technically worded they’re downright impossible to understand, to web-based interfaces that, while simple to use, are in reality tragically slow and inflexible.

Somewhere in-between these two extremes is Tor, “a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet”

Tor is split up into four main panes. For the purpose of this guide I’m not going to cover the whole of Tor’s functionality, except to say that if you follow the instructions for how to install Tor, with the Vidalia front end controller and the Torbutton Firefox plug-in, the only thing you’ll need to change to enable Firefox to save incoming file transfers, is the Java settings in the Torbutton preferences panel of Firefox.

Warning! DO NOT use Tor to download hundreds of megabytes of data to which you are not entitled to retrieve. One of Tor’s intended uses is as a lifeline to political dissidents and journalists in countries with oppressive regimes, where the free exchange of information is a crime punishable by death. If you misuse this guide, someone, somewhere is suffering for your greed. This information is intended to be used responsibly as a work-around to a simple programming bug and should only be used as a last resort.

• Choose the Mac, Linux or Windows version of the Tor install bundle, from https://www.torproject.org/download.html.en. Install it and follow the on-screen instructions. Vidalia must always be running for Firefox to use Tor proxy servers when the Torbutton add-on is enabled, but you can quit it when Torbutton is set to ‘off’.
• Right-click on the enable / disable Torbutton, in the bottom left-hand corner or Firefox and choose ‘Preferences’
• In the ‘Dynamic Content’ tab under ‘Security Settings’, you need to un-check ‘Disable plug-ins during Tor usage. This is because, unless your free hosting site supports right-click “Save As..” download links, the Java code used to ensure you don’t hot-link to a file’s location on the server will be prevented from running
• You should now be able to work-around the false positives thrown up by the free hosting server and retrieve the files

If the free file hosting site still identifies your IP address as having exceeded bandwidth allowances, and you are sure this is a mistake click the ‘Use a new identity’ button in the Vidalia control panel and Tor will re-route your connection to a different IP range—allowing you to appear as if connected to the site from a different address which has not been incorrectly banned. Once the files you require are successfully retrieved, you should consider “giving back” some of your bandwidth to the Tor project by enabling Vidalia client to work as a relay.

If you found this guide useful, please promote it using the social bookmarking buttons below. I am a freelance tech blogger and appreciate constructive feedback.

[ad#textads_2]

The idea is simple, you create the content, they handle everything else. Printing, credit card processing and world-wide delivery. Everything from personalised calendars, to T-Shirts, DVDs and paperback books.

But in reality, on-demand print services, like lulu.com and cafepress.com, can be quite picky about which kinds of document they’re able to process and, more importantly, recreate exactly in print, as they appear on your screen.

This is because PDF, the Portable Document Format of choice for books and artwork, was originally designed to be an on-screen draft document viewer, but has become almost ubiquitous in the professional print industry as a lightweight way for producers of off-line print media, like the beleaguered JPGmag to send WYSIWYG magazine layouts to printer-distributors.

To accommodate this growth in what is actually an unintended use of PDF, Adobe have had to bolt certain functions on top of the original PDF standard. Rather typically this has resulted in lots of different standards, which leaves ordinary users, who simply want to use a word processor to make books and portfolios, somewhat lost in a world of Quark and In-design jargon.

A PDF exported from Microsoft Word isn’t guaranteed to look the same from one machine to another. Similarly, a document exported from Apple’s iWork Pages, has certain data embedded within it which is only readable by OS X’s Quartz Core Graphic layer. This is because each application has slightly different ways of marking out which line of text, for example, is supposed to be in bold and which is supposed to be a chapter heading, at the start of a paragraph, in italics or tabulated with bullet points, and so on.

Stripping this data out, without affecting the look of your presentation, can be done rather simply, if you use Adobe’s Acrobat Pro to cross-convert your finished document.

These examples of how to do this and the screen-shots below use Apple’s Pages and lulu.com, but you might just as easily have used MS Word, Open Office or Google’s Docs.
Read more…

OS X Leopard, on my 20” Aluminium Intel iMac, with 2GB of RAM, isn’t the fastest machine in the world—but it’s capable of being a damn sight faster than it had been running, for the past 6 weeks, after I went through a spate of trying out just about any and all freeware which iusethis.com could throw at me.

Widgets, System menu add-ons, haxies, Dock customisers—They’re all lots of fun, but sometimes you just have to admit you’ve added too much crap to your system, bite the bullet and do a clean reinstall.

As something of an Apple Mac veteran, this usually doesn’t phase me. New-to-Mac users, having recently switched from Windows, on the other hand, while they might not have to do this for several months into Mac ownership—if at all—might still find themselves somewhat worried by the prospect of losing data and / or damaging their machine.

The actual process of reinstalling OS X, however, contrasts greatly with a typical Windows reinstallation. But before you begin, there are a few things you need to do ahead of inserting the Installer Disc, to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, once your newly installed Operating System is ready to run. So I thought I’d share some tips with you on making this whole process as painless as possible.

Read more…

For those who don’t already know, hulu.com is the legitimate catch-up service for US residents to watch repeats of the previous week’s network television shows, on NBC, CBS, ABC and so on. Unfortunately, for various legal reasons, it is currently not possible for Americans living outside of the US to view the site.

Using a how-to access BBC iPlayer from outside the UK guide, which I posted on my other blog, reader Matt shows us how we might access US TV content using similar methods.