Jay McGavren’s Journal

MythNetTV is an early but effective MythTV extension that downloads podcasts and adds them to your recordings list, just like the free downloads feature on TiVo (except you can subscribe to anything you want, provided the format’s supported).

These commands will install and configure the app (be sure to substitute the path you want videos saved to):

sudo apt-get install mythnettv
mkdir /your/dir/here
mythnettv --datadir=/your/dir/here

Subscribe to some geeky shows:

mythnettv subscribe "http://revision3.com/pixelperfect/feed/Xvid-Small" "PixelPerfect"
mythnettv subscribe "http://www3.youtube.com/rss/global/top_rated.rss" "YouTubeTopRated"
mythnettv subscribe "http://revision3.com/trs/feed/Xvid-Small" "TotallyRadShow"
mythnettv subscribe "http://applebytepodcast.cnettv.com/" "CnetAppleByte"
mythnettv subscribe "http://buzzreportpodcast.cnettv.com/" "CnetBuzzReport"
mythnettv subscribe "http://cnetnewspodcast.cnettv.com/" "CnetNewsDaily"
mythnettv subscribe "http://firstlookpodcast.cnettv.com/" "CnetFirstLook"
mythnettv subscribe "http://hackspodcast.cnettv.com/" "CnetHacks"
mythnettv subscribe "http://howtopodcast.cnettv.com/" "CnetHowTo"
mythnettv subscribe "http://realdealvideopodcast.cnettv.com/" "CnetRealDeal"
mythnettv subscribe "http://revision3.com/coop/feed/Xvid-Small" "Co-Op"
mythnettv subscribe "http://www.onnetworks.com/feeds/1460/video/rss.xml?target=site" "PlayValue"

Get show lists for all subscriptions, then download 10 shows:

mythnettv update
mythnettv download 10

List the next 10 shows that will be downloaded:

mythnettv nextdownload 10

Download 1 show from the given subscription:

mythnettv download 1 CnetNewsDaily

List subscriptions:

mythnettv list

More info on these commands and others:

man mythnettv

jay@dandelion:~

$ sudo port install cowsay

Password:

--->  Fetching cowsay

...

jay@dandelion:~

$ cheat lipsum | cowsay

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Man, was this a pain to find. I’m assuming some proficiency with XML and Quicksilver here; leave a comment if you need more specific directions.

Install the Web Search module from the Quicksilver plugins pane if you haven’t already. Quit Quicksilver. Then edit this file:

~/Library/Caches/Quicksilver/Indexes/QSPresetDocWebSearches.qsindex

Search for:

<string>qss-http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=***</string>

And change it to:

<string>qss-http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=***&num=100</string>

Be sure you’ve got the “Google Search” entry; there are many similar ones. I originally edited the file while Quicksilver was running and had to quit and reload the catalog several times before I got it to stick. Your mileage may vary.

To test, bring up QS, type “Google Search”, tab twice, type your query, and press Return. Your default browser should load a Google Search with 100 results per page. You can of course make any other tweaks to this or any other search URL that your heart desires.

The OS X port of XScreensaver is simple, stable, and unobtrusive as far as I can tell. Unfortunately you can’t (easily) pipe program output into Phosphor and other textual screen savers, but other than that they’re spectacular.

I did toss out some of the less impressive ones, though. Here’s what I kept installed:

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Why is it I waited to get a Mac until I hardly even care what OS I’m on? I had Spotlight replicated via Enso. (Enso’s actually better, since it’s quasimodal.) I had a decent equivalent to the BSD core via Cygwin. (Though I’ll now be able to compile some Ruby extensions that I couldn’t on Windows.) Console2 is an excellent alternative to Terminal. I had Textmate covered via E - Texteditor. (Er, wait, that’s not really a satisfactory substitute at this point.)

Well, I had to fight tooth and nail to get those Windows equivalents working properly, and the seams are still showing. The Mac versions work right out of the box, and seem to work marginally better. I hate everything when I first start using it, but I’ve already had some “Hmm, that’s well-designed” moments with OSX. It’s definitely not the panacea I was hoping for, but I think it’s going to grow on me.

I also said I’d present on rubyscript2exe, which is likely to turn into a NSIS tutorial as well.

Here’s a quick copy-paste from a build session…
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KDevelop allows collaborative editing on a document… If the file is altered on disk and you haven’t made local updates, it’ll reload as soon as the other person saves.

I think I’m gonna use this for an always-on todo list at work, which I’ve wanted for eons.. I’ve pointed KDevelop at a plain text file on a Samba share, then loaded the same file in the editor on my Windows box. Every time I save in Windows, the change is reflected on the KDevelop screen a second later.

Now when I want to know what I should to next (or need a reminder after spacing out), I should be able to just flick my eyes to my left, instead of waiting for an e-mail client to load. (And yes, I could accomplish something similar with paper and pen, but I want something searchable, automatically archived, and universally accessible.)

A similar setup with Google Docs seems to work as well. The view only refreshes automatically if you have edit permissions on the document, though. If you don’t (or don’t want to log in all the time), the Firefox “Reload Every” plugin should do the trick.

Got a phone call from my Mom this morning to let me know the photo of my niece wasn’t visible - to everyone besides me. Guess I had a little too much faith in Flock; I thought it would save the image and then upload it to Wordpress, but it just linked it from my GMail account (to which I have access but no one else does). It’s also crapping Technorati tags all over my entries instead of using Wordpress categories. I may be reverting to Firefox soon.

So I experimented with Nozbe for a while and then discovered that its main benefit was the next actions list, which could just as readily be replicated with a next tag in Gmail.

So I’ve got everything I can do as a next action on the Next tag there, and my Nozbe account sits unused. Guess I don’t need to spend that $5 a month.

I really didn’t understand why blog-to-book would be so hard… Blurb’s Booksmart blog slurper was cumbersome at best and incompetent at worst, and the only other competitor in the field closed up shop a couple years ago.

Well, Qoop has rolled out BlogPrinting.com, and so far it Just Works. I know their site looks like it was made to harvest passwords, but enter your info and you’ll be treated to a nicely-formatted PDF preview of your blog in book form, complete with embedded images, in about 3 minutes. My <pre> tags (meaning all my code snippets) all got wrapped into a messy blob, but most folks don’t use those. Posts marked private are included (a good thing for me), but you could probably filter them by setting up a special login for the site to use.

Price is quite reasonable, too: $22 for a 379-page 6×9 book in black and white. (For gods’ sake, don’t leave it on color (the default), it was $120 for the same book.) I’ll follow up when I actually get the book, but so far this is really nice.

WordPress, Movable Type, and TypePad are all supported for now. Not sure if my LiveJournal friends can use the Movable Type option, but if not, drop me a line and I’ll walk you through exporting to WordPress.