Planet Ubuntu-AU

Quail: Updated Gallery

Dale — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 09:19:04 +0000

Added few more images to the Dipoles gallery, showing off the new OCFD I have built.

IKT: Exploration

ikt — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:19:59 +0000

Makes sense

IKT: Reason for your existence!

ikt — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:04:56 +0000

Source: http://www.bytecolumn.com/11/reason-of-your-existence/

Stephen Rees-Carter: I spoke too soon…

Stephen — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:12:05 +0000

Well, my celebratory post about being able to install Ubuntu 12.04 was done in haste and now I’m eating my words.

Every time I attempt to install 12.04, the partitioner destroys my root partition and then gets stuck on this step: “Removing conflicting operating system files”. I end up with a non-working system I need to spend some time testing to figure out what triggers it, but for now I’m going back to 11.10. *sighs*
(I reported the bug here)

The only saving grace is the fact that I have a separate partition for my /home directory, so it’s safe

Quail: New Gallery Added

Dale — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:14:20 +0000

I have added an SSTV gallery, They are just ramdom image I have recieved by just setting the radio to 14.230 and and going to bed for example and letting the software do it think

pop on over to the gallery you might find an image you sent.

Sridhar Dhanapalan: Creating an Education Programme

Sridhar Dhanapalan — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:34:34 +0000

OLPC Australia had a strong presence at linux.conf.au 2012 in Ballarat, two weeks ago.

I gave a talk in the main keynote room about our educational programme, in which I explained our mission and how we intend to achieve it.

Even if you saw my talk at OSDC 2011, I recommend that you watch this one. It is much improved and contains new and updated material. The YouTube version is above, but a higher quality version is available for download from Linux Australia.

The references for this talk are on our development wiki.

Here’s a better version of the video I played near the beginning of my talk:

I should start by pointing out out that OLPC is by no means a niche or minor project. XO laptops are in the hands of 8000 children in Australia, across 130 remote communities. Around the world, over 2.5 million children, across nearly 50 countries, have an XO.

Investment in our Children’s Future

The key point of my talk is that OLPC Australia have a comprehensive education programme that highly values teacher empowerment and community engagement.

The investment to provide a connected learning device to every one of the 300 000 children in remote Australia is less than 0.1% of the annual education and connectivity budgets.

For low socio-economic status schools, the cost is only $80 AUD per child. Sponsorships, primarily from corporates, allow us to subsidise most of the expense (you too can donate to make a difference). Also keep in mind that this is a total cost of ownership, covering the essentials like teacher training, support and spare parts, as well as the XO and charging rack.

While our principal focus is on remote, low socio-economic status schools, our programme is available to any school in Australia. Yes, that means schools in the cites as well. The investment for non-subsidised schools to join the same programme is only $380 AUD per child.

Comprehensive Education Programme

We have a responsibility to invest in our children’s education — it is not just another market. As a not-for-profit, we have the freedom and the desire to make this happen. We have no interest in vendor lock-in; building sustainability is an essential part of our mission. We have no incentive to build a dependency on us, and every incentive to ensure that schools and communities can help themselves and each other.

We only provide XOs to teachers who have been sufficiently enabled. Their training prepares them to constructively use XOs in their lessons, and is formally recognised as part of their professional development. Beyond the minimum 15-hour XO-certified course, a teacher may choose to undergo a further 5–10 hours to earn XO-expert status. This prepares them to be able to train other teachers, using OLPC Australia resources. Again, we are reducing dependency on us.

: Certifications

Training is conducted online, after the teacher signs up to our programme and they receive their XO. This scales well to let us effectively train many teachers spread across the country. Participants in our programme are encouraged to participate in our online community to share resources and assist one another.

: Online training process

We also want to recognise and encourage children who have shown enthusiasm and aptitude, with our XO-champion and XO-mechanic certifications. Not only does this promote sustainability in the school and give invaluable skills to the child, it reinforces our core principle of Child Ownership. Teacher aides, parents, elders and other non-teacher adults have the XO-basics (formerly known as XO-local) course designed for them. We want the child’s learning experience to extend to the home environment and beyond, and not be constrained by the walls of the classroom.

There’s a reason why I’m wearing a t-shirt that says “No, I won’t fix your computer.” We’re on a mission to develop a programme that is self-sustaining. We’ve set high goals for ourselves, and we are determined to meet them. We won’t get there overnight, but we’re well on our way. Sustainability is about respect. We are taking the time to show them the ropes, helping them to own it, and developing our technology to make it easy. We fundamentally disagree with the attitude that ordinary people are not capable enough to take control of their own futures. Vendor lock-in is completely contradictory to our mission. Our schools are not just consumers; they are producers too.

As explained by Jonathan Nalder (a highly recommended read!), there are two primary notions guiding our programme. The first is that the nominal $80 investment per child is just enough for a school to take the programme seriously and make them a stakeholder, greatly improving the chances for success. The second is that this is a schools-centric programme, driven from grassroots demand rather than being a regime imposed from above. Schools that participate genuinely want the programme to succeed.

: Programme cycle

Technology as an Enabler

Enabling this educational programme is the clever development and use of technology. That’s where I (as Engineering Manager at OLPC Australia) come in. For technology to be truly intrinsic to education, there must be no specialist expertise required. Teachers aren’t IT professionals, and nor should they be expected to be. In short, we are using computers to teach, not teaching computers.

The key principles of the Engineering Department are:

Technology is an integral and seamless part of the learning experience – the pen and paper of the 21st century.
To eliminate dependence on technical expertise, through the development and deployment of sustainable technologies.
Empowering children to be content producers and collaborators, not just content consumers.
Open platform to allow learning from mistakes… and easy recovery.

OLPC have done a marvellous job in their design of the XO laptop, giving us a fantastic platform to build upon. I think that our engineering projects in Australia have been quite innovative in helping to cover the ‘last mile’ to the school. One thing I’m especially proud of is our instance on openness. We turn traditional systems administration practice on its head to completely empower the end-user. Technology that is deployed in corporate or educational settings is typically locked down to make administration and support easier. This takes control completely away from the end-user. They are severely limited on what they can do, and if something doesn’t work as they expect then they are totally at the mercy of the admins to fix it.

In an educational setting this is disastrous — it severely limits what our children can learn. We learn most from our mistakes, so let’s provide an environment in which children are able to safely make mistakes and recover from them. The software is quite resistant to failure, both at the technical level (being based on Fedora Linux) and at the user interface level (Sugar). If all goes wrong, reinstalling the operating system and restoring a journal (Sugar user files) backup is a trivial endeavour. The XO hardware is also renowned for its ruggedness and repairability. Less well-known are the amazing diagnostics tools, providing quick and easy indication that a component should be repaired/replaced. We provide a completely unlocked environment, with full access to the root user and the firmware. Some may call that dangerous, but I call that empowerment. If a child starts hacking on an XO, we want to hire that kid

Evaluation

My talk features the case study of Doomadgee State School, in far-north Queensland. Doomadgee have very enthusiastically taken on board the OLPC Australia programme. Every one of the 350 children aged 4–14 have been issued with an XO, as part of a comprehensive professional development and support programme. Since commencing in late 2010, the percentage of Year 3 pupils at or above national minimum standards in numeracy has leapt from 31% in 2010 to 95% in 2011. Other scores have also increased. Think what you may about NAPLAN, but nevertheless that is a staggering improvement.

In federal parliament, Robert Oakeshott MP has been very supportive of our mission:

Most importantly of all, quite simply, One Laptop per Child Australia delivers results in learning from the 5,000 students already engaged, showing impressive improvements in closing the gap generally and lifting access and participation rates in particular.

We are also engaged in longitudinal research, working closely with respected researchers to have a comprehensive evaluation of our programme. We will release more information on this as the evaluation process matures.

Join our mission

Schools can register their interest in our programme on our Education site.

Our Prospectus provides a high-level overview.

For a detailed analysis, see our Policy Document.

If you would like to get involved in our technical development, visit our development site.

Credits

Many thanks to colleagues Rangan Srikhanta (CEO) and Tracy Richardson (Education Manager) for some of the information and graphics used in this article.

Paul Schulz: Box for Huxley Reprap

Paul Schulz (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:54:38 +0000

I have been building a couple of Huxley Repraps, one for myself and assisting in building one for the Adelaide HackerSpace.

In order to be able to design things to print I am going to have to get my head around using CAD. FreeCAD looks like it will do most of the things that I need a CAD program to do, so I have spent a some time learning how to use it by drawing up a box that could be used to store, carry and display the finished Husleys.

It is a 32cm cube, to be made out of 9mm MDF, with rebated joints (glue and screw).

The Huxley will be bolted to the base with the box fitting over the top, similar to a sewing machine case. A method for keeping the base attached to the box has yet to be sorted out, although a sash-clamp/tie-down appears to be the easiest solution.

The inside dimensions are 302x302x302 where the Huxley (according to my measurements) is 295mm high. (So everything should fit... but I need to measure the other dimensions and adjust accordingly... 320mm was a nice initial number to work with.)

I haven't figured out a way to make the circular cuts with the CAD program, so the handle slots are all square.

Stephen Rees-Carter: 12.04 here I come…

Stephen — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:19:48 +0000

I posted a couple of weeks ago about an issue I was having with my Thinkpad L520 being unable to load Ubuntu 12.04 on the primary monitor.

I reported a bug in Launchpad, which was copied across to the bug tracker for Xorg. With some debugging help from the fantastic Bryce Harrington and Daniel Vetter I discovered that the bug I am encountering has been fixed in a Kernel branch as it is a common fault for the sandybridge graphics my laptop has. So now I have a laptop which will support running 12.04!

All of that said, the bug that I thought had gone away in 12.04 has appeared again. So I still need the ‘noapic’ flag to boot, but that’s better than not booting at all
I have a bug report for this if anyone is interested.

So, the steps for getting Ubuntu 12.04 running on a Thinkpad L520 are:

Connect an External Monitor
Boot into a LiveCD boot options (press a key when the first purple screen comes up)
Select ‘noapic’ from the F6 boot options menu
Boot into Ubuntu, and Install (the secondary monitor should be the only one working)
Reboot after installation, hold down Shift after BIOS to get to GRUB and add ‘noapic’ into the boot options
Once in Ubuntu, download and install the right kernel .deb files from
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/drm-intel-fixes/
Reboot

This method is installing a Mainline kernel build, so I recommend you read the documentation here first: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds

I’m off to run a backup and then upgrade to 12.04 on my primary hard drive. Wish me luck!

Quail: [How To] Compiling WSPR under Debian testing (wheezy)

Dale — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:14:19 +0000

Description:

WSPR implements a protocol designed for probing potential propagation paths with low-power transmissions. Normal transmissions carry a station’s callsign, Maidenhead grid locator, and transmitter power in dBm. The program can decode signals with S/N as low as -28 dB in a 2500 Hz bandwidth. Stations with internet access can automatically upload their reception reports to a central database called WSPRnet, which includes a mapping facility.

Installing the required software:

# apt-get install subversion python2.7-dev python-numpy python-imaging-tk python-pmw libportaudio2 portaudio19-dev libsamplerate0-dev gfortran cl-fftw3

Getting the source:

$ svn co http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/wsjt/branches/wspr

Compiling WSPR:

$ cd wspr
$ ./configure
$ make

Optional:
you can either run WSPR from it current location or you can install it system wide by

# make install

Notes:
I got an error about port audio 19 when running configure, example:

This program needs portaudio v19 to compile.
Please use --with-portaudio-include-dir= and
 --with-portaudio-lib-dir= to set the paths.
configure: error: Please check error messages and install missing packages.

but that is easily fixed by running configure like this:

$ ./configure --with-portaudio-include-dir=/usr/include --with-portaudio-lib-dir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu

References:
http://wsprnet.org/drupal/node/2066
http://www.physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/K1JT/devel.html

IKT: HP DM1 4016au – Maintenance and Service Guide

ikt — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:15:34 +0000

Just putting this here so I don’t forget about it.

Just replaced the 320GB Hard Drive with a 128GB SSD.

PDF: c03084091

IKT: Why do humans procrastinate, and how can it be beat?

ikt — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:58:40 +0000

Something I struggle with quite a bit has a great answer on reddit:

I’m willing to spend hours and hours playing Battlefield or COD shooting randomly at computer images, yet I lack the discipline to spend a single hour to read a textbook.

Why do so many people seem to naturally fall to procrastination? And how would one stop such a habit?

And the answer:

Kahneman and Tversky, the guys who first really began to probe human cognitive errors, found in their research that there was a systematic human tendency to either under or overestimate the expected value of a reward that varied as a function of time.

I’ll give you an example. Do you want a dollar today, or 10 dollars in a year? Most people will say a dollar today. How about a dollar today, or 10 dollars in a week? I would take 10 dollars in a week. But does this make sense? I mean, in the first case, I make 9 dollars fewer. Yet, in the second example, I suddenly flip my preference.

It turns out that human motivation is heavily influenced by expectations of how imminent the reward is perceived to be. People overestimate the value of the reward if the reward is imminent, and increasingly discount the value of the reward, the further away it is in time. In other words, your perceived utility of an outcome increases with temporal proximity.

So playing skyrim now is more valuable than an A on your paper until temporal proximity increases the value of that A on the paper, which is when you stay up all night finishing it. One way to try to work around it is to give yourself an immediate reward for forward thinking goal oriented behaviour. You can, for instance, create a situation where you will reward yourself with a tub of ice cream when you’ve put in 4 hours of work. How can you get around it without resorting to this? Have high level executive functionality. Which to some extent can be exercised by simply practicing doing things you don’t want to. So, start small, do 5 minutes of dishes per day. When you have no problem keeping up this routine, add in more tasks with short term punishment but long term reward. You build your way up. However, there are limits.

It’s one of the systematic biases in human cognition that this dynamic duo discovered. They were pretty much the death of the rational actor model in psychology, because we’re not. Their work is the basis for neuroeconomics, which seeks to take into account that humans aren’t rational, that we have systematic cognitive biases, and to reinvent the field of economics so that it has more bearing on reality, and is a reflection of how people really act.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_discounting

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mkwf2/why_do_humans_procrastinate_and_how_can_it_be_beat/

Quail: ACMA to permit the trial of limited higher power

Dale — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:48:49 +0000

As of the 1st of March the ACMA has permitted the trial of 1000 watt PEP for advanced licensed amateur radio operators, and this trial is to run for about 12 months where it will be reviewed by the ACMA.

You can read the full story at the WIA

Quail: Coax bulkhead

Dale — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:08:59 +0000

For the last week or so in my spare time I have been working on a coax bulkhead for my window for my coax runs to go too and throw form the window without letting the bad weather and bugs outside.

Hardware used:
* IP65 ABS sealed boxes
* SO259 panel mounts
* RG213 coax (mil spec)
* various nuts and bolts
* length of timber

Cost:
About 30AUD and spare time and cans of drink

head over to my gallery and check out the images

James Purser: Sigh, so that happened

James Purser — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:40:56 +0000

So two things happened today.

The first was a near riot that necessitated the evacuation of the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader from an awards ceremony meant to highlight the work of emergency workers.

The second was WIN Television blowing it again.

If you haven't caught up on the events today then I heres a brief timeline I've put together from various sources:

Earlier today in Sydney, Tony Abbott made comments indicating that he thought it was "time to move on" from the thinking that led to the Aboroginal Tent Embassy being set up forty years ago.
Tony Abbott travels to Canberra to attend the awarding of the inaugeral National Emergency Medal along with the Prime Minister.
People at the Tent Embassy hear of Tony Abbotts comments and are, it could be said, greatly miffed. They are then told that he is actually in Canberra, not far from the Tent Embassy itself.
A number of people decide that they're going express their anger at the Opposition Leader and Prime Minister. They surround the restuaraunt, a glass walled building and start yelling and slamming on the glass.
Police are called and the Prime Ministers security detail advises her that the situation is getting dangerous and that she should leave. The PM agrees and also indicates that they should escort the Opposition Leader as well, as he doesn't have his own security detail.
The PM and Opposition leader are rushed out of the building surrounded by the biggest scrum of security personel. The PM trips on the way out and it appears the opposition leader is helped along by the security personel via the method of grabbing his belt and pushing.

That's it in a nutshell I think. I've probably missed something but that's what I've managed to pull out of the media.

Needless to say as I watched the tweets fly by with all sorts of claims and details (the original tweets I had seen claimed that the PM had been crash tackled by a protester), I waited for any sign that the MSM had picked up the story. It didn't take long for the papers to run with it, and the TV networks at least squeezing in an extra news bulletin to cover the basic details.

Well, most of the networks.

WIN Television's Wollongong station couldn't even be bothered following channel 9 by putting on an extra news bulletin after Wriddhiman Saha lost his wicket. Instead WIN simply continued on with it's pre-planned ads and it wasn't until it broadcast the 9 news bulletin at 6pm that the news finally reached the airwaves.

I basically have three things to say:

To Tony Abbott, on this day of days, a day which a large part of the indigenous community views as the day they started losing their rights, to suggest that perhaps the Tent Embassy wasn't needed was either a dog whistle of epic proportions, or simply a case of shoving both feet in at the speed of sound.

Oh and as for the snide little raised eye brows and snark when Gillard offered to remove you from the situation, that just makes you look like a petulant little child.

To the protesters, you did yourself and your cause no favours today. You managed to rise to the bait and make yourselves look like a rabble. And getting cute by offering to give the PM back her shoe tomorrow if she comes by the Embassy just really doesn't help.

Finally, to WIN Television. Convergance is coming, and it's not going to be nice to those who aren't ready for it. You've known about this for years now, unless you start doing something soon, you will be left behind.

Anyway, that was my Australia day, how was yours?

Blog Catagories:

Politics

media

convergance

James Purser: On Bogans and Racism

James Purser — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:29:46 +0000

So, last night I got into one of those twitter arguments that I tend to (I have a bad case of "Someones wrong on the Internet").

In this case it was triggered by the following tweet:

Redglitterx: how do you know if youre an elitist, smug, over-priviledged racist? you make bogan jokes

Now, if you're not sure what a bogan joke is, a bogan is a name for someone who is considered ill-educated, with low income and not only ignorant, but revelling in their ignorance. As you may have noticed, this is actually a stereotype, a cardboard cutout that people use to mentally slot a group of people into the social heirachy. In this way, calling someone a bogan is very much LIKE racism.

However I have never considered the term itself to be racist.

This may be one of those cases where a term is whatever anyone wants it to be, but I really think that it doesn't help anyone to try and conflate anti-boganism with racism. If nothing else, "bogans" don't face the same extreme issues as those who suffer from racism. Bogans are not likely to be physically attacked because they are bogans, there is not a continual low level campaign by large sections of the media to seperate them out from the rest of the population, and let's be honest, there is a hell of a lot of government policy that is aimed at placating and winning the votes of those who might be called bogan.

As I said at the beginning, calling someone a bogan is like racism in that you are using a stereotype to mentally sort that person, just like calling someone an eastern sububs nancy boy, or a north shore soccer mum.

Sridhar Dhanapalan: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-25

Sridhar Dhanapalan — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:15:00 +0000

Meghalaya, India: Where women rule, and men are suffragettes http://t.co/F0ojnKxD #
Allow me to express my gratitude to the #lca2012 organisers for a brilliant conference! #
Sick of Sydney? http://t.co/JewJPoIv #
Interview with OLPC CTO about XO-3
http://t.co/zmh6VOkz #olpc #
Fuseproject Unwraps The Third-Gen One Laptop Per Child: A $100 Tablet http://t.co/jzuqqBSn #olpc #
Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class http://t.co/AK1b7Ogm #
@threethirty it means a tablet based on standard Linux — Fedora, GNOME, Sugar, etc. See the talk at http://t.co/dYbj5ECb #olpc #olpcau in reply to threethirty #
@kattekrab you can probably do 70, but we don’t want to push it #olpc #olpcau in reply to kattekrab #
@kattekrab have you seen http://t.co/IjsGlYVN ? Happy to chat if you have further questions! #olpcau #olpc in reply to kattekrab #

IKT: v0.4.5 out

ikt — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:18:19 +0000

Fixes another awesome crash, download here:

https://github.com/ikt/ium/downloads

Scott Sinclair: Now available via IPv6

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:53:01 +0000

Quick Update - This site is now available via IPv6.

You don't have to do anything special, you will just use IPv6 if it is available and you have preferences for IPv6 connections.

If you want to test to see if you can get to the IPv6 site, try visiting http://v6.nullis.net

Joel Pickett: proof-reading en_AU translations

Joel — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 07:18:43 +0000

A lot of work was done in these past couple of cycles to get the en_AU locale into shape. We were hovering around ~43% translated (around 185,000 strings to go) at the natty Ubuntu Global Jam — http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-au/817/detail/

Since then, we’ve managed to translate the lot, only having to search through the new strings trickling in for the Precise cycle – averaging around a couple of hundred new strings per week.

Consider the below workflow, replacing STRING with the en_US string that you’re trying to find/fix, eg. color, cell phone, meter, dialog – etc (the comprehensive list – English Translation keywords):

mkdir ~/en_AU; cd ~/en_AU
wget people.ubuntu.com/~jpickett/translations/en_AU-20120118.tar.gz
tar xvf en_AU-20120118.tar.gz
cd en_AU
grep -i "STRING" ./* > ~/STRING
grep -i "msgstr" ~/STRING > ~/result
less ~/result
...

The output in ~/result will show all the strings that may need to be fixed. The simplest way to do this is to have a tab open for each batch of templates, ie:

https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+lang/en_AU?batch=300

https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+lang/en_AU/+index?batch=300&memo=300&start=300

https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+lang/en_AU/+index?batch=300&memo=600&start=600

https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+lang/en_AU/+index?batch=300&memo=900&start=900

https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+lang/en_AU/+index?batch=300&memo=1200&start=1200

This makes it super easy to Ctrl-F through the lists and find the package that the typo/mistake resides. You’ll also want to periodically check for the new tarball to make sure you have up-to-date .po’s and that you aren’t rechecking files that you’ve already fixed

There’s probably a billion ways that this could be done easier/faster but for now, that’s the way it’s being fixed

Although translation into en_AU may not be the most important goal we have in the Ubuntu project, I firmly believe that it creates that *finishing gloss* that reflects what the Ubuntu en_AU translators have achieved.

James Purser: Talks to catchup on

James Purser — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 02:06:43 +0000

Okay so I missed #lca2012 this year. However because the LCA team is awesome (continuing the grand tradition of awesome LCA teams), the talks have started appearing on the linuxconfau2012 youtube channel.

Squeeee.

Now I have a number of talks to watch on the googletv thing:

Tux in Space: High altitude ballooning - Joel Stanley,Mark Jessop

Lego + Kids + Arduino - James Muraca

Making video streaming interactive, heckling user groups from the clouds!

Android Accessories Made Easy With Arduino - Philip Lindsay

Desktop Home Hacks - Allison Randal

Now these are just the one's I want to watch immediately. If you have a love of hackery, FOSS and all things shiny then I think you need to go through those talks and queue them up on your device of choice.

Also remember, the videos will be made available on the Linux Australia Mirror shortly, so you will be able to grab all of the talks and watch them whether you're online or not.

As I said before: Squeeee

IKT: Stephen Colbert – Colbert Remix Challenge – Remixing is ok – FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU Comedy Central

ikt — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 01:32:27 +0000

Ok, so it starts off innocent enough, I caught a glance at this gif animation:

Is that Stephen Colbert at a rave? That is awesome!

So I’ll just watch the episode on the official website.

GOD DAMN IT!

Ok, not a problem I’ll watch it on youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgVzcWGi4QA

Camcorder recording a television screen, that’s alright I guess, but I’d rather get the actual show itself.

1. Can’t legally watch the show in any shape or form
2. Head to bittorrent sites, found the show!
3. 0 seeders :/
4. Stumbling upon a random related website I notice the embed video works!
5. I’ll just grab the URL of the stream and download it, too easy
6. Spend an hour looking for an inbuilt header checker/stream finder for chrome + firefox
7. Spend an hour or 2 looking for a stream finder for ubuntu
8. Try 2-3 different programs, including get_flash_video and rtmpdump
9. Wireshark! I’ll just use wireshark and grab the URL from the packets themselves!
10. Ok. ok. I can’t see it. It’s an encrypted RTMP stream. O.O
11. Notice all of the other programs are windows only
12. Login to windows, proceed to download all 40 different stream/header/rtmp finders
13. 2 of them actually work but refuse to download because Copy protected files can’t be legally downloaded? wtf?
14. It’s now 3-4 hours after point 1, I DON’T EVEN CARE ANY MORE JUST GIVE ME THE DAMN FILE
15. The alternative Replay Media Capture offers is Replay VIdeo Capture, it’s pretty much just fraps. http://applian.com/replay-video-capture/
16. Oh ma gawd it works
17. The result of my 5 hours of effort:

Thanks a lot Viacom/Comedy Central, serves me right for trying to watch your content

IKT: Story of my life…

ikt — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:51:47 +0000

source: http://buttersafe.com/2008/10/23/the-detour/