Twenty years ago, author Douglas Adams and photographer/naturalist Mark Cawardine traveled the globe in search of some of the most endangered species imaginable. This resulted in the superb book Last Chance to See, which I highly recommend, due in equal part to the extremely interesting content and the wonderful way that Douglas Adams looked at everything. I had the pleasure of experiencing it originally as an audibook read by Adams himself, which I believe increased the enjoyability immensely. He’s downright hilarious. If you haven’t read it, I suspect you’d like doing so.

In any case, long-time friend of Douglas Adams, Stephen Fry, has set about attempting to revisit all of the endangered species Douglas did twenty years ago in order to see how they’re doing today. He’s joined by none other than Mark Cawardine himself, lending an extremely knowledgeable air to the whole endeavor as he once again attempts to photograph these rare, splendid creatures. The BBC has filmed each leg of the journey, and has been broadcasting the resultant documentary, likewise entitled Last Chance to See. Thus far, it’s been equal parts educational, hilarious and heartbreaking.

The programme is available via iPlayer, unless you happen to live outside the UK. If, like me, you don’t actually have access to all the fine programmes the BBC airs, it can quite easily be acquired via the usual dark underbellies of the Internet to which we all frequently turn in order to acquire content that licensing issues prevent us from accessing legitimately. Three episodes have aired thus far, and it really behooves you to make the effort to track them down. You’ll thank me later.

There are things on Usenet that you want to download regularly. Doing so is a time-consuming chore that’d be better accomplished through automation. This guide aims to show you how.

The problem with Usenet is that, even with the requisite utilities, you still find yourself manually extracting RAR files, applying PAR2 files to regenerate missing chunks, and then disposing of all the compressed/encoded files after extracting your media file. Not to mention seeking out and downloading every episode of everything you want to download. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Here’s where it gets awesome, though. There’s a free, open-source application called SABnzbd+, available for every platform, that does all that for you. Even awesomer, it can monitor RSS feeds and watch for user-defined strings in the filenames to facilitate the automatic downloading, unpacking, repairing, renaming and moving of files into your media library with zero intervention on the user’s part. After setting up SABnzbd, the content you want to download is magically downloaded FOR you, with no intervention on your part. This is the future, and it is AWESOME.

To get started with your magical new life of automatic content delivery, you first need a Usenet account. And, you’re probably going to want a ‘premium’ account, meaning that you’ll have to spend some money every month. There are many different options when choosing premium Usenet providers, but I recommend Giganews. They even have a free trial, allowing you to see how awesome this whole thing can be. You can sign up for your free trial by clicking the nifty banner below. (We’ll supposedly get referral credit or something if you end up being a paying customer.)

The next thing you need to do is install SABnzbd on a computer in your household. On Mac/Windows it’s a super-easy installer, and it runs using a web interface rather than a GUI. Upon installation you’ll need to specify the username/password for your Giganews (or other Usenet provider) in the Config tab.

The next stop is giving SABnzbd one or more RSS feeds to monitor looking for things to download. There are many different options for sites that provide RSS feeds of nzb files. A quick Google search can help you find one that has the type of content you’re looking for. Once you add a feed, you can enter in names/words in filenames to either ‘accept’ or ‘reject.’ SABnzbd will then periodically check the rss feed, and when it finds an nzb that matches your rules, it queues it for download.

You then configure the Folders option to specify where you want finished downloads to end up. That’s really all there is to it. Now your computer will periodically check any configured RSS feeds for things it should download, and when it finds something, it just does. And then it decompresses, repairs (if necessary), and then gets rid of the compressed stuff. No muss, no fuss. Set it and forget it.

An average 360meg file downloads in about 2 and a half minutes. But you don’t care how fast it is because it’ll just be there waiting for you automatically.

An added perk, is the SABnzbd Firefox extension , which gives you a constant indicator of things that are downloading, right in your browser’s status bar — and also the ability to click on any nzb file from any nzb search engine and have SABnzbd automagically start downloading it, even if you’re surfing from a different computer than SABnzbd is running on. Very awesome.

UPDATE: I’ve now written an app for Android phones that will allow you to queue nzb files on your SABnzbd installation: NZBdroid

I’m not what you would call a “Doctor Who fan,” but we’ve been watching all of the recent series on our Roku Netflix box lately. There are a lot of pretty cheesy episodes, but I’ve generally enjoyed most of them.

However, the other night we watched an episode entitled “Blink,” from season/series 3 (episode 10), which I believe originally aired in 2007. Holy crap that was a good episode. I mean, not a “good — you know, for Doctor Who” type of good, but a seriously fantastic hour of television. The story is great, the writing is great, the villains are great. It’s scary. It’s clever.

In short, it’s amazing.

If you’ve not seen this particular episode, I heartily recommend doing so. Netflix streams it here and an illicit download can be easily found if you’re not a Netflix subscriber.

While in Australia, D and I got invited over to one of her coworkers‘s place for Christmas.  In addition to being awesome, this was a much better option than the Hooters plan I had earlier declared.  There was much good food, much Mario Kart and Rock Band on their Wii, and lots of good hanging out with other North Americans.

While there, I was re-acquainted with the open source Xbox Media Center, which, since I last was aware of it, is now just ‘XBMC’ because it now runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and AppleTV.  In the years since it left my awareness, it’s also become FREAKIN’ AWESOME.  One of the really cool things it does now is fetch artwork and information about your television and movie files you watch with it from community-maintained sites, while looking really pretty:

http://teamrazorfish.co.uk/gallery.html


Needless to say, the 5+ year-old MythTV setup we were using to play all the things we downloaded got replaced. 

While watching programs, I’ve found that some of our more obscure programs are missing pretty artwork, so I’ve been dusting off my GIMP skills here and there making some.  I’ve also been fulfilling requests from other less-artistic users, which is pretty good for the old sense of satisfaction of a job well done.  It’s no secret that I enjoy making things in GIMP, so I figured I’d make some stuff other people will find valuable instead of just silly fake movie posters to amuse myself.  If you want to follow along at home, the stuff I’ve been making is viewable via the following links: banners , posters, backgrounds.  The site is pretty klunky, but their API is pretty nice, allowing for anyone to use the artwork/descriptions in their tv-related applications.

The fun part is that theTVdb requires artwork to be of resolutions high enough to be problematic for those who just want to download some off google and upload them.  In many cases, you have to ‘make something out of nothing,’ or, more accurately, out of many different nothings.  Other than new serieses that provide lots of high-res wallpapers and stuff to work with, you end up crafting entire posters out of tiny little elements — and, in many cases, filling in all the rest of it with nothing but your imagination.

On Tuesday, July the 22nd, the fantastic British sitcom, SPACED, (from the minds of the people who brought you Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) gets its long-awaited US DVD release.

If you haven’t already imported a copy from the UK, I highly, HIGHLY recommend you pick up a copy of the US release. Highly.

I’ve not met a geek who doesn’t like this show, so get in on the ground floor while you still have the chance to be the one telling people about it.

Spaced: The Complete Series