Schinckel.net

Well, last night was the final episode of The Chaser’s War on Everything. Those of you who missed this series should rush to your nearest Torrent-site and grab it all. I missed a fair chunk of it, and so when they started Vodcasting it, I subscribed to the feed. However, the quality of the video available from the ABC website is crap, to say the least. So, I’ve begun downloading all episodes, even 22-28, which I have as vodcasts. However, episode 17 is missing. I’ve found a torrent for it, but noone seems to be seeding it. I’ve got episodes 1-14 complete, and partway through 15, 16 and 18. At 235Mb per episode, it’s fairly slow going. But it most certainly is worth it. As for legality issues – I can’t get reasonable ABC reception in my house, so I feel perfectly justified in doing this. I have a right, after all, to view stuff on the ABC.

I listen to Podcasts rather than music most of my commuting time now. One of the ones I subscribe to is The Science Show, from ABC Radio National. Back when I was on dialup, I used to wget the podcasts, and then add them to iTunes using a cool little hack, where I made my computer think it’s own IP address was the address of the abc.net.au server. Then I didn’t have to worry about iTunes not finishing a download, and having to start over. Resumable downloads rock. However, sometimes I would not get all of the file, and not realise. Thus, the other day I was listening to a great segment on Mathematics and the Brain, when the program stopped. I had only grabbed 33 minutes of the 48 minute program. Trying to get iTunes to re-download a podcast is tricky, so instead I used wget to grab the full file, and then deleted the original iTunes file. I then replaced it with my new one. All fixed. This is a side-effect of the fact that iTunes doesn’t keep that good of a track of files. You can move files out from underneath it, and it can’t find them. I’ve come across this from the other perspective – we share the same directory for storing two people’s iTunes libraries, so we don’t have duplicates of all of the same music – but in this case, I used it to my advantage.