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Browsing Posts tagged software

Sick Beard is a (terribly, terribly named) application that downloads TV episodes from newsgroups—as opposed to BitTorrent—moves and renames them, and even fetches artwork and episode information (.NFO files) for use with XBMC. If, for any reason, you want to avoid BitTorrent and go with newsgroups instead, go aheard and install SABnzb+ for downloading purposes, [...]

I bought a Kindle 2 last month and joined the e-book revolution. I love e-books for various, practical reasons:
1. Books pile up around the house. I don’t have room to keep all of them. Selling, training, giving, or donating them is a pain. Throwing out books makes me sad.
2. Books deteriorate. I typically purchase used books, and [...]

When I was in high school, we used to play a simple but addictive shareware game called Scorched Earth, a turn-based artillery game. It involved tanks shooting at each other with crazy weapons, fun upgrades, very basic controls, and a little dumb humor. I was delighted to find out that there is a version of [...]

The most popular post on my blog is how to set up the Ubuntu Server firewall via ufw, the Uncomplicated Firewall. I recommend UFW for any standard server, but you might want to move to something more advanced to expand your firewall knowledge, to set up a network gateway, router, or firewall, or to conform [...]

I hate getting up in the morning, and have long had trouble falling asleep at night. These two apps by Mobitobi work together to make it a bit easier.
Gentle Alarm
Thanks to the Motorola Droid’s dock and clock (ahem, “Multimedia Station”) mode, my phone became my alarm clock the day I brought it home. (Of course, [...]

Here are instructions on how to overclock your Motorola Droid. I learned how to do this through various forum posts and a blog posts, some of which were a confusing mess of information and misinformation. My goals is to summarize what I have learned in one place, to act as a more-or-less definitive guide.

Root your Droid. [...]

I bought my Motorola Droid the morning it was released to the public. The first app I installed on it was Locale, which promised to automatically set the phone’s volume, wifi settings, and so on, based on its current location. I thought this was a great idea: I could automatically silence my phone at the [...]

Today I learned a different way to configure the firewall on my Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Server: the ufw command. UFW stands for “Uncomplicated FireWall,” and it’s just that. It provides a simpler interface to add or remove firewall rules to iptables, the default Linux firewall. It’s installed on Ubuntu Server by default (and has [...]

TVNamer is a Python application that will automatically renames TV episode files to a clean, consistent, and useful format. If you rip your DVDs, or download torrents (for shame!) on your server, you might find the “tvnamer” Python script very useful. I am running this on my Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx server right now, and [...]

When I read posts on LifeHacker and Gizmodo sometimes, I figure that everybody else in the world is downloading TV episodes via BitTorrent, and doing it using RSS feeds and an automated process. That can’t possibly be true, but I figured that if other people do this, I should be able to figure out how, [...]