commandN #149 (September 19, 2008)

Direct Downloads are here! 

• H264
• MP4
• AVI
• WMV
• iPod

headLINES

• King of Spam goes free
• BestBuy nabs napster
• Social Networks trumps porn online
• Facebook old school style
• IMDB to show clips
• Internet addiction

webPICKS

• Richard Cheese
• Walking Spree
• The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy
• Liveautographs
  

Other sites where you can see commandN

YouTube, Yahoo, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Crackle, Imeem and Viddler

Comments

[John]

Just tried viewing on line and at first there's no audio then the video locks up while it's loading and it can't be restarted.

JQ

[John]

I take it back, looks like my PC got messed up...time to reboot.

JQ

[Amber Mac]

I have to thank everyone who attended Third Tuesday last week in Moncton - but most importantly, the folks who gave us web picks this week were AWESOME! Chris also did a fab job producing this show, love all the tunes!

[lt3ag4s]

Good show! I was waiting to hear some referance to Richard Cheese after hearing the Jack Cheese segment on N@N.

Amber, I like that top you were wearing.
Will has gone through some changes...oh wait...that was Jeff...never mind.

Thanks for feeding my webcast addiction,
Peace,
lt3ag4s

[Joel]

Great show, ya'll! Thanks for using my web pick!

[Gene Rubio]

I think the reason why social networking is growing so rapidily is because people are leaving their TV sets to interact with one another.

[Jay]

Nice show, I know what you can use to view those sites you cant get to outside the US, TOR + Privoxy!!! short instructions:
download Vidalia bundle http://www.vidalia-project.net/
Vidalia is a GUI for the TOR network which basically randomly routes your traffic across the globe to secure your web surfing. Its all free, you just don't know where your web request is coming from, could be any country, so you may have to "refresh" until your web request terminates from a US peer. After installation is done with vidalia, make sure both Vidalia control panel and privoxy are both running, you have to configure your proxy in your web browser of choice to 127.0.0.1:8118 or ip 127.0.0.1 port 8118. This software is what people in suppressed information countries use to view an "unbiased web". Hope this helps, the shows are great keep up the good work.
-Jay

[Liam K]

All-round great episode guys. The hosting, the shooting, the editing, the content - I've got no complaints :-)

[Ed]

Very Entertaining show. How's your neck, Amber? All that looking over your shoulder at Jeff.

It looked like a Football play was about to happen.

[Eideard]

Even though certain geek Web-alliances take precedence - a couple of Cranky blogs and IPTV shows - I have to take a moment, folks, and just say of the several shows we download and watch in our high desert household, Command-N is #1 in production quality and style.

Love the new look.

But, then, you already knew that, eh?

[Daniel Riddle]

Once again, great show!
I really am still digging the new look - very pro!
Sometimes changing things aren't so bad after all :)

[Tim]

Question... I've been watching the CommandN H264 feed in iTunes on my Mac.

I just got the new iPod Touch and was eager to watch some video on it so I tried to copy those podcasts onto it, but only one out of the last five or so episodes was "compatible" with the iPod according to iTunes.

So I just subscribed to the iPod version feed and none of those are compatible with the Touch. Is that only for the Classic style iPod?

I'm terribly confused and thought I could really catch up on my video podcasts with the Touch, but I don't know how. Which one should I subscribe to, or is it just not doable on the Touch?

Thanks!
Tim

P.S. I just exported an incompatible H264 CommandN podcast in QuickTime using the "iPhone" preset and it plays great on the Touch. I hope I don't have to do that every time. :(

[Sgtret]

This was a perfect little podcast, no unnecessary frills. Just good information. Thanks for toning down the explosions.

I save the "content as" and view it with VLC. The latest version has a snapshot generator. H264 full screen is the way to watch the show, not on an iPod. I use that to listen to audio podcasts like net@night.

[Chris Dick]

Thanks for the feedback everybody it is really appreciated. If you want to leave a video comment just leave a "response" on the commandn channnel on YouTube or email me christopher@commandn.tv the link on 12 seconds, 15 seconds, or YouTube, Viddler or the any other video site out there.

@Tim - Did you try the mp4?
I know it's a bit confusing... I would love to get the feeds down to iPod and Apple TV only but that is proving more difficult than first anticipated.
I suggest you test out the mp4 and if it doesn't work I'll see if I can optimize a file for your particular version of your touch.

Thanks for watching

-Chris D

[Tom York]

Just wanted to get on here and talk real quick about the spammer who got off on jail time.

It seems weird to me that you guys are so against this. Spam is something easily dealt with.. and in the end is just advertising. Do you get incredibly* up in arms over the way that billboards are everywhere, or the way that you get advertising in your real at home mail box?

*I say incredibly because it seems that you're for people being being jailed if they spam.

Maybe there's a line of distinction that you folks here at CommandN draw, but from where I'm sitting it looks like spamming for the most part is just another form of advertising. Especially when it comes to the kind that hits your email. Also wanted to reiterate how easy it is to deal with. I've got my public email up on DNS records so it gets mined and spammed all the time, but rarely does gmail let one through. I as I'm sure you do get spammers all the time on my wordpress blog, and akismet catches most of them.

I get that spam and spammers are annoying and agree. But should people be jailed for being annoying?

[anon]

i use this script to put trailers on imdb -

http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/4117

[anon]

actually this is the url to install the greasemonkey script -
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/4117

[anon_again]

i just noticed i have that imdb trailer GM script disabled so i'm not using it to show trailers, the one i use is called IMDB Pirated Version. it does loads of things as well as show trailers, but i think the show trailers might have stopped working lol
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/21977

[Jeff MacArthur]

Thanks for all the great comments everyone!

TOM YORK: I can't speak for Amber or the rest of the crew but the problem with spam for me very much parallels the problem with phone (or even door-to-door) solicitations by companies, etc. I have in no way invited any such attention and yet it is brought to me directly and intrusively.

Also consider (and maybe you're in the same situation, I have no idea) that when we have to post our emails online for commandN or business, they get harvested a lot more AND we can't be too fervent in auto-blocking spam because we could lose important legitimate communications - thus we're forced to deal with more spam than we should have to.

Finally, spam consumes a variety of scarce resources with no benefit to anyone but its creators:
1) Bandwidth (80-90% of all incoming email traffic is spam!!!)
2) Time (dealing with spam in whatever manner you do)
3) Go check out wikipedia for more (e.g. Cost of spam: A 2004 survey estimated that lost productivity costs Internet users in the US $21.58 billion annually, while another reported the cost at $17 billion, up from $11 billion in 2003. The world-wide productivity cost of spam is estimated to be $50 billion. On a world-wide basis, the IT cost of dealing with spam was estimated to rise from $20.5 billion in 2003, to $198 billion by 2007.)

As I think I said, 9 years is maybe too much time to do for this, but I think it is a crime that must be punished. We don't need any more advertising in our lives, especially when it's not even footing the bill for something we can enjoy (whether that be through sponsorship of cultural events, entertainment production, or whatever).

My 2 cents,

Jeff

[Amber Mac]

All great feedback going on here, keep it coming! Also, for any commandN fans, I'm co-hosting a meet-up in NYC this Friday night with Natali Del Conte - should be fun!

-Amber

[Div]

Hey Amber, Jeff, Chris:

Just a heads up that if you've been wondering why nobody is linking back to your blog posts the answer is because your trackback link returns an XML error (ie. does not work).

Great show this week.

[David Jonah]

Hi Amber and Jeff,

Great show from Moncton. Love the show and professionalism. On the topic of watching videos from away, by far the best app is one that also protects you in hotspots from access tracking, check out http://hotspotshield.com/ and then you can access any site in the world from anywhere.

Thanks all

[Rick Ankrum]

Program 149 will not play on my Zune. The Zune software says the file format (h264 version) of 149 should play but there is a problem with download file. Show 148 plays fine. I have this issue every so often.

[Chris Dick]

Try this out, I used AVC encoding specifically for the ZUNE. Looks really bad on my computer but I am running all mac all the time so test her out on your zune and let me know

http://traffic.libsyn.com/commandnpro/commandN_149_ZUNE_AVC.mp4

Chris D,

[Kaity G. B.]

Your two's idea of what should be legal & what shouldn't makes no sense,

You first go off that because something is 'annoying' it shouldn't be protected speech, & perhaps even freedom of press. But than you ask to have those of us in the us to help you violate our own laws. Those not protected by our "Constitution" or "Bill of Rights". But instead just because the laws & agreement are annoying.

WTF?

I find spam annoying but who defines what that is? Unsolicited emails? Okay that's so not going to become illegal. I hope that if it makes it to the supreme court that they refuse the case. Whether I, you, or any one agrees w/what or how some one says *anything*, sponsored or not, shouldn't be a reason to even consider legalizing it. I think major content distributors that limit their own audience to the USA only are making a poor dissension when it comes to their content.

Of course the same could be said about your 'no-derivatives' choice on your cc license. I'd rather program 10,000,000 spam filters than see freedom of speech, in *any& of its forms stomped out because what or how annoys any one. What could be next annoying uneducated political blogs, planet/aggregates, public micro-blogging streams, or what else could be so annoying that it should be illegal? Maybe voting or public demonstrations? One step in the wrong direction is still the *wrong* direction to take.