mindplunge

Social Media Count

This has been around Twitter and other media for the past couple days but it’s so cool to re-post it here. More info about the living statistics here.

Whopper Sacrifice

Had to share this: Sacrifice 10 friends from Facebook for a free WHOPPER®.

Facebook and Burger King are teaming up to give you a free Whopper–as long as you “sacrifice” 10 friends to get it. The world of social networking is getting meatier all the time.

The magic of RSS and how it replaced my satellite TV provider

We’ve all been there, zapping through hundreds of channels and nothing interesting to watch. It only get worst if you forgot to record a show or something similar to your DVR. You still want to watch the damn tube but at the end of the night ended up with unnecessary purchases of some retarded infomercial channel.

But there is a ‘new’ way of watching TV and the best thing of it all, it is free!

Well, not completely free but for one thing you can cancel your subscription with your TV provider saving roughly 40 bucks a month. That’s almost $500 per year! In extreme cases (DirecTV premier package $82/mo) you will save $984.00

How to save money and still watch TV?

You need a few things but I bet most of it you already have. Let’s go over the list:

• TV (HDTV recommended but any TV could do the trick)
• High Speed Internet
• Apple TV
• Boxee account
• Flash Drive

Since you are curious on how to save money on your monthly TV bill I’m guessing you already have a TV. You wouldn’t be able to read this post so you can check of internet access as well. A flash drive is a pretty common household item these days especially if you’re a geek. Flash drives are pretty cheap these days. Just do a Google search. Cheapest flash drive I found was 5 bucks.

That leaves you with the Apple TV and the boxee account. The low end Apple Tv (ATV) is $229 and is sufficient for the job. The next thing you’ll need is a Boxee account. If you don’t have one leave a comment with a valid email address and I’ll send you an invite. Boxee accounts are free!

The set up

Very simple. Connect your AppleTV to your TV. You just enhanced your TV viewing pleasure! Movies and/or music videos rented or bought through iTunes can now be viewed on your TV. Playlists can be streamed or created on the ATV.

But it doesn’t end here. There is more you can do with your ATV. Way more…

How to hack your AppleTV

To get the fullest of your Boxee account you need to hack your ATV. It sounds scary but it’s not. All it takes is five minutes. If your not tech savvy I recommend buying your AplleTV with Boxee pre-installed. If you think hacking is your thing head over to atvusb-creator and follow the steps.

Basically what you’re doing is download a program on your usb stick (flash drive) and stick it in the back of the ATV. The usb port on your ATV is only used for diagnostics when you bring it in for repairs but with the atvusb-creator you just have opened up this port!

Congratulations! You have just hacked you ATV! Wasn’t too bad huh?

You’re all set up! Boxee is a media station and offers a wide variety of channels: CNN, Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, YouTube and as of today: Netflix. Netflix isn’t ready for the ATV yet but I’m sure it will in the future.

So what’s the big deal?

Well, since I’m only interested in a few shows I was able to cancel my account with Dish networks. The shows are now being streamed by hulu on my boxee. And it gets even better. The title of this post mentioned RSS feeds. I was able to successfully add video RSS feeds to my boxee account (Since I’m Dutch I added some Dutch TV programs) and I’m now able to play those feeds through boxee on my ATV.

There are tons of other video feeds out there and you can add the ones you like. It’s like creating your own TV station. No more zapping around to find good content. You decide what to watch and when to watch it!

What about the news or Sport events?

That’s a personal choice. Live broadcasting can’t be viewed on the ATV. I decided to give up those perks simply because I was becoming a couch potato. I read the news in the morning. No need to see it live. All it showed was another murder in town and it became depressing. I miss out on sports though. But hey! Go to a friends place and watch the game together! Have a social life!

Need a Boxee account invite?

So if anyone is interested in a boxee account lemme know. Leave a comment and I’ll send you an invite asap!

Automator + iCal + Transmit = score!

Scheduled tasks on a PC are easy. With a Mac it’s easy and fun! I needed to make daily backups for a client to our local server. Leopard comes with Automator, a cool app to , you’ve guessed it, automate tasks. Since I’m using Transmit as my dedicated ftp client it gets only better!

Automator has Transmit defaults build in. As stated on Transmits website it’s not in the library anymore but you can find it under the ‘Internet’ submenu of your library. Another place to look is ‘Most Relevant’ and ‘Most Used’.

setting up an workflow in Automator is pretty intuitive and you should be able to crank out a workflow within minutes. Now comes the sweet part. Rather then saving it as a workflow you can save your task as an application. To set up a scheduled task open iCal and create a new event. In the ‘alarm’ section select ‘open file’ and pick your newly created application. You can manually set the time when to launch this, in my case 3X a week at midnight.

When waking up my files are downloaded to the folder I told it to, zipped up and renamed with a date stamp. Life is sweet…

Inspirational running music

No doubt that music is a big motivator for me when running. I was thrilled to find some of my ‘lost’ mixes online. My hard drive crashed twice on me with the result of losing most of my music. Today I found a link with the DJ mixes most precious to me. It’s radio mix by dutch female DJ 100% Isis. She used to be big early 2000 and not sure how she’s doing right now. Most of my dutch friends are into the Dance and DJ scene and having Isis play at my friends house was a trip. Kinda like a private session since only 10 people were present.

The site has also all the Essential Mixes (1993 – 2000) from the UK. If you need to fill up your iPod or other mp3 player I strongly recommend lekkerlui.nl