Best Damn Tech Show, Period.

After months of being put on hold, one of our favorite bit-torrent sites has returned!

To my total amazement, I logged onto my family’s computer this evening forgetting that I had Demonoid as my home page. Oddly enough, I was planning on searching some torrents anyway and for a brief few seconds, I didn’t even notice I had been searching on Demonoid (rather that The Pirate Bay like I had planned). I’m pretty frigging stoked!

According to a post on Demonoid.com, Deimos, the former site administrator, was no longer able to put in the proper amount of time to take care of the site due to personal matters. He has recently assigned a good friend to take his place and the original moderating crew is still on board. Everything seems to be running smoothly, so for those of you with accounts, get back in there!

The Schmidtness!

Opera is breaking out the big guns…lawyers.   Today, Opera filed a complaint with the EU against Microspank.

They don’t want IE bundled with Windows, as it gives Microsoft unfair advantage in the browser war, and they want IE to comply with web standards.

Hmmmm.  Don’t we all?  I love Opera, they have big brass balls.

However.   Is there anyone bitching about Safari and iTunes coming bundled with OS X?  No?  *crickets* Anyone?  *more crickets*.  Oh yeah, nobody cares….yet.

So big ups to Opera on getting them some press coverage, but nobody in the world can make Microsoft comply to “standards” that aren’t really standard from a legal perspective.  We’ll be keeping a Geek eye on this one for y’all.

_drew

Former Rocketboomer, Best Damn Hottie, Hot, Hot, Hot winner and more recently, ABC’s answer to new media has been quietly released from her contract (or has apparently decided not to renew) with the network after it became quite evident that the experiment bit the big one.

Traditional media (and traditional viewers) have traditionally had a difficult time adopting new media so it shouldn’t come as a huge shocker to us. I thought Amanda was a pretty risky choice. Her quirkiness was at times a little too quirky, even for a quirky bastard like me so for old schoolers, it was most likely, too much. A spot like Rocketboom was a far better platform as it has an underground vibe to it rather than being smothered with an establishment feel. Overall a failed experiment but no harm, no foul. Amanda is off to pursue other things (of course we wish her well), ABC will go back to the drawing board and most likely come up with another potentially lame option. Maybe Chris Crocker on assignment?

Ok, so we were quite harsh on the whole Netscape/Digg clone when it first came out but now we realize that it’s the best thing since Google. No? OK it still sucks. Well, they’re at it again and this time they’re revolutionizing the web as we know it with my.netscape.com. No? OK it will probably suck. Along the same lines as YourMinis and PageFlakes, My Netscape looks like it will be inferior in every way. Hey, they keep trying right?
I’m going to put it under the Web 2.0 category although I’m pretty sure it isn’t very 2.0ish.
- flemo

OK so I think I may have almost convinced my wife that you can really watch TV on your computer. Her computer sucks, it’s no secret (it’s ACER people…cheap and nasty) but she keeps hearing me and others talk about using your computer to watch movies and tv shows (and not just DVD’s) online. I showed her YouTube…she wasn’t convinced…too much crap, people talking about themselves, only short clips etc. I showed her a few of the others, blip and revver and metacafe etc. ad infinitum. That’s right, there are a bunch of them. She still remained disillusioned. Again, just short clips and people talking about themselves (or annoying people more appropriately).

So I showed her PeekVid and something turned her. I don’t know if it was Gilmore Girls or Saved by the Bell that changed her mind but she was impressed. Then she saw that you could watch movies that hadn’t been released yet and it was all over, she’s a convert. It got me thinking though. PeekVid may do it for me and mine but what about you and yours….maybe there are others that will help convince them to explore this exciting medium further. Here’s my top 5.


1. PeekVid.com - As mentioned above, they have a decent resource of tv shows and movies for your viewing pleasure.
2. ChooseandWatch.com - cable tv stations available on your browser (can be a little sluggish at times tho) but has sucked a lot of my time. Recently updated their look. Also ChannelKing as a bonus is this realm.
3. Viewmy.tv - a slick interface separates this one out. The ability to sort by region and genre is a big plus.
4. TV-Video.net - if you missed an episode of one of your favorite shows like Prison Break or Heroes, here’s where you’ll find and be able to watch them.
5. Bleenks - offers a few unique shows that may not be available elsewhere. Can take a while to figure out how to find something.

L0L. Love it.

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Thanks to our homie Chris Brogan for this great advice and heads up.

Handsome Om Malik has officially scared the bejeesus
out of me with his post about Gmail suffering some kind of problem
resulting in deleted accounts, missing archives, etc. Story link is here.

Back Up Your Gmail

I took Om’s advice and backed my gmail account up. Here’s the steps I took.

1. Read Google’s Help document on POP access to your Gmail account.
2. Configure an account on your mail client for your gmail
   account. - IMPORTANT- Build a separate account. If you’re using
   Outlook, make sure this is a standalone PST file. If you’re using
   mail.app or Thunderbird, make sure this is a standalone account.
3. Do the sync between gmail and your client. NOTE: This will probably take a while.
   If you’ve got a fairly healthy gmail account with lots of archived
   mail, you will be at this step for hours. So, disable your computer’s
   sleep setting, but enable the screensaver if you want, and let it do
   its thing.
4. When it’s all there, turn off your mail client.
5. Locate your mail client’s file for the gmail mails.
6. Consider moving these (or making a copy) offline to a backup
   drive. In my case, I’m going to clip off a current update from today,
   and toss that entire file to my backup drive. Then, I’ll delete the
   account on my POP mail client, and go about my business.
7. Schedule your updates periodically with Google Calendar (provided THAT doesn’t encounter a whoops).

I am a *huge* supporter of web-side applications. I use Google mail,
calendar, docs, maps, and search every day. But an experience like what
Om points out at GigaOm is a great reminder that it’s still my job to
make appropriate backups of my records and not trust Google (or any
other company) to keep my data safe for me.

If you’re a gmail user, consider doing this within the next 24 hours
(provided you haven’t been doing this all along). External hard drives
are cheap (I just got a 200GB external drive for $99). Give your online
data a life vest.

technorati tags:chrisbrogan, gmail, google, bestdamntech, advice, backup

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The Best Damn Micki Tech Show, Period., originally uploaded by bestdamntech.

Next weeks show has a special guest. Micki Krimmel blew the roof off of that mother.

As we’ll cover on next weeks show, digg has made some major upgrades.  One of them?  A listing of podcasts.

So if you like us, please go digg us

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If you haven’t heard of Pandora, you should check them out. Basically, you go to their site, you put in the names of artists and songs you like and they spit out other musicians and songs you might like. Not totally based on user ratings though, they take the style of music, rhythm, and other things, mix and mash it up, and spit out the results.

It’s hella cool. In Best Damn Tech Land, we’re HUGE music fans. Heck, we do the Roadie Show.

We heard that Pandora was going to be in town at the UPenn (philly) bookstore to do a town hall type meeting. It’s tomorrow (Thursday Nov 2 at 7pm). So naturally we invited them to come sit in on the show and they accepted!!! So next Tuesday, be sure to watch Tim Westergren and Michele of Pandora and BDTSP!!!

Here’s some info on the meeting if you’d like to attend:

Pandora Music Genome Project Town Hall

Share your passion for music with Tim Westergren, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Pandora.com, an online personalized radio service powered by the Music Genome Project. As part of Pandora’s outreach to the listener community, and to further the musical research that fuels the Genome, Tim has been traveling around the US speaking with groups in a series of ‘Town Hall’ meetings including numerous stops on college campuses. Tim will be visiting the Penn Bookstore on November 2nd. The project began in January 2000 with the creation of the Music Genome Project, a comprehensive musical taxonomy comprised of 400 musical dimensions designed to capture a song’s musical ‘DNA’. It allows for the creation of radio ’stations’ that play music listeners’ love, with very little effort. It is a free, ad-supported service. Since its launch just 10 months ago, Pandora has become the world’s third largest online radio broadcaster, with more than 3.5 million registered listeners. The service has been featured in such publications as the New York Times, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine (2006 Top 50 Website), Wired, National Public Radio and many other news outlets. Come listen to Tim’s presentation, followed by an informal Q&A discussion driven by the particular interests of the audience. These forums, which have been held from Biloxi, MS to New York City, and from Orlando to Seattle, have involved lively discussions about Pandora, online music, and the evolution of digital technology in general. Don’t miss the opportunity to weigh in on this new and exciting phenomenon - plan to be at the Penn Bookstore, Nov. 2 - 7 pm