This video, called "Fuck the Corporate Media," is from the Portland Independent Media Center. Once you get past the fact that it's narrated by a girl with a bandanna covering her mouth, it's not too objectionally radical. Really it's just a comparison of how the local news (KATU) covered demonstrations and protests during a Bush visit to Oregon compared with home videos taken of the same events. Where the news media continually brought up violence and anarchy, the home videos of the exact same coverage reveal the crowd to be rather benign.

I'm not sure I'd agree with some of their conclusions, but at least it shows the need for alternate media angles and news coverage.

The torrent is here.

If you hadn't heard, Phish is calling it quits after this summer tour. This is their show from last Saturday (two days ago) 6/26/2004 in Alpine Valley, Wisconsin. Cheers to music venues that still have their original name (after all, who would want to hear music at Hidden Valley Ranch Amphitheater).

Of course, if you've already added bt.etree.org to your Torrentocracy RSS list, you can download this directly from their site.

The torrent is here.

The kind folks at etree.org have been nice enough to switch their torrent listings to now use enclosures. I'm still away from my computer so I can't test it myself, but if someone could add:

http://bt.etree.org/rss/bt_etree_org.rdf

to their feeds.xml list and reply to this entry, that would be great. This will be a big score for legal torrent downloaders.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is why Torrentocracy exists. This torrent shows congressmen and various dignitaries attending a ceremony for Reverand Moon, the owner of the Washington Times, heralding in a "declaration of God's fatherland and the era of the peace kingdom" as they literally place robes and a crown upon his head and upon his wife's head (for a man who has proclaimed himself the Messiah). This all happened in the Dirksen Senate Office Building a couple months ago and is quite alarming. The video is of low quality, only 17MB but is decently long and *worth completely watching*. It even shows Yasser Arafat praising Moon and is simply astounding for what it represents.

The video originally appeared on Moon's Church's site, but has since been pulled as those involved have started ducking for cover. I saw the scoop on Boing Boing which in turn points to the this text transcript. NPR was also discussing it this afternoon and I think I saw Salon had an article too.

The torrent is here.

Torrentocracy 0.0.5 is now available (tarball):

* The black torrent status window now actually has a purpose. It displays the name of a torrent associated with an entry and whether the torrent is ACTIVE/inactive. In general, I just wanted to get some rudimentary functionality working here, but the eventual goal is a real time update with real download stats.

* The "Stop Torrent" button now functions. It currently just deletes the .torrent file from the /active directory. When I figure out how to do a move in QT, I'll likely switch this such that it moves the .torrent to the /inactive directory instead of outright deleting it.

* Updated the README to include explicit directions on what needs to be added to the MythTV main menu and MythTV setup menu so that you can reach Torrentocracy within Myth.

This will probably be all the development I get to until I get back from Chicago on Sunday (seeing Phish). Hopefully I'll get some CVS access up next week.

Here's a torrent from Phish's performance atop the Ed Sullivan theater yesterday afternoon in NYC.

Make sure when installing torrentocracy, you also do the following:

Edit /usr/local/share/mythtv/mainmenu.xml and add an entry to the main menu for Torrentocracy. This can be done by copying one of the entries for one of the other plugins, replacing in the word Torrentocracy.

Edit /usr/local/share/mythtv/main_settings.xml and add an entry to the setup menu for Torrentocracy. Again, just copy and paste another entry to suit your needs.

Note that in order to use Torrentocracy, you need to go into Torrentocracy Setup and add feeds for Torrentocracy to use. Otherwise, the plugin will just show a blank view.

Here's a torrent for today. I can't vouch for what it is as I haven't downloaded it yet, but its free and legal. Here's the scoop from http://patrolling.rantmedia.ca:

Patrolling With Sean Kennedy equips the viewer not only mentally and physically but with the right gear for the job, ready for any situation. This freely distributed TV Show encourages viewers to share the media. Sean Kennedy has been entertaining the Internet for over five years now with recorded rant, radio shows, TV shows and books, all distributed for free.

The torrent is here.

My write-up on slashdot took me down for about the last 4 hours due to some crummy configuration by my hosting providers. Looks like they got it squared away and I'm back up.

This is the June 2004 show of Seattle Wireless TV. It contains a segment on the Austin Wireless City Project and another segment called "Booze and WiFi". This was originally posted on slashdot.

The torrent can be found here.

I hacked up a method to add enclosure support to this Blog's RSS Feed (index.xml) so now any torrent file which I link to from an entry will get added as an enclosure. In turn, the Torrentocracy plugin will then be able to start the download from your TV. You'll notice that I went back and changed two of the links in yesterday's Bonnaroo entry to actually point to torrents. Unfortunately, though, torrentocracy can only currently handle one torrent per entry.

Also, I've added a Suggest A Torrent page and would like to start featuring a daily torrent. Send me your suggestions.

I just found this RSS + Bit Torrent reader called Buttress. It's java based and also licensed under the GPL. They've got a version for Windows, too. I have a feeling that bit torrent downloads will become a standard feature of all RSS aggregators soon, but my focus will remain creating a UI specifically meant for your television.

Bonnaroo is a yearly jam-friendly, taper-friendly music festival held in Tennessee. It was held last weekeend and below is an aggregate of all of the torrents which have been made available from the performances there. For now I don't have the torrents listed as enclosures with this entry, so you'll actaully have to click and download these manually. But I think this gives a good idea to where this is all headed.

Umphrey's McGee
Trey Anastasio Band FOB AKG's
David Byrne
Gov't Mule AKGC33->V3
Dave & Friends AKGC33->V3
moe.
Mike Doughty - Interview for XM Radio
Dave & Friends mk41
Leftover Salmon
The Dead AKGc451b
Acoustic Syndicate SBD
Dave & Friends ck63
Chris Robinson and New Earth Mud
Damien Rice ck63
Barbara Cue
Superjam
Burning Spear
Femikuti
Danger Mouse

Day 1, release cool new software that has tons of potential, but could still be abused by pirates.

Day 2, learn Senator Hatch has proposed a terrible new bill that holds the makers of such software/hardware liable for the pirate's actions.

Well, as long as this Induce Act would make VCRs illegal, it seems hard to believe this will go anywhere, but sheesh.

I put up two images of torrentocracy on the screenshots page. There's more info there.

Torrentocracy 0.0.4 is available (tarball):

The intitial version for the website is up. Downloading torrents works and if you have the bittorrent service running, it'll then automatically kick off the torrent. Though, as of now, the GUI doesn't yet tell you this, nor does it do any status.