Archive for the ‘Projects’ Category
Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013
Yeah, I stole the title from the Halloween series. It seemed fitting.
So here we are about a year later. Guess what? Revision3 has killed off a few more shows, started a bunch more, and redesigned their site.
A few days ago, Moonlit and I got into an interesting Twitter conversation with Revision3, the results of which can be found here and here. Basically, with their site redesign they lost a bunch of shows which they then regained after we brought it up. They also claimed to fix some dead links, so some possible good news there. On the negative, they did say that some shows have been removed purposefully. Thankfully I believe I have a copy of everything they’ve taken down to date. On the whole, it felt as though they danced around issues I brought up, but at this point I find it unsurprising. It’s probably a good thing they didn’t Google me while we were talking.
I checked my download script from last summer, and sure enough it didn’t work. Upon doing a few trials, it’s a simple fix to change “small” to “medium.” So, I went ahead and updated it. This now works perfectly again (woohoo!).
I went through the wiki page and added in the shows that they had cancelled while I was out of the loop. I’m just going off of their “Archive Shows” page, which may be incomplete, but I don’t know enough about this age of Revision3 to tell you if something is missing or not. It doesn’t look too much as if they throw out shows altogether these days.
I count 10 more dead shows.
On a similar topic, I’m also finally getting work done with Hack College (One of the baby Rev3 Beta shows) and am in the process of uploading it. Let’s walk through how I did this finally because you might be curious.
I know that they have the series up on http://blip.tv/hackcollege. This is good for starters. I also know that youtube-dl supports Blip.tv. Excellent. After a little trial and error, I settled on this command:
youtube-dl -c -i -t http://blip.tv/hackcollege
This downloads all the videos from the hackcollege account, puts titles in the file names, continues incomplete downloads, and skips errors. I only added that last part because one video gave me an error (I eventually just downloaded it manually). Then, I forgot I wanted descriptions for each video, so I ran this:
youtube-dl -i -c -t –write-info-json http://blip.tv/hackcollege
See how easy that was? JSON descriptions in just a few seconds. Okay. A few people still know a little trick for getting RSS from Blip.tv: just add “/rss” after the account url. You can go ahead and load it yourself at http://blip.tv/hackcollege/rss. Now, if you’ve been downloading along, you might notice that youtube-dl only snags the .m4v files and there are these beautiful giant .mov files in the RSS feed. Wouldn’t it be nice to grab these? Unfortunately, you can’t fine-tune youtube-dl for these just yet (maybe if I hunt around in the source code I can set this up, but I honestly didn’t think of that until right now). How do we get these files? I came up with this one-liner:
curl http://blip.tv/hackcollege/rss | grep -o ‘http.*mov’ | sort | uniq > out.txt
Pretty self explanatory. Grab the RSS, filter for .mov links, and sort it to get rid of duplicates. Then, save it to a text file. You might notice that the RSS feed doesn’t contain links for every video. There really isn’t anything we can do about that, but it does appear that the .mov files were a semi-recent addition to these videos and earlier videos most likely don’t have the option. I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet that we’ve got them. Next, we will want to download those links. You can probably pipe that one-liner into wget, but I wasn’t ready to download when I wrote it, so I saved the text for later. Here’s how I eventually used it with wget:
wget –user-agent=”iTunes/10.6.1″ -c -i out.txt
It appears that Blip.tv white-lists your user-agent, so it knows to not allow wget, or probably a slew of other bots and/or browsers. You can find this out if you can download a file in your browser but running something automated on the site results in redirects and file fragments. There’s always a workaround. If you trick it into thinking you are iTunes, you not only get access to the files, but also get them faster than if you just manually downloaded from your browser (throttle-free!). Very nice. So after feeding the text file into wget, the .mov files download rather quickly. You don’t get the nice fancy file names like with youtube-dl, but you do get the files.
So there. Only took an hour or two to work everything out.
Well, as you can see, I’m finishing up a few parts of SaveRev3. Unfortunately, there is still work to be done and the list keeps on growing.
Here’s to another summer of hard drives and bandwidth. It’s going to be a hot one.
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Friday, February 8th, 2013
I have many projects. Too many, one might argue. Either way, they exist and I enjoy doing them.
For a long time, I’ve had something of a collection of magazines that I usually refrain from talking about simply because it doesn’t come up a lot in normal conversation. A few months ago when it was announced that Nintendo Power was halting production, someone told me that the cover of the last issue was a throwback to the very first issue from 1988. I was asked if I had the first issue (people tend to wonder just how much old stuff I have) and I do. Here’s a picture of it.
Nintendo Power #1
What you don’t see in this picture is the rest of my magazines. I have a lot. Hundreds. Most of them are video game magazines from the 1990′s and I’ve been accumulating them for over ten years. That isn’t to say that these sum up my entire collection. I have an almost complete run of 2600, six or seven years of Wired, a few dozen issues of MAD Magazine from the 1970′s bundled away, 10 or so issues of High Times from the late 1970′s and early 1980′s, and a few years of some more modern things. Besides those, I have a few other random magazines here and there and most likely some I’ve forgotten.
Magazine Shelf
While I have a few current subscriptions, I’ve recently re-opened my magazine obsession. Why now? I don’t really know, but it was bound to happen. Every once in a while you get one of those “I should really do that, wouldn’t that be great?” ideas and they really start to stack up. One or two of those ideas end up toppling off the pile sooner or later and you just run with them. This particular idea started with Blacklisted! 411.
If you haven’t heard of Blacklisted! 411, I don’t hold it against you. If you know what 2600: The Hacker Quarterly is, then think of Blacklisted! 411 as a lower budget version of that. If you don’t know what 2600 is, it’s the most popular and longest running independent print hacker magazine. Blacklisted! has something of an interesting past. There are a lot of politics involving the magazine that are still something of a hot issue even for people today. There’s no doubt that it left a sour taste in the mouths of many. To briefly go through things, the zine started as a cheap black and white publication in the early 90′s. Initially monthly, the magazine switched to a quarterly release schedule to allow for more articles per issue (mirroring 2600 in this regard). Many criticized the quality of the articles and the publication in general, but it had a loyal group of fans and writers. In the mid 1990′s, the magazine up and disappeared (angering many) and reappeared in the early 2000′s. Throughout the life of Blacklisted!, a lot of people claim to have been treated unfairly by it and promised compensation for their articles which they never received I wasn’t there, and I don’t know all the details for sure. Defending nor attacking the magazine are not my goals either way.
Issues of 2600
For as long as I had known about 2600, I had also known about Blacklisted!. While I could easily get back issues of 2600 through their website, Blacklisted! was far more elusive as it went out of print. I was less likely to come across old issues out at book sales or flea markets when compared to something more popular like Wired. So, I forgot about it for a while and chalked it up to a boat that I had missed.
Fast forward to now. I’ve decided to take it upon myself to start gobbling up every issue of Blacklisted! 411 ever produced. Normally when you see someone take on a pie-in-the-sky task like collecting all of something from scratch you dismiss them with an “oh, that’s nice” and pat them on the head while taking bets on how quickly they tire of the project and go home. I already know it’s not something that will happen overnight, and will probably take years if I’m ever able to complete it at all. It’s a bit of a turn-key project either way, so it’s not much of a hassle. Initially, I set up some aggregation online to see if any issues go up for sale, at most I might dig through a few more bins at the punk rock flea market. It’s something of a slow burn.
Blacklisted! 411
As I started doing research on Blacklisted! I came upon a few other hacker or hacker-related magazines that went into print. For example, I discovered Mondo 2000 (and its other incarnations), bOING bOING, THUD, Grey Areas, Binary Revolution, and more. These were also low-number interdependent physical magazines that lived a short life of usually fewer than 20 issues. So, I expanded my scope. If I can find them for the right price, I’ll snatch these up as well. Are there more out there? Probably (And please, let me know what I missed). I can’t get to everything, but I have a pretty good idea of what print zines we had just by asking around.
Mondo 2000
Gray Areas
bOING bOING
THUD & Binary Revolution
You may raise the issue of me going after physical magazines exclusively. Where’s the love for the electronic zines? While I do have a fondness for ezines, I don’t consider them nearly as endangered a species as the print-only zines. While an electronic zine may have been copied hundreds of thousands of times with little effort, when a physical magazine goes out of print it can only slip further into obscurity. Some copies get mistreated and trashed, while others are packed away and forgotten. These are the ones I want to save. Right now at least.
So the next logical question is what am I doing with all of these magazines? While I admit that I do get a nice warm, fuzzy feeling from physical magazines, I have bigger plans than simple self-satisfaction. Scanning is the name of the game. I’m currently in the process of scanning in all these old issues I’ve already found, compiling each issue into a single document, and uploading the documents online to share with everyone. Through this whole scanning process, I’ve already learned a lot. Enough to write something on it actually, but it would fare better as its own article. My scanning workflow works well enough to actually yield results, which you can check out here and here. If you want to check out my overall progress on how I’m doing with all the zines I hope to find, you can visit this page. You might notice that in some cases, I’ve found magazines already scanned by people. These are few and far between, but save me a little work considering they are usually of good quality.
While my scanner might be slow and I might be busy, I’m happy to say that the wheels are in motion. Things would probably move a little faster if I had a more portable scanner, but for the time being I’m keeping things slow and steady. That all said, if you have some of these magazines and feel like donating to the cause, I’ll serve as a home for your wayward magazines (and I’m probably a decent alternative to the trash if anything). If you feel like scanning, you can contribute that way as well. The Anarchivism wiki linked above is editable if you create an account.
So as I’m picking up older magazines, I’m also starting to focus on newer ones. Consider something like Bitcoin Magazine. An independent publication about a decentralized digital currency? Who knows how much longer this will stick around. It’s important to apply a little foresight for things like this. Otherwise, who knows what you’ll be able to get your hands on down the line. Luckily, many current publications have bridged the digital divide and offer both physical and electronic copies. Other magazines are now entirely based online. Still, there are those holdouts that are only available on paper. These are what I’m after. These are what I want to save before time runs out.
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Friday, November 23rd, 2012
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these.
My progress on archiving had been stalled for a little bit. I got about half way through the Revision3 Beta shows, and then had other things that demanded my time. Working through the past week I’m down to just one more show which I am trying to download as I type. Surprise, sometimes downloads don’t go the way you want them to. Focusing on Revision3 Beta shows, I believe I’ve already touched on how these shows are hosted for streaming on Viddler instead of the standard BitGravity download CDN. But why you may ask? With those unfamiliar with the concept of Revision3 Beta, I don’t hold anything against you. It’s another one of those little failed projects by Revision3 that you’d be lucky to find any information on these days. Here is an archived page of the line up. These were little independent series that were “talent-farmed” (quoting Wikipedia on this one) with hopes that they’d one day make it to a full-on Revision3 show. A pretty awesome idea if you ask me, and something that had a lot of potential. The project was apparently halted because of a lack of funding, but if you watch any of these shows you wonder what the hell that could mean. The shows don’t seem to be getting any money, running Viddler accounts can’t be too expensive, and basic web hosting is pretty cheap. I’d wonder if someone just didn’t want it around anymore. Even though Revision3 shut down the Beta project, many of these shows went own to produce more episodes outside of the Revision3 banner, but most ended up with a short lifespan anyway. Most of the shows continued to upload to Viddler and these episodes basically have to be downloaded manually. This can be a pain if there are many of them. Thankfully, a lot of these shows uploaded their back catalog of episodes on other sites such as Youtube, Vimeo, or Blip.tv. Using youtube-dl, downloading these videos from more popular sites can be automated for the most part, making things much easier. It would still be nice if the tool had Viddler support, but Viddler isn’t a popular platform and beggars can’t be choosers.
Going back to regular old Revision3 shows, Unboxing Porn has finally been moved to the Archived page after being out of production for quite some time. On top of that, Ask Jay and Epic Meal Time are now moved over as well. So, I did what anyone would imagine and performed a download sweep of those shows. As usual, I found some numbering errors. Epic Meal Time goes out of sequence for two episodes, and has a completely messed up episode feed. Fortunately, I was able to pull all of the episodes they put out under Revision3 without any considerable hunting. Ask Jay turned out to be perfect, which is always helpful.
While I was originally worried about the state of Revision3 after the Discovery deal, I’m surprised by what I see today. While I thought many shows were going to be cancelled, the network is actually growing considerably. I’d estimate that the number of shows currently being produced has almost doubled since the start of the summer. I can’t help but wonder if this is a measured approach, or if they’re just throwing shows against a wall to see what sticks. Either way, I’ll be sure to follow up and see what they axe.
The more shows they end up making, the more I’ll end up preserving.
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Saturday, November 3rd, 2012
Been a while since I’ve done one of these. You may remember in the last part of this series of articles, I hinted at a documentary I was doing (It’s posted below, but you can check it out here if you don’t want to wait). This was April, seven whole months ago.
I got busy. That happens with life and I wish it didn’t. On top of that, my computer couldn’t handle the high definition video that I wanted it to. I wish it could have, but it couldn’t.
The documentary in question is about my friend and his barn. For a little background, he lives in a house that was built around the time of the American Civil War, and the property also includes a barn from the same era. Back then, my whole town was farm land (apparently my property 30 seconds away was part of an orchard) but now the original properties have been substantially broken down for housing. From what I’ve seen, his is the only one in town to include the original barn. Anyway, I called him up and asked him if he’d be interested in letting me do some filming to test out my camera. He agreed.
Now, it’s important to note that this filming had no plan. I came over and told him to just start talking. We didn’t hash out too much of a story, there wasn’t any logic to the way the footage was shot, and we concluded filming when there wasn’t enough light to go any further. Having said that, don’t expect the resulting documentary to follow any logical flow. It was more an act of shooting as much as possible, and then seeing if I could somehow work all the footage together in a way that made sense. In this regard, I think it came out well.
Let’s talk about where I messed up. For one, lighting. I brought a measly halogen light when I went to film, but quickly abandoned it. It made absolutely no difference whatsoever in illuminating the room. I probably could have produced better footage had I handled the ISO settings better, so that’s something to take into consideration for next time. Really though, it’s difficult to get a good sense of things when you have only a two inch screen to look at and adjust with. On top of this, I also purchased an inexpensive NEEWER LED lighting rig that sits on top of the camera. Though off-brand and cheap, it’s particularly bright and comes with several gels so it should help out tremendously. A smaller mistake I made was where I had my friend looking when on camera. While I tried to follow the rule of thirds as best as I could, I didn’t know about having the subject look to the far side of the camera. If you have him look at the edge of the screen he’s on, it’s as if 2/3 of the screen is wasted. Unfortunately, it’s something that you cannot unsee after it is pointed out to you. Lastly, I had some problems in audio. While I did monitoring with headphones, it was difficult to gauge the sound quality when I could hear everything from outside the headphones as well as through them. Ultimately, I’ll probably get a pair that do noise cancellation. I’m also interested in getting an inexpensive shotgun microphone for something a little more directional.
For editing, I ended up completely building a new computer from scratch. The process and all the little details can be found here, so give that a glance if you have not already. While I did a rough edit on my laptop, it would frequently crash and I could not get an fine edit because the playback was so choppy. This new rig does the job nicely and cuts through the video like a warm knife. Now, I started editing this in Sony Vegas and that’s what I finished in. For future projects, I am hoping to switch to Adobe Premiere. I’m a bit sick of Vegas at this point, especially after finding a glitch wherein I cannot render using the beefy GPU I got for the build. Anyway, I feel the editing went well. I’m not fantastic at color correcting. I did some minor correcting and light balancing, but some of the footage was hard to do anything with since it was so dark.
Below is the final edited video if you care to check it out. I originally planned to do a few of these mini documentaries, but it took so long to do one and I ultimately ran out of time to follow through with anything else. While I had some problems with this project, I can say that few of these issues would effect how I do Obsoleet or any similar tutorial-based segment. I recently created a segment for The New Tech which will pop up soon with any hope, and I can now turn my attention more towards this type of content once again. Let’s just hope real life tones it down a little.
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Wednesday, September 12th, 2012
As I mentioned previously, my laptop and HD video were not the best of friends. So apparently pulling myself into the current generation of video with my DSLR camera meant that I had to upgrade everything else I had as well. Not a problem. I decided to spend a large sum of money to build an editing rig from scratch. Difficult? Possibly. Doable? Absolutely.
I decided to do my research. If I was going to spend my hard earned money, I wanted to get the best bang for my buck and avoid cutting corners. I chose to use PCPartPicker for ratings and pricing, and a few forums to get the baseline of what I wanted. It had to be fast, it had to be stable, and it had to be upgradable. I was used to mainly getting laptops which are limited in their use as time goes on. I had a desktop before, but it ran Windows 98. That’s how long it has been since I had one. I wanted to build something now that after a year or two I could throw a few hundred dollars at instead of buying a whole new setup. I wanted something that would last a good while. PCPartPicker proved to be an invaluable resource. I could search for just what I wanted, and add it to my build list. It kept track of which retailers had the best price and previous prices so you could figure out if the component was prone to going on sale or at the lowest price it has ever been. On top of this, I usually waited to see if I could get a manufacturer rebate, and ended up with about seven of them at the end of my purchase spree. I started buying components in early August and had my computer finally assembled in the first week of September.Not too shabby.
Ultimately, this was my build list:
CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor
CPU Cooler: Corsair H100 92.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler
Motherboard: Asus P8Z77-V ATX LGA1155 Motherboard
Memory: Corsair XMS3 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
Storage: Samsung 830 Series 128GB 2.5″ Solid State Disk
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 3GB Video Card
Case: Cooler Master HAF 922 ATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply: SeaSonic 620W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply
Optical Drive: Asus BW-12B1ST/BLK/G/AS Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer
Monitor: Asus VH236H 23.0″ Monitor
Monitor: Asus VH236H 23.0″ Monitor
Pretty powerful, and pretty expensive. Nevertheless, I had all the components I wanted and they started to roll in.
Before I go any further, I have a confession to make: I had never built a computer from scratch. Everyone has added in more RAM or switched out a blown PSU, but most self-appointed geeks had also built their own custom computers and I had never taken the plunge. It wasn’t for lack of interest, it was mostly just something I never got around to. I’m happy to say that this, my first computer built, went completely successfully and booted the first time. Sure, it took a few hours, and I had a little help, but I’m incredibly happy with the results.
As you can tell by my build list, the computer doesn’t have many components outside of what you get from a basic PC. Not many accessories here. I recently went ahead and ordered some cold cathodes for more case lighting and a Firewire card so I can do old footage dumps from my DV camcorder or hook up an analog-to-digital video adapter (have one in the mail) and rescue VHS tapes or other old formats. Why more case lighting? Maybe it’s my childhood self getting the computer he wanted to build back when $50 was considered a large amount of money. Otherwise, I wanted something that was nice to look at.
I didn’t bother getting a new keyboard or mouse since I have a few nice wireless mice and an old Z-board keyboard that still works fine. Will I upgrade these in the future? Most likely. Depending where this computer ends up, I may not have enough space to facilitate a mouse. As for speakers, they are built into the Asus monitors so no problem there. I wanted two monitors for editing video: one for the actual editing and one for preview. I found out that my graphics card supports up to four monitors, so I have room to grow if I want. Lastly, I got a copy of Windows 7 Professional for free (thanks Pat) which saved some money.
Performance wise, the computer runs like a dream. But, as any madman would, I want to push it to the limit with overclocking. That is an adventure for another time, but I found some good guides to use as starting points. From what I understand, both my processor and graphics card are prime candidates for overclocking and I intend to squeeze a bit more out of them before I get comfortable.
So now what? I’m going to finish the short documentary I started in April. This should take no more than a few nights if all goes to plan. What it really comes down to is some fine editing, possibly some color correction, and making sure all the text graphics are as I want them. While this is happening, I’m also going to switch up editing software to Adobe Premiere. Not migrate my documentary over, just set it up in addition to Sony Vegas and ween myself over. Sony Vegas is nice, but I feel as though I have outgrown it. As for my adventures in filming, I already have 2/3 of a segment done for The New Tech so expect this to find its way out soon.
Otherwise, I’m fast approaching the point at which I can roll out Obsoleet Season 2.
Thanks for hanging in there.
As a parting gift, here are some pictures taken right after the build. Enjoy them 
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Thursday, August 2nd, 2012
Today a show I recorded for Hacker Public Radio (hpr) has gone live on their site. It is officially titled Hacking Second Hand – Obtaining Old Tech and focuses on getting hardware from the used market. One could argue that this was a long time coming as I was asked, probably around six years ago, to record segments for TWAT which was a precursor to Hacker Public Radio. Anyway, check below for a direct link to the posting on their site!
http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=1043
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Thursday, July 19th, 2012
I haven’t made a new episode in a while. I apologize for that. Let’s talk about what has happened in the interim.
Episode eight came out in February, and I released a short test video a month after with my new camera. In the month of April, I started working on a short documentary, but here is where the snags started. What it really comes down to is my computer being unable to handle editing high definition video. I edited together the footage from the first shoot after a few days, but trying to do anything more than splice clips is next to impossible. I can’t color correct without crashing, precision editing cannot be done with choppy video, and I barely have enough resources to run my editing software yet alone any other applications.
Let’s step aside from this for a minute.
In early May, I started the SaveRev3 project. I actually hinted at this in Obsoleet as an un-named project. Anyways, with the the help of others I have archived all of Revision3′s “Archived Shows” including ones they removed from their site. A nice accomplishment if you ask me. On top of this, I started a new website for the project called Anarchivism. Anarchivism is an ad-hoc/umbrella/do-ocracy destination for archiving projects which has already expanded past the Revision3 efforts to cover other video shows, audio shows, hacker conference media, and demoscene discs. With any luck, it will only get larger.
Aside from this, I have been writing more. A lot more. I have been keeping SaveRev3 status updates, general reviews, editorials, etc. and it has given a new spark to my old habits. Aside from writing for my own site, I have also been contributing articles to The New Tech, a wonderful video podcast and community-oriented site.
This leads in to what’s next. I had originally thought about releasing short one-segment videos to pass the time before I build a brand new computer with all the bells and whistles (Which I’m starting early August). Instead of doing these one-off segments for Obsoleet, I got the idea to contribute them to other shows. I am planning on creating segments for both The New Tech and BSOD in the near future before starting season 2 of Obsoleet. This way, I can still make video while getting my computer together, and have some of the editing responsibilities split with others.
I also plan on branching back out into audio. The New Tech is planning a weekly radio radio show that I hope to be involved with in some capacity. I am also planning an episode of Hacker Public Radio, which has been on the to-do list since before it was even called Hacker Public Radio (TWAT represent!). In addition to all of this, I’ve been considering revamping Techtat so that it has its own podcast in addition to the articles.
So where are we exactly with Obsoleet? Season 2 will pick up after I build an editing rig. Plain and simple. In the mean time, I’ll produce content for other shows, so you can still get your fix. As a little bonus, I’ve recently registered obsoleet.com (which I’ve been waiting to be free since starting the show) and have migrated the site over there (Update your bookmarks). It still needs some work, but it’s getting there bit by bit.
As always, let me know what you think. If you have any additional ideas, suggestions, or gripes, you know how to find me.
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Monday, June 25th, 2012
So we’ve come a long way. All of the archived shows have their episodes up, and some of them have episodes up that weren’t produced by Revision3. This is a pretty big point in the project, so breathe the fresh air while you can. A few shows still need show notes (Did I mention that we have almost all the show notes as well?) but things are coming along nicely, though a bit slower.
On top of archiving the archived shows, we have also taken care of some of the shows on hiatus. Moonlit and myself have also begun working on Revision3 Beta shows. Some of the Beta shows are missing episodes, and other have them scattered all over different services, but we are slowly gathering and compiling them. All of the shows were originally hosted on Viddler, and using some URL generation, it is fairly easy to make download links from the videos. However, some of these generated links end up dead which means the streams have to be downloaded manually. It’s a time consuming task downloading and checking, but definitely doable.
As for currently produced shows, the best thing to do might be to upload episodes in year chunks. Either way, it is probably a good idea to start downloading these shows now, just in case the worst is to happen.
That said, I’m currently dividing my archiving a bit to a few more projects, but saving Revision3 is still on the list.
We’ve almost finished getting the shows most have forgotten about, but we will still fight to get the others before they can be forgotten.
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Monday, June 11th, 2012
Shorter update today, let’s just cover the main points.
For starters, Moonlit and myself did an article for The New Tech about archiving. It’s a cool read if you have the time, and I’ll eventually put it up here.
In the past week, Moonlit found a fantastic way of downloading episode descriptions en masse with a cool tool called Outwit Hub. This automates the whole task of getting descriptions. After these are pulled, I check them and add show descriptions before uploading to archive.org. I’ve done a handful of shows so far, and more are on their way to being completed. I also have started downloading the last two shows on the archive list, which are more of a pain to do but at least I’m getting them done.
As I said earlier, my next phase will be archiving Reivision3 Beta shows. To do this, I’m going to need a mass Viddler download tool to avoid going insane. Just something that will pull all the videos from a profile. If anyone has any ideas, send me a tweet, come chat, or leave a comment.
Revision3 Beta Logo
Others will probably want to go right to archiving shows currently being produced. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to do this. For now it’s probably a good idea to download first, and ask questions later.
As always, I’ll keep you updated and feel free to stop by if you want to help out or have any ideas!
See you soon.
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Tuesday, June 5th, 2012
Well, things are going pretty smoothly now. If you look at the page, most of the content is up. That is, most of the shows that have been put in the Revision3 “archive” have been downloaded, sorted, inspected, and re-uploaded to archive.org.
It’s taken a long time.
This is day 25 of me downloading and uploading. All day. Every day.
What have I learned? Revision3 cannot take care of their content. I’ll give them a little credit. I have a list here of notes from when I started this project two years ago. It’s a short list of little issues I encountered, some of which have been fixed. This sort of surprised me. For example, there was originally a missing episode of popSiren. Missing as in not in the episode list, but it’s back now. I can’t say the same for most shows that are now in the archive. I’d say that about half the shows I’ve downloaded have one problem or another whether it be missing content, mislabeled episodes, or some other issue that you couldn’t even wrap your head around.
All the issues I stated in the last articles, they just get worse. It would be a waste of article to address them all, so if you’re really curious just click the link to the wiki page above and look through the notes section of the table. There are a few that I may have fixed and not mentioned, but most of the issues are there in readable little sentence fragments.
So where do we go from here?
I’m currently trying to scrape together the last few shows. After this, there will be a *complete* mirror of all the Revision3 archived content. I use that world complete to mean everything they offer. There are shows with holes, and I note them. I’ve also investigated some of them and found that there is true mislabeling, but some I can’t tell for sure. After I get all of this sorted through some detective work, I have to go into descriptions. This will take hours in itself (some help would be nice) so that all the content has episode descriptions. I didn’t do this initially because I wanted to make sure I had all the content. You can scrape episode descriptions from other places if things go bad, but you usually can’t find two dozen shows when they just disappear overnight.
let’s cause this descriptions bit Phase II.
Phase III will be getting other content. Yes, we got the archived shows, but Revision3 still produces content daily. This needs to be grabbed too, but questions come up. How do you archive a show that still makes video? Local copies until it dies? Upload it yearly? I’m not sure yet and am open to ideas. We must also go into Revision3 Beta, the website for which is now gone. This is where I will be focusing many of my efforts to try to snag what I can before the internet forgets it completely. Lastly, I want to expand to shows that Revision3 produced in part, but not fully. For example, I have complete runs of The Game Show and Epic Fu, both of which now appear dead. There are more shows like this, and more still going on that need to be monitored carefully. We don’t want anything disappearing into the aether.
Again, I ask for your help.
We need people. We need people for a variety of tasks large and small. What can you do to help? Download episodes. Gather descriptions. Come talk to us. Give us ideas and help us think in ways we haven’t yet. More than anything, spread the word. You might have no interest in any of this, but if you think the project holds any merit, donate a re-tweet. If you have a podcast or blog, interview me. If just one of your hundreds of internet followers is a fan, that’s one more person who might want to help be a part of this massive (and often crazy) project.
This is only the beginning. We’re going to need a bigger boat.
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