To me, these videos are more than just something to be discarded. Every video has its own personality and story that could all be lost with the compacting of a trash truck. So call me crazy, but I strive to save these types of videos and share them with others. I’m not alone in my efforts, as others are doing the same thing. Right now, there are people capturing trashed VHS tapes to a digital format in an attempt to put old blood in an otherwise glossed-over body of modern video. It isn’t an easy task doing something like this, and while knowing how to hook up a VCR might take you through some of the ride, there is still more to consider.

You need to know your hardware and your software, how to make old components talk to newer ones, and how to be patient when a recording goes wrong two hours in. Different players are always needed and sought, such as Laserdisc, Betamax, CED, Hi8, and VHS. Then you need to break this down even further. VHS decks with quasi s-vhs playback, or an s-vhs deck all in itself, 4-heads, flying erase heards, etc. Combine that with Macrovision defeating gear, time base correctors, video processors, and detailers to get the best picture, and then pipe it all into a DVD recorder, a capture card, or a camcorder. After a while your head will start to spin.

I’d have to say that part of video ephemera is the challenge. From hunting down a diamond in the rough to fighting tooth and nail to get a good quality rip in digital form. There is also the excitement of watching a video that few have seen, and was not meant for your eyes.

Having said that, I’d like to bring your attention to something called The Found Footage Festival which is an event hosted by two filmmakers who share all sorts of strange videos they have found at garage sales and thrift shops. They show little bits of tapes edited together for the best video (who wants to watch an hour long video for one interesting scene?) and provide commentaries during and in between the segments. These commentaries go from purely informative to observational humor. In a way, FFF is keeping ephemera alive. Many people simply chalk it up as a common video mixtape (a mix of video clips assembled into a video which is then released online) but I think that the commentary and research done for the different segments sets FFF apart. Other people are unhappy with the idea that many segments in FFF could actually other people’s uploads which have been spread online already and are simply taken without credit. Personal views aside I can put myself behind any mixtape, whether it be released freely or with a set price.

Video ephemera is not for everyone. Some people may not be interested in the thought of clunky VHS tapes winding up and down to produce a jittery image. For most people these days, if you cannot get a high definition digital download, a video is not worth seeing. For those of you who trip over Laserdisc players in the morning and trade war stories about circumventing copy protection, digitizing your analog media might be a fun and interesting project for you.

Please rewind this tape and remove it from the machine.

So as for The Lionshare, I watched it a few months after I downloaded it. I was mostly deterred from the reviews. The minority seemed to like the film and praised it as an honest look into the life of a twenty-something in modern day, but the majority of reviews I read said the movie was nothing more than a bore, and showed the limits of releasing a film in this manor. I got around to watching it and have to say my opinion lies somewhere in the middle. I think that the movie starts out beautifully, but loses momentum before you really start to learn anything about the characters. Without ruining the story, I’ll tell you that a guy goes on a blind date with a girl, and she invites him to a torrent site, and it follows the guy. This might be as far as this reflects the life of someone today. Women and technology are always good subjects, but I feel that the movie starts to get too hip considering anything besides this.

About two months ago, I found another link in The Lionshare’s universe. There was a Kickstarter (see my previous post) project dealing with a new science fiction show released only on Bittorrent. At this time, internet only television has become an interest phenomena. I’ve seen billboards all over the sity for a show released only online called Reinvent The Wheels which looks to be more of a mainstream thing following a niche concept. This science fiction show, Pioneer One, is a television episode by the same crew that pulled off The Lionshare, and I have to say that I like this work much better. Without giving away too much, it has a watered-down X-Files vibe that I really enjoyed, and centers around a strange piece of debris that lands in the United States. The production value for this is also much higher and looks professional, there there are hiccups. After watching the first episode, I was sad that there were no more. The Kickstarter was only made to produce one episode, so who knows if more will ever be created.

So give these videos a try if you see something you like. Both are available freely on torrent sites and I’m sure there are direct download links up somewhere by now. You might just end up having some new favorite media.

This is where Kickstarter gets cool. After you say how much money you need, people can pledge certain amounts, and Kickstater keeps track of how much more needs to be funded. This is all done over a predetermined time allotment. So I have my project up, I need $10,000 and have 80 days to get the donations I need. If at the 80 day mark I don’t have the funds, everyone gets to keep their money. But, if at the 80 day mark I have hit the goal or even gone over, I get the money to finish my project.

But why would people donate, and how does Kickstarter make money? Aside from people wanting to fund a project because of their own interest in it, they can also be offered incentives. So If you pledge $25 I could send you a t-shirt for my event, or if you pledge $50 your name gets to go in the credits of my movie. Kickstarter makes money by trimming off 5% of the funds for a successfully funded project. So if your project raises $20,000, Kickstarter still makes a significant amount to stay afloat.

I first found out about the site through Jason Scott’s Sabbatical to complete his new documentary, Get Lamp. I have been coming back to the site infrequently, and noted other projects that I am interested in such as The Waterman Movie, which is based on a popular web series and has been in development for years, as well as a Documentary on “The Thief and the Cobbler”, “The Thief and the Cobbler” being a film that was in development for three decades and eventually pulled away from the director and chopped up into different movie. Every once in a while, a new project pops up that grabs me, and it gets me thinking. Really, this service is truely amazing. There is no better way to reach people to create a niche project that reuires funding. I can just imagine how much more would have been accomplished had this site been around ten years ago, and how much it will accomplish over the next ten years. I also consider that I may one day be able to utilize it. I can fathom a few projects that could take advantage of this as a way to reach people, though they may be a long way off.

I hope to see Kickstarter thrive, and help out some truely unique projects as time goes by. I do have to mention that the site does not take pledges using Paypal because of how Paypal handles refunding. A credit card is needed for now, though other options are being looked into. Check out kickstarter yourself and see what you find, you might be surprised.

Updates for the show will be available on a separate site, http://obsoleet.noobelodeon.org/ so more information can be found there. Searching the site will let you find an rss feed and a twitter account, so you can stay in touch through a few ways.

I’ve had the idea of starting a show for a few years and I feel that I am close to being able to produce a prototype. I’ve attempted segments for other shows, as well as management for new ones with little success. Most of my projects get tied up as ideas and never solidify. This project, however, has some motivation behind it as well as the availability of tools and talent. Though I have two t‘s I lack time, and therefore may be limited in my conquest. I do hope to have something to show in the next few months.

Any ideas are welcome.

I brought the handset home and plugged it in. I had the switch on TALK and instantly heard a dial tone. I decided to call my cellphone, and entered the number (which can take a bit of time using a rotary dial). I got connected and heard my voice mail message. I decided to try to use my old Radioshack tone dialer next. I punched in the number on my tone dialer, and held it up to the handset. I hit the dial button on the dialer, and heard the tones through the earpiece of the handset, but the tones did not register on the handset itself, and the number wasn’t called.

Next, I flipped the switch on the handset to MON mode. At first, I didn’t hear anything on the line. I hooked up a standard phone nearby, and picked up the handset of that phone. My lineman’s handset instantly had a dial tone, and was monitoring the line. The MON setting also turns off the microphone in the handset, so there are no slip-ups when monitoring.

Other than the cool factor, there are a few things I can do with it. I could use it as a house phone, though it does not have its own ringer. I could also do some wire tapping, but that is illegal. It is not a very practical piece of hardware, but it certainly does hold my attention. Maybe the web will end up lending me some ideas of what I could do with it.

These days, I share my collection of shows over the internet: the same way I received them. I continue to seek out lost shows and fill out holes in my archive in an attempt for completion. Many people may wonder why I even bother. The answer to that question may be more complicated than one would think.

It all must have started in the mid 90′s. I was maybe eight years old. I used to love watching cartoons, but my favorites always played when I was off at school. This is when I discovered the magic of VCRs. I never knew that you could use a VCR to record shows before, but it made things a lot easier after I found out. I learned how to tape shows while I was watching them, and advanced to master timed recording. I filled hour after hour of tape after tape, and re-watched episodes until I had to go to sleep. In affect, this marks my first archiving practice. I wanted to watch whatever I wanted when I wanted it, and found a way to do so.

Years later, I got into torrenting, which I still enjoy today. I’ve never been to keen on mainstream content. Those Hollywood blockbusters don’t do too much for me. The wonderful think about Bittorrent communities is that they are very diverse. I can find so many things that I would otherwise have missed. Have a favorite television show from the 80′s that was never released to DVD, or a movie that only could have been seen when you owned a Betamax player? Odds are I can find what you are looking for. I like to think of torrent communities as groups of friends you lend DVDs out to and talk about weird films with. When you put this group of friends online, it expands to include hundreds more like-minded individuals.

So why go through it all?

Part of it revolves around me having a certain mentality. If I don’t archive it, who will? The stuff that was out there years ago is becoming harder to find. This seems to be true for everything, but especially IPTV. As far as I can tell, I am one of two or three people that have been saving this stuff and trying to share it all back to the world. I think of websites like Jason Scott’s textfiles.com and think of how different things might be if he never decided to share a world of text files. What would have happened to our history of Bulletin Board Systems? Maybe a few Angelfire fan pages and a news group? Certainly not enough to make a statement.

Another part of it is simply the community aspect. Sharing the content makes for meeting people makes for conversation and more sharing. For example, with the IPTV Archive, I chat with a number of people who have an IPTV craze. We get to talking and searching for lost videos and have fun in the process. It opens whole new doors. Somebody may have ideas that throw you in new directions and change things for the better. Video packratism works far better in groups. Pooling resources, time, and effort helps maintain efficiency.

Through it all, video packratism has worked well for me. I locate, I leech, I share, all along with others. It might have taken a long time. I’ve been accumulating content for years, and am still nowhere near done. That is the thrill of it. Locating the un-locatable and watching the unwatched. It is a long process with a short reward. A month searching for thirty minutes of content? Good thing there are hundreds of files out there that are just waiting to be found, otherwise I might get bored.

After registering I notices I received a number and an extension anyone could call to reach me. I also saw I was given the option to record a personal greeting. It also appeared that I did not even need a valid email address to get a number as I didn’t have to click any activation links. The number was just handed to me in-browser. I went back to the inumbr home page and notices that I could manage my inumbr account by logging in with the number they gave me and the number I chose to forward it to. Here, I was presented with more options for my inumbr.

I saw that I could change the length of the number’s lifespan between the three mentioned terms before, as well as a one month option that wasn’t there earlier. I also saw that they gave a slot for a second number in case the first was unreachable. After that, there are many check boxes for additional features. “Don’t accept calls from blocked caller ids,” “Don’t accept calls from suspected telemarketers,” “Forward all calls directly to voicemail,” “Do not disturb from 9PM to 8AM,” “Turn off call screening,” “Activate voicemail for missed calls.”

So in all, I got a free throwaway number with a handful of features. This is great if you have to supply a number for something and don’t want to reveal an actual one, or maybe just see how you can mess around with phones.

Besides TPB, many other tracker/indexer sites have been around for a long amount of time. For example, H33T and SUMMOTorrent (and Demonoid to an extent) offer both in-house trackers and indexes. Other indexing sites, such as Mininova or TorrentBox offer free use with 3rd-party public trackers such as  OpenTracker. Next to these public trackers are private torrent sites that usually require a user to be invited to it by another. These private trackers offer a level of safety due to their exclusivity, but are by no means completely safe from anti-piracy outfits.

Since the acquisition of TPB was announced, many new sites have popped up to offer new outlets to BitTorrent users.

Starting off, there have been a few public trackers popping up that look promising. The first being OpenBitTorrent, which from research proves to be the trackers from TPB using a new name (so the offline time for them is questionable). A similar project using the same software, but this time spearheaded by the administrator of BTJunkie, is known as PublicBT. These two trackers are virtually identical in use and message. They are simply for the tracking of torrents with no needed registration or limitations.

Besides these two trackers, a third entitled TheHiddenTracker should be noted for an interesting execution. TheHiddenTracker hides itself and its connections using TOR. Many torrent users know not to transfer files over TOR as it is slow and degrades service, but in this case, only the tracker is reached through TOR and file sharing happens normally. To use this tracker, one would have to either install TOR, or use a handy web service entitled tor2web that allows an internet user to access TOR addresses without downloading any additional software.

Now that there are new trackers, there are also some practical and interesting ways to share them amongst others. First off, if one possessed any torrents utilizing the old TPB trackers, these torrents could easily be edited to reflect new trackers using TorrentEditor, which helps edit torrent files online.

One interesting way to share torrent files is through the use of a service called Hid.im which will turn a torrent file into an image. This way, torrent files can easily be shared in places like forums or social networking sites. Anywhere an image can be hosted can now host a torrent.

Another service entitled Torrage (combinging the words Torrent and Storage) attempts to hold torrents without providing a search function. The only way torrents can be found through this website is if a user knows the info hash that the site generates for every torrent upload. Some torrent indexing sites are already utilitzing this as a way to store torrents more effectively, in a more decentralized manner.

Last but not least, isoHunt recently launched a “social networking torrent site” by the name of Hexagon.cc. Hexagon is made up of a bunch of different, smaller groups within the whole of the website. So say thay you are a fan of Creative Commons content. You can then join the group, download torrents associated with the group, and engage in discussions. Besides the public groups, there are also private groups that can only be accessed and seen through invites. They are also apparently SSL encrypted for added protection. Even though the site is less than a week old, it already houses over 45,000 torrents and is growing every day. The site is currently only joinable through the use of invites, but expect it to open up more as it expands.

So although TPB appears to be burning down (though some argue that the acquisition is doomed) loyal torrenters can rest assured that new services will rise from the ashes. Things such as The Hydra Project and (the now defunct) Securep2p project could come to light and revolutionize how people think about file sharing. The end of an era may be upon us, but a new chapter of BitTorrent history is being written as we speak.

]]> http://famicoman.com/2009/09/03/modern-bittorrent-hydra/feed/ 0 http://famicoman.com/2009/08/07/google-gives-voice/ http://famicoman.com/2009/08/07/google-gives-voice/#comments Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:33:04 +0000 Famicoman http://famicoman.com/?p=95 So it is probably common knowledge now that Google has unveiled the Google Voice service which is pretty groovy. I didn’t jump on the boat when most people did. I heard some buzz about it, but didn’t really know what it was and dismissed it as something that was probably related to Google Talk. After I understood the concept of getting a number for all your phones and some interesting features, all for free, I thought I might as well see what it was all about.

The invite process was a lot less hassle then I’d guess most thought it was. I knew some people that signed up for an invite years ago when the service was still called GrandCentral. These people that requested invites years ago were just receiving them now which suggested the invite system was really backed up. I took my chances and put in for an invite. About five days later, I received an email telling me to pick up my new account. This part is easy enough. You go through the steps, the best being picking your number. Thankfully, you can search them using letters as well as numbers, so I could throw in a significant phrase and hope that it would spit back a local number. After maybe a half hour of debating, I settled on a number and was greeted by the Google Voice dashboard.

The dashboard, as you can see in the low resolution picture above, is almost a complete clone of the Gmail dashboard. This was great news for me as I am very familiar with using Gmail, and the Google Voice dashboard behaves in the same way considering placement of settings, inbox, etc. Basically, if you have used just about any email service, you should be in good shape. From here, I edited my settings, and toyed with some of the features.

I first decided that I just wanted to link the number to my cell phone, and ignore the options for house phone and work phone. I then went through the settings one by one. I added my voicemail message, as I am mainly going to use the number for that. I skipped the recording of my name as I don’t need that quite yet. I also set up notifications to use in conjunction with the voicemail. Whenever I get a voicemail, I get emailed and my cellphone receives a text message. So now, I have the ability to know if I have a message whether or not I have internet access.

Google Voice also has many privacy features. There is a call screening option that asks callers to identify themselves. Google will also provide a variety of options for when someone calls your number. You can choose to pick up the call, let it go right to voicemail, listen in on the voicemail that is being left, and even record the entirety of the call. There is also the ability to block numbers, and even allow different phones to ring depending on who calls.

Where I believe Google Voice really shines is how it handles the voicemail online. I already mentioned receiving notifications, but Google Voice goes far beyond that. For one, you can listen to the voicemail online, so just fire up your browser and point it to your account to hear what people have left. Google Voice will also automatically transcribe the voicemail, and even send it to you via email/sms if you desire. I also must add that there is a “Do Not Disturb” option which I use that will just connect a caller to voicemail without ringing any phone, so you never get annoyed with calls when you don’t want them.

In all, I can say that Google Voice is an interesting little Google project and I am interested in how they might improve upon it. I’m also interested in how people might use this in unexpected ways, considering how popular voip is these days. There are features like conference calling and free U.S. based calls which I am sure people can  find interesting uses for. If you want to try calling me, feel free to check out the widget to the right of the screen.