Mostly Harmless

I had forgotten how much of a time-sucking vortex the newsgroups are. I was reminded last Saturday when I went spelunking through Buffy Musical (in, um, 3 different formats… along with 5 versions of the unofficial soundtrack).

I made my own version of the soundtrack Friday night by making a digital CD quality recording from my low-fi P.O.S. VCR and turning that into MP3s — hence the quest for better recordings from people with non-P.O.S. VCRs or digital recorders. I finally found a really good set which should hold me over til the official soundtrack is released (there was a vote for it at the web site, it looks like it’ll be a sure thing).

So, anywho, as I was saying, my news server (MediaOne/ATT) sucks. It has *dick* for retention, good luck finding an entire set of files for just about anything. It’s fun to download 600 megs worth of files and then discover that you’re missing part 43 of 60. Argh!

Throwing a little cash at this problem made it go away. I am now a happy subscriber of EasyNews. You get 6 gigs of downloading a month for $9.98, and here’s the important bit: they have a couple of weeks worth of retention so there are really good odds of finding a complete set of files, and they have a nifty wingus that makes zip files of the stuff you want to download so you can just grab one or two multi-hundred megabyte files for a complete episode, depending on the format, of course. I just grabbed the 240 meg VBR MPG of the last episode this afternoon in about 30 minutes (not bad for 42 minutes of video).

I managed to use up 1.25 gigs of my monthly total in about 4 hours Sunday morning. Cable modems are cool.

BTW, Giganews.com is another alternative for commercial usenet news but they charge you for downloading headers and text messages too, unlike EasyNews.

My hard drive is beginning to feel a little strain. Since I haven’t removed any of the zip files or rar files yet I’m using 3x the space of all the stuff I’ve downloaded so far. I think I’m down about 8 gigs at the moment, which means I should burn some stuff to CD pretty soon.

Speaking of CD burning, I’ll need to buy Here’s a lesser ($99) option.

Once I actually got the files downloaded I still had to contend with some non-Mac friendly file types. Issue #1: dealing with .rar files, Issue #2: converting Divx/avi to QuickTime, Issue #3: .par files.

#1) I determined that Stuffit Expander’s handling of .rar files is, shall we say, sub-par — only in the sense that it doesn’t f*cking work at all. I grabbed the source for unrar-2.71 and compiled it (cc -o unrar -O2 unrar.c) — after uncommenting"#define _UNIX"in"os.h"first. Works like a champ!

#2) Determined that EasyDivx sucks. Used Avi2Mov instead (look for"divx for X 1.1.7"at VersionTracker)

#3) Grabbed parchive from Sourceforge. PAR files will save your ass. They are parity files for .rar archives. A single par file (.p01, .p02, etc.) will replace any single missing rar file (.r09, .r42, etc.) in an archive. If a newsgroup poster includes 5 par files you can deal with any 5 missing files, which is just astonishingly useful. My 240 meg VBR was missing 3 parts (4.8 megs each) which I recreated from the PAR files. Sweet!

And did I mention that my regular news feed sucks? That VBR I grabbed has been on EasyNews for 3 days and still hasn’t shown up at MediaOne. I wanted to just use EasyNews as a backup but I can’t very well do that if my primary"free"($50/mo. cable modem) news server doesn’t get the files in the first place. Bastards!