Archive for February, 2008
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Bigpond Movies Review - Rent and download movies, tv and music built into Vista Media Centre!
Author: PantherAmy and I finally finished setting up our new home theatre on Friday (separate photo gallery to follow when we get around to it 
) and then by luck stumbled across BigpondMovies. One of our ADSL accounts (yes… we have two ADSL lines… we’re geeks, so sue us :p) is with Bigpond and whilst I had heard of it before I figured it was probably a crappy service with over-inflated prices.
I was very very wrong - I seriously doubt I’ll ever rent movies from the stores again. Not only has Bigpond movies got a huge library of movies available, its completely integrated with Media Centre which makes it perfect for our HTPC home theatre setup. Even better - the prices are decent (plus you get a 20% discount if your a Bigpond broadband customer - not to mention the downloads don’t count towards your limit), you don’t have to worry about return fees, and they are high quality digital downloads. All this aside - it’s available right now to customers in Australia (unlike crappy ITunes).
The price for renting movies through them varies (depending on how new the movie is) from around $2.00 for 72 hours, to $5.00 for 24 hour new releases (for movies anyway - tv series are a tad cheaper as are the music + music videos) and the DRM allows you to watch them unlimited times during that rental period. Check out the website Bigpond Movies Download to see what kinds of movies, tv series and music they have available for what prices and what ‘rental periods’.
Anyway, to get bigpond movies set up with your Media Centre HTPC, first of all create an account on the Bigpond Movies Download website. The one annoying thing about this step if you are a bigpond member is you need to find the “My Account” page on the Bigpond Movies site and “activate your Bigpond Discount” before you will start receiving a 20% discount on all purchases. It does not automatically detect that you are a bigpond customer even with your @bigpond.com email address - so don’t forget this step!
Next download and install the Bigpond Media Manager application on whichever computers you want to use it on (we have three HTPC’s, the one in the theatre room, and Amys and my own computers in our bedroom hooked up to our bed).
After you’ve got that up and running you can close it again and it should now be integrated with Media Centre. Open up Media Centre (should be on your start bar)…
Now scroll down to the “Online Media” row and select “Explore”
Now if the install worked correctly you should have a button in online media called “Bigpond Movies”. Open it to launch the Bigpond Movies, TV & Music rental service…
Once you have opened it you can browse through the various Bigpond Movies sections including Movies, Music, Music Videos, Sports, and TV.
Once you open up the section you are interested in (In this case Movies) you will be taken to a list of all the Genres, as well as the “Featured” and “Whats New” movies:
After selecting the movie you’d like to rent you can add it to your cart, and then go to the check-out. If its the first time you’ve used it you will be prompted for your login details (as per the account you registered on the Bigpond Movies site) and your credit card details to pay for your rentals. If your happy to you can tell Media Centre to remember these settings (credit card and login) so that you don’t have to enter them each time.
After you have gone through the checkout your movie will start downloading. One really cool feature of Bigpond Movies on Windows Vista Media Centre is that you can start watching your movie before the entire thing has finished downloading, and it will let you know how long before you can start watching it (for us we could start watching our new movie in two minutes - much much quicker than driving to the video store!).
Bigpond Movies also has an albeit not as complete as Itunes (then again itunes tv is only available to Americans) TV series section
Anyway…. I now have a new favourite toy :p Time to go watch a movie!
Before 9/11, before GWB became President, a movie about a series of terrorist attacks in NYC leads to the President suspending the Constitution and declaring Martial Law.
Can America justify the use of torture on its’ “prisoners of war”? Could the same argument not be made by “the other guys” that torture and terrorism is acceptable to protect their beliefs and ways of living?
Besides… Western countries should look at themselves. Terrorism has been successful in its goal - scaring people and having a major impact on the “freedom” that we cherish. Politicians and authorities love it, just another way to influence the masses. Who dares step out of line when the government is the only thing preventing boogey-men jumping out of garbage cans with anthrax bombs and killing everybody???
Don’t get me wrong. I decry any form of violation against basic human rights and the right to feel safe and secure I believe is one of them - however I do find it somewhat disturbing the way western civilization has through the manipulation of the media and politicians, so dramatically ignored the one difference that puts us on morally higher ground. What is so different between “us and them”?? With all of this water-boarding crap going on in America at the moment the only difference I can see is religion. Does that make it a free for all and “may the strongest religion win”? If thats what we believe, then how can we condemn the extremists for following essentially the same principles applied to different deities?
So out of boredom I’ve thrown together a much much more insidious version of the “Rick-Roll’d” page. For those of you who don’t know what “Rick Rolling” is, it’s an Internet meme involving tricking somebody into visiting a link or site that contains the music video for “Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up” - an incredibly annoying song from the 80’s. A bunch of sites showed up with this video tied with some javascript to make it annoyingly move around the screen slowly.
So, I decided to modify the script a tad to make it move around much more and much faster 
Anyway, if your feeling cruel - free free to Rick Roll people by sending them to this link http://www.precariouspanther.net/amusing/… Just try avoid clicking on it yourself
I have been breeding rabbits for almost 2 years now. Due to University work i am having to stop and focus more on my studies. So i am selling my rabbits for $15 each, i have the following available:1 3yr old Male Red-eye White Dwarf Lop
1 2yr old Female Frosty Point Dwarf Lop (Who i bred myself and i have had three beautiful litters from her!)
1 5month old Female Frosty Point Dwarf Lop (She is truly adorable!)
1 5month old Male Fawn Dwarf Lop (Father is a Pedigree)
1 1yr old Female Sooty Fawn Dwarf/mini lop (Has a cute face hehe)
Also on the 27th February i will have 5 kits available (Fawn, Black Otter, Black, 2XDark Sooty Fawn)
If you would like some more pictures please email me at amy@precariouspanther.net or if you have any questions!
Thanks,
Amy
5 Month Old
1 Year Old (Lana)
1 Year Old (Lana) & 5 Month Old
Lana
Lana
Boo
Adonis
5 Month Old
Lacey
New Baby
New Baby
New Baby
New Baby
So… The windows command line has a bunch of commands built in for common tasks such as creating directories, renaming stuff, moving things about, yada yada yada. Its kind of stunted though when I compare it to the kind of file operations I do all the time in my development work.
I just finished sorting a huge number of files into appropriate directories, and noticed annoyingly that about 10,000 files (images in this case) had signatures in the file name making them ugly when displayed on my HTPC as a slide show. For example “Blue Iris (!downloaded from precariouspanther.net!)”… (The site link obviously changed in this case). Rather than having that garbage show up on my screen, I much prefer it to just be “Blue Iris”.
The easiest way to do this is just selecting the file, pressing F2 (or right click/rename) and editing the name removing out the garbage. This is normally fine - however with this collection of around 10,000 images it would take, oh I dunno… three years???
Frell that for a joke! After five mins scouring google I didn’t find a quick and easy solution, so whipped up a quick php script to enable simple find/replace on file names in a directory, opened up trusty CMD, typed in
findReplaceName * ” (!downloaded from precariouspanther.net!)” “”
and within 2 minutes all the work is done. I used to use perl for my shell scripting in linux all the time on the web servers, but given I’m coding php all day every day (and setting up perl on windows is annoying) this worked out much much better for me.
My uncle wanted to take a look at some of the sites I’ve done dev and or design (sucky) work on so thought it would be easier to throw the list up here. Most of the development site of things is login only which makes it a little difficult to show off, but I’ll put together a proper screen-shot and possibly a locally hosted demo of some of them here when I get a chance.
Wildtribe
- Australian Walkabout Park - inc completely custom eccommerce, CMS, stats packages, booking system, multi-user authentication etc
- Inconjunction Real Estate - Another completely custom CMS with built in property listing and image galleries, open time bookings, etc.
- Asquith Girls High School - BIG Custom project, major customised CMS with separate events management, news system, multi-user access (including admin, teacher and student) with cascading permissions system inc stats etc.
- Calabash Kennels - Very simple image rotation stuff to dynamically load images from a directory and cycle them as a css background property on page load. Looks cool though!
- Neetacity Shopping Centre - Very rapid simple CMS with single user login system. Completely flat file based due to requirements, rapid job of about 1 week.
Expertise Events
All of the following websites are running from the same customised events management CMS - dubbed Xerxes. Xerxes, along with quite a few other smaller projects was developed to facilitate complete control over the look and feel of the sites by the web team (design and development), whilst still giving less “web experienced” staff the ability to add and update large quantities of content across a significant portfolio of events management web sites. It includes things like Cascading permission systems, advanced statistical analysis, “drag and drop” emphasis GUI for simplifying interaction with a powerful engine, completely dynamic menu systems and ordering, drag and drop stand planning for exhibitors, advanced feedback forms using simple drag and drop mechanics with modules for stats tracking, compositing into CSV, etc, e-cards and special promotional systems, seo focused code generators and templating system, segmented templating engine allowing designers to simply implement advanced functionality within their designs without knowing *any* “code”, integration with third party services such as google maps/earth, and much much more.
A list of all of the current sites including:
- Craft and Quilt Fair
- Gardening Australia Expo
- SMPTE
- Auto Trade Fair
- Salon XPO
- Home Improvement Expo
- Event Conneqion
- Pet XPO
- Travel XPO
- etc
can be found at the Expertise Events corporate website - http://www.expertiseevents.com.au which automatically lists and cycles through all the upcoming show websites.
Melon Media
- Melon Media Corporate Website - Setup and customisation using ExpressionEngine
- Melon Stork - Custom email spam analysis tool
General
- precariouspanther.net - This site, using Wordpress with a bunch of custom modifications (mostly server side inc fetching photos automatically from my mobile phone).
- Ragajac Ragdoll Cattery - Ragdoll cattery website that I did for my mother who breeds Ragdoll cats over a Christmas break a few years ago. Customised CMS system and pedigree/family tree system for the cats. Also some cool photo gallery stuff I played around with at the time.
There are quite a few others that are now defunct as is always the way in the web world - but 404/server not found pages are hardly worth listing here :p
Yeck… Just stumbled on an entry on cracked.com with an entirely disgusting list of foods from around the world…. Baby mice wine??? Maggot cheese???
Incase your sick enough… here is the link