delx.au / blog

Back in 2009 I wrote up a short guide to using Hulu outside USA. I stopped using it and the necessary voodoo has changed slightly. Since that post is so old I’ve decided to write a new one with the necessary updates.

My approach is different to what most people do. The goal is to access Hulu and Pandora from outside USA, so obviously we have to use a proxy of some kind. However I don’t want to proxy all my traffic through the USA, as then I would not be able to access Australian specific content. So what I have is a few hacks on my router that tell it to forward only Hulu and Pandora traffic through my USA server.

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I’m enjoying my new Nokia E7 with Symbian Anna, however I’ve had a problem with the music player and I thought I’d share the fix. In the Symbian Anna update, Music Player gained support for the album artist tag on music files. See Nokia’s FAQ: Why my albums are not shown properly after updating to Symbian Anna?.

This has caused trouble for a lot of people with incorrectly tagged libraries, and I have a work-around for manually correcting the Music Player database.

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I wanted to play some audiobooks from Audible.com on various devices as mp3s. These books are distributed in an encrypted .aa format. You can play these in iTunes or Audible Manager. You can also burn them to audio CDs, which is a pain as they can be 20-40 hours long, that’s a lot of CDs!

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In my house I have Debian Linux running on an old laptop acting as my router with a Netgear WNDR3700 acting as an access point (WAN port on this is unused). The AP is configured with WPA2 security, but recently I wanted to connect my Nintendo DS to the wifi network. Now the Netgear has guest networks, which is pretty much what I wanted, but it only allows the guest wifi access to the WAN port, which was useless to me. I also wanted to be able to conveniently enable and disable the insecure network with a button on the access point. Knowing that the hardware supported what I wanted to do, and having had good experiences with OpenWRT on another router in the past, I set out to see if I could make it work.

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At work recently I was writing some code that needs to parse very large input files consisting of decimal numbers. These need to be converted to binary. My first attempt at doing this with boost::lexical_cast() was laughably slow, so I did some experiments to see how fast I could get it.

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Update: See WebDL

Just wrote a simple downloader script for SBS’s website. The SBS Player interface is all in flash and is very hard to use on my TV, so this script lets me download the stuff I’m interested in and play it however/whenever I want.

It has a simple command line interface and requires that you already have rtmpdump on your path. Get the sbs-downloader script here.

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I just wrote a simple YouTube downloader. You can grab the code for it from here:
youtube.cgi

It’s a simple CGI script with a form to submit a YouTube URL. It then streams the video download to the user. If you run this on a machine in the USA then it provides an easy way to bypass YouTube’s region checking.

Ask me if you want the URL for an installed copy.

I often find that many people have trouble distinguishing the many different kinds of cables that are commonly used in TVs and computers today. There are so many types, some of which do the same or similar tasks and have adaptors to go to and from each other. So, read on for a bunch of pictures and descriptions.

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A very small (~25KiB compressed) Python Cocoa GUI app for synchronising iTunes playlists to any folder mounted on your Mac. I use this to sync my music and playlists from iTunes on my laptop to XBMC on my lounge media pc.

See the NotiPod project page.

I just realised that my previous post on this was 18 months ago. That’s depressing. Well, the situation has mostly stayed the same since then. It’s good that it has not become worse!
This post is a slightly edited version of an email I sent to my local representative about the matter.
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