showRSS custom TV torrent feeds

ShowRSS rises in the in the wake of the sad demise of FeedMyTorrents (due in part to legal troubles).  ShowRSS works much the same way as FeedMyTorrents.  Where you are given the ability to create combined television show torrent RSS feeds or use any of the pre-existing feeds.  These feeds are already pruned for duplicates and have the ability to filter Proper, Repacks, and HD torrents.

Overall showRSS works much better than FeedMyTorrents ever did.  Creating a custom feed is simple, and the server response time is much improved!  So load up your torrent client and give it a go.

Additional Resources

• ShowRSS
• TorrentFreak post on the demise of FeedMyTorrents

These photographs are on my flickr stream and are released creative commons.

Additional Resources

• MakersShed MintyBoost 2.0
• Ladyada.net MintyBoost Instructions

The answer is simple.  But of course there are different ways to do the same thing.

Using the find command

find -name '*' -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \;

NOTE: the -name ‘*’ parameter is used to keep from modifying the present working directory or ‘.’ directory.

find . -type f -exec chmod 0644 {} \;

Using chmod with capital X

The capital X will cause directories and files that are executable (for user and group) to be set as executable. Other files will not be set as executable.

chmod -R ug+rX .

Other uses of the find command

Modifying specific file types:

find -name '*.pdf' -exec chmod 0755 {} \;

NOTE: you can insert any command in after the -exec but before the {} (chmod 0775) such as ‘chown’.

My common usage

I often setup new Wordpress installations. I like to get ownership and permission sorted out quickly.  I’ll use this as my example.

In your Wordpress root directory:

chown your-username.www-data * -R
find -name '*' -type d -exec chmod 2750 {} \;
find . -type f -exec chmod 2640 {} \;

NOTE: the 2750 and 2640 sets a bit so that all directories that are created by the www-data user in my case will have the same permissions and ownership as the the other files.  Otherwise the www-data user may create files that are owned by itself and the your-username may not be able to modify them easily.

Now change so that the wp-content/{uploads,plugins,themes} directories are writable to the www-data group. This is so that the web server can upload photos and auto-update plugins/themes.

cd wp-content
mkdir uploads
chown your-username.www-data uploads
find -name '*' -type d -exec chmod 2770 {} \;
find . -type f -exec chmod 2660 {} \;

Thursday, May 7^th

Get ready for another MinneDemo!

MinneDemo is the Twin Cities’ premier technology demo and networking event. Come for the demos, stay for the beer and conversation. We will be back at Intermedia Arts, a cool art/performance space in Uptown’s Lyn-Lake neighborhood.

Date:	Thursday, May 7th
Time:	Demos start at 7pm
Location:	Intermedia Arts 2822 Lyndale Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55408 (map)
Attendees:	All are welcome! Please RSVP.

Free Beer & Soda

Since MinneDemo is not at a bar this time, we’re brining in kegs, and it’s all free. Be sure to tip your bartenders. If you need to go all night, there’s tons of bars in the area.

Demos

1. ShortJournal — an open source developer journal with a REST API (Zach Johnson)
2. Skimmer — a lifestreaming app created by Fallon and Sierra Bravo that brings together your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube streams (Chris Wiggins of Fallon and Chris Black of Sierra Bravo)
3. Zeplay — a kick-ass multi-channel HD instant replay video server for live sports events (John Reilly)
4. tinyEscrow — Source code escrow for programmers, not for lawyers. (Corey Thompson)
5. Extendr — one link to rule all links. (Joseph Rueter)
6. SightWare and SmartWatch — SightWare is an RFID inventory system that integrates with the SmartWatch web application to provide real-time inventory management (Harley Feldman)
7. Cloudquad — a web-based student information system designed to streamline the daily workflow of school administrators, faculty, parents, and students while connecting the school community through basic tools for social interaction. (Kevin Whinnery)
8. Pen Manufactory — design your own pen using an online CAD program, then have as many as you want custom manufactured using computer controlled milling equipment. (Joseph Hoover)
9. Adagogo — hyper-local mobile ad platform created by DoApp (Joe Sriver)
10. pitchR — control your presentations using your Android phone. (Vladimir Kelman)

Resources

• MinneDemo.org
• EventBrite RSVP

Production still from "Moon" (2009) via www.cinematical.com

I was able to catch “Moon” as well as a Q&A with the director the very interesting Duncan Jones at this year’s Minneapolis – Saint Paul International Film Fest.

Duncan Jones is an interesting director.  Being the son of David Bowie may be the first thing that comes up in conversation about Duncan (aka Zowie Bowie, aka Joey Bowie), but his work definitely stands alone.  Through the Q&A he was smart, witty, and willing to discuss all.

This film was great, especially considering it was Duncan Jones’ first feature film.  The film’s budget was around $5-million and filming took a period of about a month.  The budget may seem like a lot for a independent film, but considering other independents with a $50-million budget it quickly is dwarfed.  Duncan first took this to Sundance Film Festival in order to get a distributor.  Which he gladly has found in Sony and is going to be released to theaters May 25th, 2009.

The Synopsis

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of his contract with Lunar. He’s been a faithful employee for 3 long years. His home has been Selene, a moon base where he has spent his days alone, mining Helium 3. The precious gas holds the key to reversing the Earth’s energy crisis. Isolated, determined and steadfast, Sam has followed the rulebook obediently and his time on the moon has been enlightening, but uneventful. The solitude has given him time to reflect on the mistakes of his past and work on his raging temper. He does his job mechanically, and spends most of his available time dreaming of his imminent return to Earth, to his wife, young daughter and an early retirement. But 2 weeks shy of his departure from Selene, Sam starts seeing things, hearing things and feeling strange. — IMDB

The Technical Review

This film is an interesting homage to 70’s and 80’s sci-fi films past.  And maintains that style in terms of set design, effects, and delightfully restrained screen writing.  This is not some “Iron Man” special effects driven film.  The most notable films referenced are “Alien” (Riley Scott, 1979) and “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) from which sets, characters, and effects are derived/distilled/borrowed.  In terms of story telling I found it very close to “Alien” in its Film Noir, silent suspense which I love.

Duncan wrote this film with Sam Rockwell in mind.  Gladly Sam decided to go along for the ride.  His acting in this film was great.  Being the only actor he WAS the entire film.  He played a very psychologically intense character who finds himself going insane after nearing the end of his 3-year solo contract on the moon. [OR IS HE?]

In fact the “Alien” connection is even closer in that the set looks strikingly similar to the main spaceship set of “Alien” (the brightly lit white room of the dining room from the chest burster scene). Duncan didn’t stop with only taking from “Alien”, he also created a robot named Gerdy that plays the same role as Hal in “2001: A Space Odyssey”; for which I waited the whole film to only to find out the one difference in characters is that Gerdy does not try to kill the main character Sam. The tension between the similarities of Hal and Gerdy were played out in a peculiar way in that he was made to seem malevolent.

The cinematography was amazing. At times it felt much like the more static filming in “Alien” where the one camera would film the scene statically mixed with close-up and first-person point-of-view (in this case since Sam is mostly alone the first-person is him looking at his computer screen then the computer screen looking back at him). This mixes with modern filming techniques as computer tracking shots so the camera can follow the same track as many times as needed so that Sam can be filmed in multiples with the same actor.

From the Q&A I gained some unique insight. The film was made with a $5-million budget. He compared it to his advertising work where he had roughly 2/3 that budget for 30-second clip for a popular beer brand. I found this limitation impressive, as the quality of the film did not show any strains due to budget. The 70’s era effects and costumes were done really well in that they did not distract but instead certainly enhanced the overall film. Most of the effects were done on a 30×30-foot sound-stage with minimal digital work (mostly as digital set extension to make the set seem moon sized).

This is Duncan’s first feature movie. He is a very young directory, out of a small film school in London. I enjoyed this film. I view it as an impressive first feature for Duncan Jones. Though if it weren’t for Sam Rockwell’s excellent acting the film could have been an unwatchable disaster. I look forward to a hopefully new feature from Duncan. I will be watching this film again when it comes back to Minneapolis at The Lagoon Theater in the end of June.

Additional Resources

• BoingBoing.net Interview with Duncan
• Bloody-Disgusting.com “Moon” Production Stills
• Sony Film’s “Moon” site

Check out episode 22: “Boom Tish” via their blog or iTunes.

I have since added an avatar to my friendfeed account.

Geek Troika

I’ll be seeing a few films this weekend and some scattered throughout the week.

Check out some of the buzz and find the parties on http://www.mspfilmfest.org/MMIX/,  twitter. Google News.

27th Annual Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival

Looking for a place to get RSS Feeds for your Torrenting needs  Check out http://feedmytorrents.com/.  You can create custom feeds or use the existing clean feeds.

Alternatively RSS torrent feeds can be found from most of the trackers.  Including http://www.mininova.org/

photo credit: veganstraightedge

photo credit: irina slutsky

I had some interesting requirements for my Bittorrent needs.  First I wanted to move everything to my linux mediaserver/fileserver.  So I needed a way to work with bittorrent files without traditional access to the machine.  eg. No screen or windowing system.  This led me to TorrentFlux-b4rt, which is a php based web interface to Transmission client meant to be run on apache servers.  Second I wanted to ability to download torrents automatically from RSS sources using scripting.  This is where the original TorrentFlux had failed me and I went searching.

The following is a gathering of scripts I have found and tested.  Most scripts require that you have access to Cron scheduling and the python scripting language.  And, of course, a bittorrent client that scans a directory looking for torrent files.  I am using these scripts in conjunction with rTorrent (a commandline bittorrent client) as well as TorrentFlux-b4rt on various servers.

FlexGet

FlexGet is a program aimed to automate downloading content (torrents, podcasts, etc.) from various sources like RSS-feeds, html-pages, various sites and more.

It’s most often used to download torrent-files from RSS-feeds and works very well in that environment, but there are additional modules for other kind of situations as well.

FlexGet is extremely useful in conjunction with applications and clients which have watch directory support.

- http://flexget.com/

I’ve been using flexget over the last few weeks and it is my top pick for script to use.

rsstorrent

rsstorrent is a very simple RSS torrent downloading script.  It does as advertised and is still being developed.  Though it lacks the nice documentation of FlexGet.

tvrss member script

This is the script that I had been using for about a year to automate the torrent downloading.  It scans the tvrss.net website using an easy to understand configuration file.  It worked like a charm for me but I found a new charm with more sparkle.

TED – Torrent Episode Downloader

This is a different way to download torrent episodes.  This is not a script.  It is a fully functional cross-platform program dedicated RSS Torrents.  It is way to heavy for my use. But interesting none the less.

ted can find episodes of any TV show you like to watch. Just add your favorite shows to ted and he will search for the newest episodes and downloads them for you. ted uses bittorrent and RSS technology to get you the newest episodes as fast as possible!
http://www.ted.nu/

What is Torrentflux-b4rt you say? Torrentflux-b4rt is a sophisticated web-based PHP BitTorrent client based off the original Torrentflux. It allows you to use an old linux server as your happily obedient bittorrent client , while you gallivant around town feeding it torrents. Its greatest feature is freeing you from being constantly connected to the internet while downloading.

Continue reading for the complete guide…

This guide is intended to be followed by a linux user confident with the command line and in full control of a server they wish to employ the use of TorrentFlux with. Good luck.

Base System

I am going to describe how to setup a basic server firewall with this base system as the example:

• Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS (hardy)
• basic apt sources. (hardy main, hardy-updates main, hardy-securrity main)

Installation

Basic Requirements

• LAMP Stack
• Python
• Perl
• A custom transmission-cli bittorrent client interface

LAMP ( Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP )

A cleaver guide has already been written Installing LAMP On Ubuntu For Newbies.

PHPMyAdmin

This gives you a web interface into the MySql server. Greatly simplifies life with MySql.

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

Install extra packaged needed for Torrentflux

sudo apt-get install zip unzip unrar php5-cli php5-gd perl python libxml-dom-perl libxml-simple-perl libthreads-shared-perl libdigest-sha1-perl libhtml-parser-perl transmission-cli

These are what I found missing from my install. You may come up with some missing packages ‘apt-get’ to install packages and google to find the package names.

Install Torrentflux-b4rt

Download the latest package Torrentflux-b4rt package

From your home directory:

cd ~
wget http://prdownload.berlios.de/tf-b4rt/torrentflux-b4rt_1.0-beta2.tar.bz2
tar xjvf torrentflux-b4rt_1.0-beta2.tar.bz2

Create the custom Transmission-cli client

Download the Transmission 1.06 Source

cd ~/torrentflux-b4rt_1.0-beta2/clients
wget http://download.m0k.org/transmission/files/transmission-1.06.tar.bz2
tar jxvf transmission-1.06.tar.bz2
tar jxvf transmission-1.06.tar.bz2
tar jxvf Transmission-1.06_tfCLI-svn3356.tar.bz2
cp Transmission-1.06_tfCLI-svn3356/cli/transmissioncli.c transmission-1.06/cli/transmissioncli.c

This overwrites the original source code for the Transmission-cli a new version extended for the Torrentflux-b4rt interface.

Install from Transmission from source

./configure
make
make install

This should install the transmission-cli binary in /usr/local/bin/transmission-cli

Copy the Torrentflux-b4rt html directory to a web visible location

cp ~/torrentflux-b4rt_1.0-beta2/html/ /var/www/torrentflux -R

Create the Torrentflux database and user using PHPMyAdmin

Log Into PHPMyAdmin

Log into your phpmyadmin interface using your MySQL root user/password by going to:

http://yourserverip/phpmyadmin

Create the User and Database

Steps to follow from the phpmyadmin frontpage:

• Click the ‘Privileges’ link from the home page.
• Then click on the “Add a new User” link.
• Create a new user named ‘torrentflux’, set a strong password, select “Create database with same name and grant all privileges”, click go.

Run the TorrentFlux-b4rt setup.php script

Point your browser to:

http://yourserverip/torrentflux/setup.php

Follow the directions onscreen to finish the setup. Give it your MySQL username, password, and database name. It should solve the rest.

Additional Resources

In case you get stuck or would like to more information check out these pages:

• TorrentFlux-b4rt – Includes support forms and plugins to extend functionality
• TorrentFlux – the original TorrentFlux
• Transmission – Cross Platform BitTorrent Client
• Linux.com – TorrentFlux: A BitTorrent client on a server
• TorrentFreak.com’s article on “Seedboxes“