SABnzbd is frigging amazing.  Usenetters rejoice!

I’m an old schooler, and an avid Usenet user since way back when there was actually a reason to break an upload into a billion tiny pieces.  I prefer it over every other means of mass filesharing on the intertoobs.  The advent of NZB made it even awsumer.

My goal now is to automate the process as much as possible.  Unfortunately, thus far there is no all-in-one solution for this.  Fortunately, there are great apps made by industrious people to take care of most of it.  My current test setup includes the following:

• NZBDownloader – for automatically pulling the NZBs.  I’d say it’s too bad that this can’t be configured to monitor multiple site feeds, but NZBMatrix does a good job of keeping up with most of what I’m after.
• NewsLeecher – for automatically using the NZBs to download from the newsies.  This is the only bit of the setup that isn’t free (as in beer).  There’s probably an alternative to NewsLeecher out there, but it works well and is extremely configurable.
• AutoUnpack – Automatically unpacks the files downloaded  by NewsLeecher and discards the source data.

My download path differs from my storage path – I have a separate set of shared drives to hold video.  Right now I still have to move the video file to the appropriate drive/path.  The last step of my process is to write a bit of code that detects the unpacked video files and move them to their final destination (eg: move the file “futurama.s06e01.dvdscr.xvid-mspaint.avi” from its unpacked location to its proper home at “F:\video\Series\futurama”).  This is relatively trivial.  I just need to take the time to do it.

So a friend of mine is after an old school Toyota Landcruiser, but he’s finding it difficult as it appears he’s not alone.  Any such beast in decent shape seems to sell within 48 hours of being posted online.  As such we were discussing ways he could be notified when one is listed for sale.  Bam!  Google Alerts.  Brilliant.  Simply set up your search criteria as THINGYOURELOOKINGFOR site:SITEYOURELOOKINGAT, eg:

landcruiser site:atlanta.craigslist.org

or

landcruiser site:ebay.com

Set your notifications up, and you’re ready to rock.  If you want to get specific or tricksy about it, check out Google’s advanced search magick.

Given that I have a multitude of laptops I’m test driving Prey.

Prey is a lightweight application that will help you track and find your laptop if it ever gets stolen. It works in all operating systems and not only is it Open Source but also completely free.

Hopefully I’ll never have to use it.

I loved the image resize powertoy in XP – here’s a clone for 7!

ImageResizer2

Who knew?  Not I.

iPod Diagnostic Mode.