I’m not that much of a television junkie and I prefer a good movie or an interesting TED talk over the ad-bloated junk you find on television most of the time. I don’t even have a televion and I usually don’t miss it. But sometimes — on very rare occasions — there is something one might watch. May it be some world-changing news event or that unbelievable documentary with Betty Botterblom. That’s when Internet-based television via Zattoo.com comes into play.

Zattoo.com is a free internet television service that streams many normal television channels right to your Windows, OS X, or Linux machine. It’s is absolutely legal, as zattoo has contracts with the stations it streams. On the other hand not that many channels are available yet. In Germany, for example, the complete public service broadcasting is available, but none of the big commercial stations.

The service is available in many west european countries (i.e. Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) and the channels you can watch depend on your location (e.g. Pro7 is available for people from Switzerland, but not for people with an german IP address).

The Zattoo-Player has moderate hardware requirements, is really easy to use, but lacks some (unnecessary?) features like recording, time shifting, etc., and you need a broadband connection with at least 500kbit/s to use it.

The quality was… okay… but I noticed a few dropouts from time to time. That’s not surprising as Zattoo is based on Peer2Peer technology: Your machine will re-stream parts of the content back into the net.

Go ahead and give Zattoo.com a try. But always keep in mind:

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985

Manchmal ist es doch so einfach:
Zum Sprit sparen einfach mal ins Ausland fahren…

Gefunden auf Spiegel Online

Nine Inch Nails released their new album “The Slip” for free. Licensed under a creative commons licence. Various formats are available — including 320kB/s MP3s.

You can request a download link on their site by leaving your email-address or you just get that .torrent (legally!). Artwork included.

In her new book “The Shock Doctrine — The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” Naomi Klein (author of “No Logo”) argues that in times when a society is at shock, savvy politicians and industry leaders use this situation to push through new laws and policies that would never have passed in normal times.

Only a crisis — actual or percieved — produces real changeMilton Friedman

Examples are outsourcing the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater after September 11., granting iraqs oil reserves to Shell and BP, and selling beaches to tourist resorts after the tsunami in Southeast Asia swept away the fishermens huts.

Alfonso Cuarón — director of “Children of Men” and some other remarkable movies — made a companion short film. It’s worth watching.

The books website kann be found here.

Every current television show is available on BitTorrent and most of the .torrent's are syndicated via RSS-feeds. TVShows was a great application that hid all the RSS stuff and allowed easy show subscription with some mouse clicks.

Regrettably it doesn't function any longer, as it is blocked by its feeder tvrss.netbut I don't know exactly why. For some people -- like me -- it stopped working, for others it's still working fine. .
What follows after the break is a tutorial on how to restore that functionality with some freely available tools. This article is written for users of OS X Leopard, but it should apply to Linux as well.