brave [little] meme

So, you have a Mac, you like XBMC, but you’ve been frustrated by the application’s lack of extensive support for your Harmony universal remote. Well, mope no more.

A new version of XBMC’s remote helper application has been made available. Although unlikely to see the light of day in XBMC’s upcoming Babylon release, the new helper is relatively easy to install by following the simple instructions below.

I have tested this on my MacBook Pro/Harmony One setup running the latest XBMC SVN and it works as advertised. I’s highly recommend the new helper to any Harmony user.

To get your Harmony working in XBMC:

- Add a new device mapping in your Logitech software for Media Center PC > Plex > Plex Player.

- Download the new new XBMCHelper

- Run Activity Monitor and kill the XBMCHelper process if it’s running

- Find your XBMC application in your Applications folder, right click, and “Show Package Contents.” 

- Replace /Application/XBMC.app/Contents/Resources/XBMC/tools/osx/XBMCHelper with the new version.

- Type this in Terminal: “chmod +x /Applications/XBMC.app/Contents/Resources/XBMC/tools/osx/XBMCHelper.”

- In XBMC, ensure AppleRemote is enabled and set to “Standard” (Settings->System->AppleRemote)

- Download an updated Keymap.xml and copy it to ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/userdata/.

Run XBMC once and you should be good to go! You may need to disable/enable the remote under Settings to get it to kick in, but after that you should be able to launch XBMC by pressing the Menu key on your Harmony, and navigate the application with full page up/page down support, play/stop/pause, info and custom shortcuts.

You can find the related thread on the XBMC forums here.

BitTorrent: bane of the media industries, press darling extraordinaire, and the single most successful file sharing protocol in existence. But is it really the best way to get what you want?

I stopped using BitTorrent for my downloading needs years ago, frustrated with the persistent throttling, unreliability of content, and the culture surrounding some private trackers. When I started exploring Usenet as an alternative however, I had to wade through a lot of conflicting information before honing down an ideal solution. Now, I’ve decided to post a simple guide to setting it up - so you can be up and running in no time.

What is Usenet?

Usenet is one of the oldest computer communication systems widely in use, pre-dating the World Wide Web. All you need to know is that it’s an excellent and extremely efficient way to access content, but if you want more information, there’s always wikipedia.

What’s so good about it?

- It can be very, very fast. When properly set up, it will take advantage of all your download bandwidth, 100% of the time. 

- It has a staggering amount of content (both sanctioned and otherwise).

Ok, What do I need to get going?

There are three key components to a good Usenet setup:

1) A Usenet Provider - Your ISP may well offer Usenet newsgroup access for free, or you can look here for a list of free news servers, but if you’re willing to pay in the region of $12.99 a month, newshosting.com and giganews.com are the most popular. When choosing a provider, look out for a decent ‘retention rate,’ from 90 days up. The higher the retention rate, the longer a file is kept on the servers before getting rid of it.

2) An Index -  A place to find .nzb files, which are the usenet equivalent of .torrent files in the BitTorrent world. I recommend newzbin.com, although free alternatives like newzleech.com, binsearch.info and tvnzb.com are available.

3) A Client - I use the amazing sabnzbd+, for mac, linux and windows XP. Just install it, configure it with your provider’s details from (1), feed it .nzb files from (2), and it does the rest. With a bit of tweaking you can even set it to automatically download from RSS, rename and sort all your content automatically, and much more.

In no time at all, you’ll be set up with one-click downloads for just about anything you want. Just make sure to keep it legal ;)

UPDATE: Here is a link to a thread over at the sabnzbd forums with a long list of free news servers. [link]