If it’s true about Alex wanting to leave Diggnation, then Diggnation is dead. No really. Just Kevin sitting on a couch, with Glen and Prager? That’s not interesting. Alex’s retorts and spontaneous jokes (which sometimes are so spontaneous they don’t make sense) are what make that show interesting. They can’t get another co-host, because they just can’t afford to. They’d have to come from in house, and I’m not sitting thrugh 40 minutes of Martin Sargent.

Anyway, whilst I’m here. My ‘Freelance’ label in my gmail has never been more active. It’s quite intimidating. Priorities say I have to finish that website assignment first though. Well, first food, then website. I’ve decided on just using CC and GPL content to fill the pages. Perfectly legal, if a little lazy.

Prager, producer of Diggnation,  had a random guy just stumble into his apartment, use his bathroom, take his trousers off and try to go to sleep. Being a third generation news provider that he is, he decided to twitter and ustream it up. I saw that article on in Reader and thought “lol, some people are dumb”. Then realised that it was Prager (why isn’t his name headline news? that guy’s awesome) and lolz ensued and I was slightly less shocked.

Lifehacker found an awesome Greasemonkey script that keeps your place on long pages. (In fact Lifehacker didn’t find it, gHacks did but their website is ugly, I mean serious, more ad space than content.) I was actually just about to make a Firefox extension that allows you to click a place on a page which inserts a name link tag, so that you could then bookmark that. But since I’ve just found this, I guess it’ll do.

If you find that you do decide to read Watchmen, then you’ll be needing something like this comic book reader. Whilst I’m linking to comic book stuff, I rediscovered StopTazmo the other day, free manga for the win.

What phone does Elle use... Oh yeah.

Lost is one of the most expensively produce shows on Earth, maybe even the most expensive (the reason we’re not so much in Hawaii this year? because that was costing about half a million dollars each episode, probably more now). Heroes, Battlestar, and 24 are all probably ranking up there in the hundreds of thousands of pounds per episode too.

I’d be pretty annoyed if I was a network publisher and we weren’t capitalising from the ten and a half million people illegally watching TV by downloading it. Product placement must be worth more than traditional ads when trying to improve company image and recognition. Traditional ads are removed from every downloaded piece of TV I’ve ever seen, making the benefit to the advertisers zero. Whereas product placed adverts can’t be removed easily, and who would want to anyway? They’re not in the way. They rarely dilute the story. So all those millions of people are definitely going to see your business’ logo, which is what you wanted, right?

I expect that if they don’t incorporate those statistics into their pricing it’s because there’s no reliable statistics out there. ShowInsider grabs their data (I’m guessing) by monitoring how many seeds and peers a torrent has. That’s really not a very effective method that promises much accuracy. Some people hide their tracker data, they can’t be looking at data from private trackers, or just trackers that are too small to know about. There are a lot of fake seeders out there (MediaDefender-esk). Lost’s 1,700,000 downloads this week could easily be as little as a million or as great as three million. It’s just not possible to find out well.

Even if you do trust ShowInsider’s data, you still have absolutely no demographics on who’s downloading. It’s incredibly hard to find advertisers when you can’t tell them who’s watching your show (BMW don’t want be advertising to twelve year olds). I know that’s one of the reasons there was such a big overhaul in the distribution method over at Revision3.

Back in the day you used to be able to donate $5 a month (or however much, really) to get Diggnation earlier. What happened was that one guy donated teh $5 a month, ripped the video from the site, and posted it on his own, days before it was released to the general public on Rev3′s website. I don’t think Rev3 minded that so much (this was before there was advertising on their website) as it was all extra coverage for them, but the problem it lead to was who the hell was this extra coverage? Because they weren’t going to Rev3′s website they couldn’t poll them to find that information out.

That’s largely I suspect why things like Hulu and iPlayer exist now. ABC got annoyed with not having the demographics on their veiwers, so they decided to release their content in a way that they could. Piracy is so arrife because I can’t watch Hulu though…

My Firefox seems to be getting laggy. Extensive JavaScript and Flash ads make my iTunes jump. I know it’s nothing to do with Firefox, and is probably more to do with my laptop being in near constant use for the last year without ever having much maintenance upon it. So, I’m thinking maybe it’s time to start afresh. Not just with a new Windows XP reinstall, but with a whole new operating system.

I think I’m going to be switching to Debian, before I do though, I want to make sure I won’t lose any programs that’re vital to me. I thought here would be a good place to go through them and check for alternatives.

Firefox – Not a problem at all.

Google Chrome – Not out for Linux just yet, but I only really use it for the Incognito option, which I could get a Firefox addon for. (Though, I’m sure it was a feature Firefox was going to have built in.)

Luke uses Chrome too when he’s at mine, just so our cookies don’t clash when he goes to the same sites as me. But there are other browsers for Linux if he desperately wants his own space. (Gosh, how much like a couple do we sound? He gets his own browser on my laptop? That’s on par with giving someone their own drawer in geek terms.)

Flash – According t their website, Adobe support Linux. Shockwave isn’t support on Linux, but I’m not sure where I use Shockwave…

MSN – I’m not especially a hardcore MSN user. Official MSN isn’t available on Linux, but the only features I really require are being able to talk to other MSN people, able to group contacts, a display picture and personal message, and file transfer.

There are a tonne of MSN alternatives out there, like Pidgin. I used that before and was okay with it. Pidgin’ll also let me sign onto Google Talk which I use all the time. I’d much prefer to be using one application rather than the two I have at the moment.

If I find out Pidgin doesn’t work so well for me, I could use KMess which was the first result for “linux msn” and seems to have all the features I mentioned about.

uTorrent – Not for Linux, but does run on Wine. I’m a little turned off by the idea of running an application to run an application though. Some people have said that they sometimes notice a jump of performance when running on Wine compared to natively on Windows. I certainly didn’t see that when I tried to play WoW through Wine though.

There’s always BitTorrent (which I thought used uTorrent as a backend, but I guess not). Or even command line, which I’ve been happy using before.

iTunes – Damnitdamnitdamnit. I knew if I was going to run into a problem it’d be with this SUCKY ASS PIECE OF SHIT.

iTunes isn’t supported on Linux. Completely uninstallable. Wine can’t run iTunes well. That basically turns my iPod into a brick. A £214 brick, which plays outdated music and has a spare 10gig just kicking around. This is actually a show stopper, much like WoW was back when I used to play it and couldn’t run it on Wine.

Lemme go see what #xkcd and #debian have to say about this problem.

Apparently, Songbird has some iPod support. I’ll install Songbird on my XP install in a bit to check how it pans out. If it all goes horribly wrong, I can just resync from iTunes, not losing any music. Problem potentially overcome.

Last.fm scrobbling – Songbird supports this.

PuTTY – I feel a little bit stupid for actually going to Google to search for this. Linux has native SSH support.

WinSCP – Nautilus handles this. WinSCP obviously doesn’t.

Microsoft Office 2007 – Here’s where I get worried again. This is pretty vital. Open Office is not an alternative.

Wine seems to make most parts of Office usable, at least. Some problems with how it handles objects (which are fairly new to Office), but nothing show stopping. If I do find something overly tedious, I’ll just take a trip to the library.

Norton Antivirus – Nope. But I don’t think it’s really needed.

14:42 < shamess> Don't laugh at me for asking this. What'd y'all use for antivirus and firewall stuff on linux?
14:42 < grawity> shamess: Nothing, usually.
14:42 < shamess> I thought that'd be the answer. But really, nothing at all?
14:43 < grawity> Well, there *is* ClamAV for scanning files, and iptables as a firewall...but they're rarely needed
on home machines.

I guess I’ll take my chances.

Dropbox – I actually don’t use this so much, but will probably be using it more in the future now that I’m getting other people to start using it. It’s downloadable in Fedora and Ubuntu, which isn’t helpful. But #xkcd said that Ubuntu has pretty much the same inner workings as Debian, so it could run just fine. If not, it’s not a huge loss.

Laptop drivers – I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro A-100 series. There’s no real way of knowing which drivers will and won’t work, however I’m going to run from live CD and that should check drivers and stuff. Not a problem, hopefully. A guy installed Debian on the same laptop as I have, and seemed to work fine when he updated a wireless setting.

Video/audio codecs – This is me trying to think of everything that could possibly go wrong now. The internet thinks that all my current files will still be playable. MP3′s will definitely, so will AVIs. That’s all I have really…

mIRC – I’ve actually just started using irssi on my server, so I’m not too fussed about that at the moment.

Notepad++ – Wine support only (though, good support). I’m not very attached to it anyway. Maybe this’ll give me a chance to start using VIM properly.

GIMP 2 – Full Debian support.

WAMP server – Maybe it’s about time I grew up and installed my own Apache, PHP and MySQL. I do it fine on my server.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2007 – Damnit again! Why are these big companies so obsessed with locking you into their operating system? I just paid a tonne of money to get this damn IDE, you’re not going to make much money off me installing your operating system too.

Wine looks iffy on this. Can’t boot Windows from a USB device because it doesn’t like losing contact with it’s boot drive, which is something that happens with USB connections from time to time. Maybe next year we won’t be using Visual Studio so much (hopefully) and it won’t be sorely lost. Maybe. I’ll email David Smallwood about it.

Smart Shutdown – cron.

MagicDisk – Don’t even need an application to mount ISOs on Linux.

WinRAR – Built in commands.

Foxit Reader – Available in Linux.

Skype – Linux version available.

TortoiseSVN - SVN command.

Audacity – Linx version availiable.

It’ll be interesting to see what this looks like next year.

Onwards. In 2008, I frequently used the following websites or services:

• digg.com
• WordPress
• Google Talk
• GMail
• YouTube
• last.fm
• 4chan (though, permaban ftl)
• Google Reader
• Google Notebook
• Wikipedia

That’s pretty much the websites I bounce around…