Windows Linux Mac Tips » mac

Turn Your Computer into a DVR with Ted:Torrent Episode Downloader

Michael — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:48:31 +0000

I can’t afford the DVR my cable company offers. Plain and simple. Even if I could afford it, I wouldn’t be willing to pay for it. It just costs too much money. As a busy student and TV addict, I would often have to choose between watching that new episode of my favorite TV show or studying and doing homework. Of course you can always watch the rerun, which usually shows during that next weekend, but I want to watch my shows when I want to watch them. Ted solves this problem for me. Ted is an automatic TV show downloader. Enter in your favorite TV shows and when that new episode airs, Ted starts searching the internet for a torrent of it. Ted will automatically download the torrent file and even pass it on to your bittorrent client. Here’s a quick overview of some of the features of Ted.

To use Ted, you need will to:

1.) Download Ted here for Windows, Linux, and Mac versions. (This link downloads version 0.971, go to http://www.ted.nu/ to see if there are newer versions)

2.) Have a bittorent client installed. If you don’t already have one, here are a few options:

I use both Transmission and Deluge. They are both great programs. I have never used Azureus or uTorrent, but I have heard good things about them. This is by no means a complete list of bittorent clients. You can use whatever client you prefer.

**If you want to automatically download TV shows, follow this guide to Ted and set your bittorrent client to always download to a specific directory.

Now, once you’ve downloaded and installed Ted, open up Ted and you should see:

The first thing to do is to edit the preferences. In Teds main window go to Extra (top left) then ‘Preferences’. Here you will see:

Here you can specify how often you search for episodes. I keep it at 60 minutes myself. Keep a note of the download directory, this is where Ted saves the .torrent files that will be loaded into your bittorrent client. If you have the ‘Open in default bittorrent client checked’ it should load the torrents automatically, but if it doesn’t, you can set most bittorrent clients to automatically import files in a specific directory. Just find that setting in your bittorrent client and set it for the same directory Ted downloads to.

The ‘Look and Feel’ tab at the top will show:

Here you can set whether Ted runs on startup or not, shows alerts, and allows logging. I definitely recommend you keep logging turned on because the logs may come in handy some time.

The ‘Advanced’ tab shows:

You can stop Ted from downloading certain file types; this is where you would want to put that information. Of course you can remove these standard ‘do not download’ file types, but I don’t like dealing with .zip or .rar so I keep them in there.

Click Save and return to Teds main window.

Now you need to add a show. Click ‘Add a show’.

The Add a show screen lists quite a few shows. Click one and on the right a tv.com summary will show up. Here you can choose to download starting with the next newest episode, the last episode that aired, or a custom episode. Once you’ve selected a show, click ‘Add’ in the bottom right. Don’t worry if your show isn’t on the list, just click ‘Add a custom show’ at the bottom and enter your show’s info.

Your show should now be in Teds main window (as you can see I’ve added the show Top Gear):

Now you will want to edit some of the preferences. Just select your show in the above window, right click and then click edit.

The General edit window will appear:

This is where you can edit the title of the show and which season and episode to look for next. If you were to select Season 1 episode 1 in the case of Top Gear, ted will try and find Season 1 episode 1, then try and find Season 1 episode 2 and so on. If an episode is not found by Ted, however, it will not move to the next episode until that episode is found. So if it can’t find episode 2, it will not continue to episode 3 until it has found episode 2 (unless you go to this screen and manually tell it to search for episode 3).

To add feeds, click the ‘Feeds’ at the top. You will see a window like this:

As you can see Ted has already populated 2 feeds for Top Gear. Unfortunately, mininova no longer offers TV shows, so you can remove that feed. Just click it and then click the minus sign at the bottom.

To add a feed, click the plus sign at the bottom:

You can choose from any of these and have it automatically add the feed for your particular show. I recommend putting in as many feeds as you can. There is no limit, and Ted will just download from the first one it can. Click ‘user defined’ to add a feed from a torrent site not shown in this list.

Now click Filters:

Here you can edit the minimum and maximum size of the video file. Any show that’s runs for 30 mins will usually be around the 300mb size, so choose a minimum of 150mb and a maximum of 500mb. Any show that runs for an hour, could be around 300-800 mb, so choose the minimum to be around 250mb and the maximum to be around 1000mb. If you specifically want HD content, click ‘Download in HD quality’ at the bottom and significantly increase my recommended minimum and maximum sizes.

I would recommend you use the following snippet of code in the Keywords block to stop Ted from downloading unrelated or private torrents:

(!(www | lol | com | net | org | cx | cc | leech | torrent | nova | bay | bit))

If you click Schedule at the top, you will see:

Don’t forget to click ‘Save’.

Once you have a few shows listed in Ted, on Teds main window, click edit and then click ‘Edit all shows…’

Here you can edit values for all of your shows at once.

You should now be setup to automatically download your favorite TV shows.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Fetch Art for iTunes 2.0 (Mac Monday)

Michael — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 05:00:30 +0000

Ever since iTunes allowed the cover flow option in iTunes I’ve wanted an easy way of getting all of my album art together. Luckily I found this program for Mac users.

Fetch Art is a little utility program that does what the name implies: fetch your album art. It essentially uses Amazons XML interface to find the album art to match the info already in your iTunes library. The program is controlled through the iTunes script menu. It allows you to preview album art it finds so that you can make sure it’s the correct picture. Here’s a little screenshot:

thanks to Macupdate.com for the picture

Click here to download

Instant Dictionary Lookup (Mac Monday)

Eric — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:06:21 +0000

Have you ever been reading an email or surfing the net and come across a word you wanted to lookup, but didn’t because it takes too much time? Even with Dictionary widgets and websites like Dictionary.com it still takes too long to have to copy and paste the word or wait on the internet.

So, I have the solution for you Mac users out there. This quick little tip will allow you to lookup the definition of any word in any Mac native program (Coco). The best part is the Dictionary application does NOT need to be open or even running in the background.

All you need to do is hold down Control+Command+D with your mouse hovering over the word you wish to lookup. You can even continue to hold down the keyboard shortcut and move the mouse from one word to another. The dictionary description will automatically update for each word.

If you are not sure what programs this will work with, here is a small list: Safari, Mail, TextEdit, Text Wrangler, Comic Life, iWeb and some other native Mac programs.

However, this shortcut will NOT work with programs that are not written in Coco. So even your favorite programs like Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera, Camino and Flock wont work with this shortcut.

Use Your Mac as an Alarm Clock (Mac Monday)

Michael — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:00:30 +0000

Are you a college student like me who has a different schedule every day?

While I’m usually pretty good about setting my alarm clock for the right time, it doesn’t hurt to have a backup plan. I have come across a nice piece of software every student Mac owner should have.

Aurora is an alarm clock that runs on your Mac. It even integrates with iTunes on your Mac. You can set an alarm that goes off at a different time for every day if you want.

Want to sleep in on the weekend, but afraid you might forget to set your alarm for that 8am class on Monday? Aurora solves that problem. But what if your Mac is asleep? Or the volume is muted? Aurora will wake your computer and even unmute it if it has to.

Aurora even has a fade in option to ease you out of that deep sleep if you’re into that sort of thing.

Thanks to versiontracker.com for the images.

The newest version of Aurora costs 15 EUR at the project’s homepage. Of course there is a 14 day trial period before you have to buy a license. There is even a 20% (3 EUR) student discount.

However, if you would like to try an older version of Aurora for free, here is the download link.

How to Invert Colors On Your Screen (Mac Monday)

Michael — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:00:58 +0000

Why on earth would you want to invert your colors on your Mac? Well, what if you’re on an airplane, it’s a night flight and you’re looking at something that has a lot of white space. You might be able to decrease the brightness on your screen, but sometimes that may not even work. If that’s the case, you can essentially make a negative of your screen. Here’s how to do it:

Just press Ctrl-Option-Cmd-8 on your keyboard. This will change it back as well.

Here’s what my home page usually looks like:

This is it’s negative:

How to See Boot Up Text (Mac Monday)

Michael — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 05:30:32 +0000

If you have ever used a Linux system you probably have seen the boot up text (aka verbose mode). The boot up text can be quite informative if you’re having hardware or system problems when you boot up. Or the boot up text can look kinda cool and make you feel like you’re in one of those old school green screen computer movies.

Whichever reason you choose, you can see the boot up text on your nice shiny Mac. The text has been running behind that splash screen of yours all along.

Why even bother with a splash screen? So that all those people who have no idea how to use a computer will not run away before they ever get to a login screen (and because it looks nicer). So here’s how to see the boot up text:

While your Mac is booting up, press: Command + V.

That’s it! It will only show you the boot text on that boot up; so if you like that splash screen of yours, don’t worry, it will come back the next time you start your computer.

TIP: If you want to keep the boot up text, run the following command in the terminal:

sudo nvram boot-args=”-v”

Images taken from the following sites respectively:
http://blog.igorminar.com/
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/

Playing poker on a mac is simple, easy and quick. Visit the Mac Poker guide to learn how to get the most of your online poker experience on a mac.

WWDC Coverage (Mac Monday)

Kyle — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:37:06 +0000

Less than 24 hours stand between now and the highly anticipated Keynote presentation from Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California.

Apple’s WWDC kicks off with this presentation at 10:00 A.M. PT June 9th and runs through the 13th in which development for OS X Leopard and OS X iPhone are expected to be the main focus.

Additionally, many believe the introduction of the new 3G iPhone will occur during Jobs’ Keynote presentation while the possible introduction of a new product may occur.

Check back later today and throughout the rest of the coming week for coverage of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. As new developments occur WLM Tips will provide coverage of news and/or new product descriptions.

Image taken from www.macrumors.com

Playing poker online used to be limited to those with PCs or some sort of virtual machine, but now mac users everywhere can play poker on their Mac on many different online poker sites.”

How to Rip DVDs to Your iPod Using HandBrake (Mac Monday)

Eric — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:30:10 +0000

This post will show you how to rip DVDs so you can watch them on your iPod/iPhone. Michael wrote a similar post on How to use DVD Decrypter for Windows.

1) Download and install HandBrake. If you download version 0.9.2 you must be running Leopard. If you are using Tiger or older, you should download 0.9.1

2) Place the DVD you wish to rip into your DVD drive and open HandBrake. If your computer tries to play the DVD automatically, close the program so that only HandBrake is accessing the DVD.

3) Click the Source button in the top left corner. Then choose the your DVD drive and click Open. At this point HandBrake will begin to scan the DVD. This could take a couple minutes.

4) Click the drop down box next to Title and choose the longest title if you wish to copy the entire DVD (this does not apply to Episode based DVDs).

5) The default Destination is the Desktop. Change this to wherever you wish to save the DVD file.

6) If the presets are not already displayed on the right side of the window, click the Toggle Presets button in the upper right corner to display them.

7) For the iPhone and iPod Touch you should choose iPhone / iPod Touch.

If you have an iPod video or iPod classic and want high resolution (much larger file size, good for 160GB versions) choose iPod High-Rez.

Lastly, if you have an iPod Video or iPod classic and want smaller files (good for 80GB versions) choose iPod Low-Rez.

If these presets aren’t quite what you are looking for, check the troubleshooting at the bottom of the article.

TIP: For better quality, choose 2-pass encoding. This will take longer to encode but will look better.

8.) Click the Audio & Subtitles tab. Here you should choose the language you prefer under “Track 1:”. Also, be sure to set Subtitles to None. The Sample rate should be between 32 and 48 while the Bitrate should be set between 112 and 160.

9) At this point you should be ready to begin ripping your DVD. Click Start to begin.

10) Once your DVD is finished ripping all you need to do is add it to your iTunes library (or whatever iPod manager you use) and then transfer it to your iPod.

Troubleshooting
If you have trouble with the video and audio settings from the presets, you should try the following settings instead. These settings are more strict and should work on any iPod with video capabilities.

File format: MP4 file
Codecs: MPEG-4 Video/AAC Audio
Average bitrate (kbps): 700 (again lower numbers mean less quality and smaller files)
Check 2-pass encoding
Picture settings -> set Width: 320 and the height will auto adjust to something close to 240 (will be lower for widescreen movies)

Once you find the settings that work the best for you, you can save them as a custom preset.

For more information on how to use HandBrake take a look at these websites:
How to Rip a Move for your iPod with HandBrake v0.9.0
How to Rip a TV show for your iPod with HandBrake
HandBrake Documentation

MacPoker.net is a new but comprehensive mac online poker guide. It has poker site reviews for ‘PokerStars’ mac poker client, along with many other poker sites and general poker articles.

Save a bit of text the easy way (Mac Monday)

Michael — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:57:39 +0000

I know this is a short tip, but I thought it was pretty cool (and useful).

Have you ever wanted to save a bit of text from a website? In Windows you would have to highlight the text, right click, open a document, and paste it in. In Mac however, all you need to do is highlight the text and then drag the text over to the desktop. It will create a document and save your text in it automatically.

For all you Linux users out there; this tip works for you too! (It saves your text in a file called ‘dropped text.txt)

Transform XP to Look Like Mac OS X (Windows Wednesday)

Michael — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:33:47 +0000

Do you use Windows XP? Do you like the look and feel of a Mac? Have you ever considered making your Windows PC look like a Mac? FlyakiteOSX is a program that helps you do this.

“The installer simply automates the process of replacing critical system files, setting registry tweaks, and installing extras such as cursors, sounds, visual styles, etc. FlyakiteOSX DOES NOT contain any spyware or ad-ware of any kind. All files needed for FlyakiteOSX are stored in the Windows directory in a folder named ‘FlyakiteOSX’ that is hidden by default. All registry values for FlyakiteOSX are written to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\FlyakiteOSX.”

The program is pretty safe, but it does make some system file tweaks so things could go wrong. Luckily, when you install the program it offers to make a system restore point so that if things were to go wrong you can easily fix it!

This is what your computer will look like after you install flyakiteosx

Click here to download — be sure to click the normal link to download it

Give flyakiteosx a try, if you like it, then keep it. If you don’t like it, you can uninstall the program and get things back to the way they were by just uninstalling it (through add/remove programs).

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Windows Linux Mac Tips » mac

Turn Your Computer into a DVR with Ted:Torrent Episode Downloader

Related Posts

Fetch Art for iTunes 2.0 (Mac Monday)

Related Posts

Instant Dictionary Lookup (Mac Monday)

Related Posts

Use Your Mac as an Alarm Clock (Mac Monday)

Related Posts

How to Invert Colors On Your Screen (Mac Monday)

Related Posts

How to See Boot Up Text (Mac Monday)

Related Posts

WWDC Coverage (Mac Monday)

Related Posts

How to Rip DVDs to Your iPod Using HandBrake (Mac Monday)

Related Posts

Save a bit of text the easy way (Mac Monday)

Related Posts

Transform XP to Look Like Mac OS X (Windows Wednesday)

Related Posts