I wrote a script in perl using youtube-dl, and ffmpeg to parse the music video links from Regen Magazine, download them from youtube and transcode them from .flv to .mpg. I've got crontab to run it every Thursday in the middle of the night so I can build up my music video collection. Click here. Email me if you can golf it down, which I'm sure is not too hard.

I've been playing a lot of Fifa soccer for the PS3. It's pretty cool. You can render your own face in the game and score goals with all your favourite players. The manager mode allows you to make player transfers, change tactics and send out your scouting team etc. The only other game that I own is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 which is also excellent. Click this for an absolutely hilarious trailer from The Onion for Modern Warfare 3.

I'm also looking at building a new system for playing media which means I'm looking at selling my D-Link DSM 750 wireless media extender. If you want to watch movies from your computer on your TV, this system is a low cost alternative to buying a whole new computer. $125 US + shipping. If you're in Edmonton, I'll even set it up for you. Email me if you're interested.

TV recommendations:

• Sons of Anarchy - SOA is to bikers as Sopranos was to mafiosos.
• Hung - Schoolteacher becomes gigolo. Pretty freakin' funny.
• Breaking Bad - Schoolteacher becomes meth dealer.

So I finally bought a Playstation 3. It's such a waste of time and I have so many other productive pursuits that I was afraid of spending the precious few hours staring blankly at a screen. But I heard so much about Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 that I broke down and bought one on Kijiji for $200. I wasn't wrong about it being a waste of time, but at least I can count some of the hours wasted at COD "socializing" since I can play with a couple of my good friends online. And with the el cheapo bluetooth headset I bought (which is still a better deal than the ps3 one), I can even talk with them while we're playing.

I tried to do something with the PS3 to make it a better wireless media player but I found it lacking. The PS3 doesn't play VIDEO_TS folders, or *.iso files either and even worse, it doesn't play *.mkv files natively. I was able to set up transcoding on the fly but it wasn't HD quality. What's the point of having an HD TV if your player can't play x264? Then I decided to try installing xbmc on the ps3, similar to a friend's setup with a quad-core desktop.

Xbmc does have a kick-ass interface and from what I understand it plays everything, but it doesn't run on the ps3. I successfully installed psubuntu on the system, although I had a lot of problems with the wireless. In the end, my workaround was to just disable wireless in the network manager applet then re-enable it. I did not find a workaround for xbmc though. There is no xbmc in the psubuntu repository, and compiling from source didn't work. From what I can tell, xbmc has a nvidia driver dependency, which is of course restricted and no one has, or likely ever will, built it for psubuntu. Not that it would work very well anyway. I found that most of the videos I ran either with vlc or totem were choppy and didn't play properly on full resolution. I think it's because of the low amount of RAM available, as per the psubuntu's website.

I think the best way forward is just to buy a dual-core with an HDMI output on the video card and wireless and a remote control plugged into the usb. Then I'd install ubuntu, disable the desktop environment and only load xbmc. Now if anyone has a dual core desktop they'd like to part with for $200 let me know.

For anyone that thinks soccer is a sissy sport, I'd like to introduce you to the "Old Firm" fixture between Rangers and Celtic in the Scottish Premiere League. For the uninitiated, these two teams are both in Glasgow, and have rabid support based along secular lines. If you're Roman Catholic you support Celtic. If you're Protestant, you support Rangers. Between the two, they pretty much monopolize the lead of the Scottish Premiere League table so it's not surprising that 100 years of competition, fueled by the very divisive religion issue, have fostered a healthy rivalry. Actually, the teams and supporters HATE one another. The matches are as early as possible to prevent the rival factions from spending too much time in the pub and punching the living shite out of each other before each match.

Each season, the teams play each other at least three times each season and every single time it's like the last game each side will ever play. This past weekend did not disappoint. It was a hard-tacklin', heids smashin', bloody, dirty grinder of a match and it reminded me why the SPL is so much better than watching the prima donas in the EPL or the continental leagues rolling around on the pitch like they've just been shot by a high calibre round from the stands every time another player bumps them. I'm still trying to download it from the newsgroups so I post the highlights here. Then, when I hear the typical North American gripe about how soccer players are pansies, I'll direct them to the SPL and the Old Firm fixutre.

Both the English Premiere League and the Scottish Premiere league start today. Thankfully, Setanta's issues in the UK seem to have no bearing on the coverage here, so I can still get six matches a weekend: 3 on Setanta on Sat; 1 on Sportsnet on Sat; 1 on Setanta on Sun; and one on the Score on Sun.

For those who haven't discovered it, check out Betfair in the links. They won't take US punters because of the Unlawful Online Gambling Enforcement Act and the Wire Act. Essentially, the US has prosecuted foreign gambling houses for accepting bets from the US under this legislation, and Credit Card companies have banned gambling sites from using their services. But in Canada there's nothing illegal about betting online if the site is not domestic. Setting up an online Gambling site within Canada is prohibited by provincial law, but there is no law prohibiting using an online foreign Gambling site, like Betfair in the UK.

Betfair is peer to peer betting so the odds you receive are much better than you'd ever get from a bookmaker. You upload funds from paypal or your credit card, select your wager (over/under, match odds, correct score etc) and set your stake (minimum $6) and odds. As soon as someone takes your wager you're off. This system ensures that the odds are as close as possible to the true odds. Betfair makes their money by charging a commission (up to 5%) to the winner and by the sheer volume of bets up to tens of million of pounds during a single event.

So here are some hints for novices:

1. Check bookmakers odds using an oddschecker site like the link at right, then set your odds a couple of decimal points higher.
2. Arbitage bet. For football, select "lay all" and set your odds for each outcome to mitigate your risk. Potentially, you can make money no matter what the outcome but this only happens on obscure markets like UFC.
3. Avoid backing an outcome with long odds. This is where the odds will deviate the most from the true odds. On the other hand if you want to take the risk, put a couple grand in your account and lay outcomes on markets like "correct score". This is where you'll make the most money.

My home studio is now fully functional... finally. I couldn't install Hardy from the live disk because the keyboard didn't work, midi didn't work in my Intrepid realtime kernel and the Jaunty realtime kernel was über crashy -- hanging every twenty minutes or so and requiring a hard restart. Instead of waiting for the karmic release, I decided to go for broke and compile my own custom kernel, which wasn't nearly as daunting as it sounds.

First, I downloaded the 2.6.29-5 kernel image and headers from here and the matching realtime patch for the kernel here into /usr/src/ as root (type sudo su into a terminal). I changed directories into /usr/src and extracted the kernel archive with the command "tar xjvf linux-2.6.29.5.tar.bz2", created a symbolic link called linux with the command "ln -s linux-2.6.29.5 linux" and changed directories into /usr/src/linux/. Then I patched the kernel with the command "bzip2 -dc /usr/src/patch-2.6.29.5-rt22.bz2 | patch -p1". Then I cleaned up the build directory, copied my old config file into the kernel root directory with "make clean && cp /boot/config-'uname-r' ./.config" and opened the config dialogue with "make menuconfig". The only things I configured for the kernel were:

• Changed to full preemption in general setup
• Changed timing to 1000
• Disabled the Xen/paravirtualization stuff in Processor type and features (I found the kernel wouldn't compile otherwise)

Since I had to kill pulseaudio to get sound to work before I had compiled the new kernel, I figured that was the culprit. I was able to make pulse functional (apps wouldn't freeze when there was a sound event) using this thread, but I still couldn't hear anything. Now this is where the magic happened: I updated to Jaunty from Intrepid and voila! Everything worked! I don't know what the problem was with the kernel before, but it's hummin' now. Zero xruns, jack, midi, no crashes (fingers crossed) and my sound works fine. So the moral of the story is -- if you're not afraid to get your hands dirty and potentially upgrade or completely reinstall ubuntu, then compiling your own kernel isn't really as bad as it sounds. Here are the sites I used to figure all this crap out:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1145880
• http://izanbardprince.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/how-to-fix-ubuntu-jaunty-warning-hacks-ahead/
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Kernel/Compile#AltBuildMethod
• http://www.howtoforge.com/kernel_compilation_ubuntu
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6998420

I took a few major steps in building my home studio with linux as the OS – and I’ve run into a couple major hurdles. I found the installation of my new M-Audio Delta 66 soundcard to be relatively painless. I did research first to ensure it would work and it worked pretty much out of the box. The Omnibox that I bought with it worked pretty well too. Ubuntu Studio has drivers installed by default and a mixer that works really well to route the signals. It took me a little while to figure out that I had the wrong volume sliders turned all the way down but after that it worked really well. I was able to use Ardour to route the signal from my guitar or mic out to an external effects box, sample audio from movies, manipulate recorded .wav files using Rezound etc.

My heartache came when I tried using my new keyboard as a midi trigger. It worked fine in Windows but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get a signal to register in any of the three softsynths I tried (Qsynth, Zynaddsubfx, or Alsa Modular Synth) or the two diagnostic programs I tried (aseqdump or kmidimon). I finally realized that my problem wasn’t the hardware, jack or the midi interface – it was the kernel. I knew the Intrepid kernel was buggy, but I hadn’t had any significant problems until now, except for the system hanging every time I tried to power down (which wasn’t that much of a problem because I rarely power down). This is a major problem. I want to use my keyboard to trigger softsynths but when I boot into the generic kernel I get an xrun every few second. I am loathe to reinstall Hardy since I just downgraded to Intrepid from a terrible Jaunty experience. I guess all I can do is hope that they fix the real time kernel in Karmic Koala. Or… use Windows?