I’m a design whore, there’s no denying it, I have to be, there’s no other reason anyone in their right mind would have stuck by Apple through all the years had they not have been (it most certainly wasn’t their PowerPC processing ceiling I assure you), and for me Bang & Olufsen (B&o) are the Apple of the home entertainment world. Many people will call it overpriced (which lets be honest it kinda is) and internally its technical capabilities aren’t as good as what you may be able to find for cheaper but fuck me if it isn’t the sexiest looking hi-fi gear around town.
Today B&o announced their first foray in to the burgeoning 3D TV world. The BeoVision 4-85 is an 85 inch behemoth plasma based (yes they still prefer plasma over LCD colour recreation – and rightly so) that incorporates the BeoLab 10 centre speaker and apparently 3D. Their press release doesn’t go in to great technical detail nor provide pricing (expect over A$70k) information but expect more info post its official release in Moscow tomorrow. In the mean time take a look at the BeoVision 4-85′s currently available cousin the BeoVision 4-103 (that’s 103 inches weighing 500kg folks) to get an idea of what she’ll look like.
To own a piece of B&o equipment is to adopt a child, in that buying one of their lavish devices may well cost you the same as a child does until they leave home at 18, trust me I’ve owned a CD player they make (and you’ll see in almost any Hollywood film with an office or decadent home) the BeoSound 9000 and I took out a loan! Mind you I was crazy and 21 at the time; but you do these things… don’t you?
In case you weren’t aware the newest season of AMC’s Mad Men hits American TVs this coming Sunday, the 25th of July. I have to admit that I was a late comer to the show having only started to watch the first season less than a month ago. Three weeks after watching my first episode I’d finished the three currently available seasons and was sitting on edge waiting for more!
And to celebrate the new season’s start the guys at Funny or Die have given us the second installment of “MA Men”, a Mad Men spoof based in Boston Massachusetts (MA).
For the unfamiliar TVShows is a fantastic (and more importantly free) application that does a wonderful job of monitoring a series of RSS feeds and downloading the latest torrent for your beloved TV shows.
Up until recently TVShows would run in the background checking tvRSS.net for new torrents at a predetermined interval, downloading a new episode’s torrent if there was one to collect. Unfortunately that was until about a month or two ago when all of a sudden it seemed that nothing was being retrieved anymore even though it was sitting there plain as day on tvRSS.net.
Not knowing what was going on, and not having a clue when it comes to Ruby programming I jumped into the SourceForge forum and found that I wasn’t the only one having the problem. It seems (although it’s not confirmed) that tvRSS.net has decided to block the application from connecting to the site and scanning it for new episode information. Fortunately, and full credit goes to the forum here, those wiley geeks have found a way around this and will have you downloading torrents again faster than you can say “sesquipedalian“.
Here’s how you do it…
Open up the main guts of TVShows in your favourite text editor. The file you want is:
“/Users/[your username]/Library/Application\ Support/TVShows/TVShowsScript/TVShows.rb”
At line 172 you’ll see: (this is all on 1 line, just in case your browser has wrapped it) rawEpisodes = SimpleRSS.parse(open(FEED % @exactName,”User-Agent”=>”TVShows/#{@preferences['PREFS_SCRIPTVERSION']}”))
Change this to: rawEpisodes = SimpleRSS.parse(open(FEED % @exactName,”User-Agent”=>”Apple-PubSub/65.1″))
Save the file and you’re done. You might have to reboot to restart the daemon but I didn’t.
To give you a quick explanation of what’s actually being changed (as far as I can tell) is that we’re simply telling the tvRSS.net webserver that we’re actually using a Safari RSS reader instead of another application. Simple.
