When I saw this clip, I gained that much more respect for those who take the years needed to train to be masters in their arts.

This is awesome! According to an Apple Support page, a small number of 5th Gen iPods have shipped with the RavMonE.exe virus. The best part of the article is how Apple blames Windows for this.

As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.

Only Apple could get away with something like this.

For a few months now, I’ve been making better use of my USB flash drive. Instead of just keeping files on it, I’ve started using portable apps from portableapps.com.

Portable apps are apps that you store and run directly from your usb drive. They don’t require any installation, and they don’t leave any trace (passwords, cached files, etc…) on the host computer.

So, if you’re not permitted to install any software on your pc at work, you can use your usb key to run Firefox, Thunderbird, Filezilla, Putty, Gaim, or a number of other open source applications without breaking the rules.

By running Firefox as a portable app, I have access to the bookmarks I need, as well as the passwords stored in the password manager. With the portable version of Gaim, I can log into my MSN/Yahoo accounts without having to modify settings on the host computer.

Since I almost always have my usb key with me, I always have the tools I need when I use a new computer. It’s definitely a time-saver for me.

I’ve been using a web-based torrent manager called TorrentFlux-b4rt for the past few weeks. It’s a great script that allows me to manage my downloads from any computer with an internet connection. Also, I can place a torrent file in a folder on the server and TorrentFlux will pick it up and start downloading it right away.

One great feature of TorrentFlux is that I can keep track of torrent rss feeds right there in the web interface. So, I can check the rss feed each morning, and just click on the tv shows I want to download. This is great, except I want my tv shows to download automatically over night without my intervention.

Unfortunately there was no way to do this in TorrentFlux and I didn’t want to dig into the code to figure out how to make this happen, so I decided to write a Perl script to do the job for me. It took me a while to get into the language (I’ve never used it before), and I had to figure out how to parse XML files, but once I was done I had a great script that would look through an rss feed for my tv shows and automatically download them for me.

There seemed to be a bit of interest in the TorrentFlux community for this kind of functionality, so I packaged it up under the GPL license, and posted it in the forums. I have a copy of TFRSS here as well.