Showing posts with label alternative media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alternative media. Show all posts
Friday, March 4, 2011
Monday, September 27, 2010
Surviving in a world of zombies: using podcast clients
This is the third article in my series "Surviving in a world of zombies" - you can get part one here and part two here. Today, I am going to touch upon yet another immensely useful computer based tool: a podcast client.
First, let me remind you what a podcast is. A podcast is some kind of video or audio recording, often of a show, which is made available for download. A podcast, also called a webcast, is sometimes streamed live at a specific moment in time, and subsequently made available for download.
The option most people use is to simply either sit in front of their computer when the show is aired, or they go to the website and watch a recorded show. All of which is fine if you only watch a couple of shows each day. But what if you want to check out 20 shows each day, and only download the ones which might be of interest to you? And how are you going to keep track of new shows? Some of them are weekly or daily shows, but some like Sibel Edmonds' "Boiling Frogs" do not have a regular schedule.
The solution to all that is a good podcast client.
I personally use and recommend gPodder, a free multi-system podcast client which runs on GUN/Linux, BSD, Nokia Maemo-based Internet Tablets, Mac OSX and even, yes, Windoze (is anybody reading my blog *still* using this?). You can download it here.
gPodder is so easy to use and so intuitive that I am not going to explain anything about its use. If you have read my previous two articles about how to survive in a word of zombies you know the principle: you look for a show you like, find the rss file or page which refers to "podcast" press control-L ("add new subscription via URL) and that's it. Just click on "preferences" to tell gPodder how often to check for new shows (my choice is every 360 minutes) and gPodder will automatically keep track of any new shows for you. When it finds something new, it will pop open a window for you and offer to either download the show, or mark is as "old" meaning "ignore henceforth".
Just like with an RSS reader, you can import and export an OPML file (basically, your subscription list). Mine is so short, I will simply post it here:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<opml version="2.0">
<head>
<title>
gPodder subscriptions
</title>
<dateCreated>
Mon, 27 Sep 2010 13:12:06 -0400
</dateCreated>
</head>
<body>
<outline text="Interviews of foreign policy experts, writers and activists." title="Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/antiwar-radio"/>
<outline text="Crossing The Line: Life in Occupied Palestine" title="Crossing The Line: Life in Occupied Palestine" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://ctl.libsyn.com/rss"/>
<outline text="A daily TV/radio news program, hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, airing on over 850 stations, pioneering the largest community media collaboration in the U.S." title="Democracy Now! Audio" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://www.democracynow.org/podcast.xml"/>
<outline text="Rewiring the American Regime" title="Electric Politics Podcast" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://www.electricpolitics.com/podcast/index.xml"/>
<outline text="Each Thursday we talk about Free Libre and Open Source Software with the people who are writing it. Part of the TWiT Netcast Network." title="FLOSS Weekly" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://leo.am/podcasts/floss"/>
<outline text="Free Speech Radio News daily half-hour newscast" title="FSRN - Free Speech Radio News - Newscast" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://fsrn.org/taxonomy/term/4/0/feed"/>
<outline text="Chris Cook" title="Gorilla Radio" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://www.gorilla-radio.com/podcast.php"/>
<outline text=""Guns & Butter" investigates the relationships among capitalism, militarism and politics. Maintaining a radical perspective in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, "Guns & Butter: The Economics of Politics" reports on who wins and who loses when the economic resources of civil society are diverted toward global corporatization, war, and the furtherance of a national security state.Produced and hosted by Bonnie Faulkner.E-mail Bonnie at blfaulkner@yahoo.com" title="Guns and Butter [KPFA 94.1 FM, Berkeley CA - kpfa.org]" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://kpfa.org/podcast/pod.php?show_id=34"/>
<outline text="Grassroots Non-Corporate Coverage of News and Events in the Palestine-Israel conflict." title="IMEMC Audio" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://www.imemc.org/podcast.xml"/>
<outline text="Open source talk with a serious attitude" title="Linux Outlaws" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/linuxoutlaws"/>
<outline text="Radio Project Front Page Podcast Sun, 26 Sep 2010 23:01:05 PDT" title="Radio Project Front Page Podcast" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://www.radio4all.net/podcast.xml"/>
<outline text="Open-publishing and aggregated audio content from across the global Indymedia network." title="radio.indymedia.org" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://radio.indymedia.org/en/rss.xml"/>
<outline text="" title="Sibel Edmonds' Boiling Frogs" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/?feed=podcast"/>
<outline text="Venezuela News, Views, and Analysis" title="Venezuela Analysis Audio Podcast" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://venezuelanalysis.com/audio/feed"/>
<outline text="Dedicated to exposing the official lie of September 11th, 2001" title="Visibility 9-11" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Visibility9-11"/>
</body>
</opml>
This is a mix of various podcast I like to keep an eye on. If you want, you can simply copy the file above, paste it into any text editor (Notepad for Windoze users) and save it under any name (Saker-podcastlist.opml is fine) and then import it into gPodder. I would like to single out a couple of subscriptions from this short list:
Bonnie Faulkner's "Guns and Butter": This weekly show is simply the best show in the USA, bar none. It is based in California, on the Pacifica radio network's KPFK radio station. The best of the best, I think.
George Kenny's "Electric Politics": George is a terrific guy and he invites very interesting guest, sometimes on non-political yet most interesting topics. Always a joy to listen to him.
Radio Project Front Page Podcast. This is basically a subscription to whatever shows up on this page: http://www.radio4all.net/. A huge collection of non-corporate radio news.
Visibility 9/11: the longest-running podcast for 9-11 Truth. This Australian show will keep you updated about news of the 9/11 Turth movement and plenty of good interviews.
gPodder can download both audio and video podcasts so, for example, you can download DemocracyNow! in either format, depending on whether you want to listen to it in your car or watch at home in front of your computer.
Lastly, the gPodder can synchronize the shows on your computer with whatever ogg or mp3 player you have. My personal recommendation is to avoid iPods and all the other Mac toys and get something solid, more versatile and of better quality. I use an excellent Cowon iAudio 7 and a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet (which is really a telephone size GNU/Linux computer). I am also very happy with my Nokia 5230 "Nuron" cellphone which I also use as my music player (and GPS).
Bottom line: a good podcast client like gPodder makes it easy to fetch plenty of excellent shows off the Internet which you can then listen to when driving, shopping, or working.
There is really no excuse to continue to expose yourself to the garbage heaped on you by the corporate media.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Using a news aggregator - conclusion: OPML file ready!
Dear friends,
This is the promised follow-up to my recent piece "Surviving in a world of zombies: using news aggregators". With the help of quite a few of you (thanks a lot to you all!!) and by continuing my never ending search for more alternative information sources I have compiled what I think is a decent list of alternative and/or quality information sources. As I mentioned it in my previous piece, these information sources are contained in a so-called OPML file which can be imported into an "rss news aggregator" or "news reader" (check my previous piece for an explanation of these terms).
Please click HERE to download this OPML file (this link will direct you to the website Mediafire.com and will initiate the download of a file named Sakerfeedlist-finalversion.opml
I want to repeat and stress something important here: do not not in any way 'endorse' the information sources I compiled into this file. In fact, I have included some information sources which I do not endorse at all, but which I have found to contain valuable information as even reading the "enemy's" literature can, at times, be very important.
I would also like to add that if you are using GNU/Linux (as I hope you all do, "corporate IT" or "capitalist IT" being as bad as anything corporate or capitalist inevitably is) and if you are using Liferea as a news aggregator, I recommend that you get a recent version of this very good software (at least version 1.6.2) as the search function has been vastly improved.
By big frustration with my OPML file and with all the news aggregators I have tried is that I found no way to arrange my almost 300 news sources in alphabetical order. That can be a real pain because it makes even a trivial task such as searching for double/redundant subscriptions difficult.
IF ANY OF YOU CAN WRITE AN APPLICATION OR A SCRIPT (awk, Perl, Python - whatever) CAPABLE OF DOING THIS PLEASE CONTACT ME. Please keep in mind that my OPML file includes English, Russian, French, German, and Spanish language information sources and that the file is full of XML tags.
I urge you to try out a news aggregator. Now that you have the OPML file already available, the hardest work is done. I hope that you find this as useful a technique to beat the Imperial brainwashing machine as I have.
Kind regards and best of luck!
The Saker
This is the promised follow-up to my recent piece "Surviving in a world of zombies: using news aggregators". With the help of quite a few of you (thanks a lot to you all!!) and by continuing my never ending search for more alternative information sources I have compiled what I think is a decent list of alternative and/or quality information sources. As I mentioned it in my previous piece, these information sources are contained in a so-called OPML file which can be imported into an "rss news aggregator" or "news reader" (check my previous piece for an explanation of these terms).
Please click HERE to download this OPML file (this link will direct you to the website Mediafire.com and will initiate the download of a file named Sakerfeedlist-finalversion.opml
I want to repeat and stress something important here: do not not in any way 'endorse' the information sources I compiled into this file. In fact, I have included some information sources which I do not endorse at all, but which I have found to contain valuable information as even reading the "enemy's" literature can, at times, be very important.
I would also like to add that if you are using GNU/Linux (as I hope you all do, "corporate IT" or "capitalist IT" being as bad as anything corporate or capitalist inevitably is) and if you are using Liferea as a news aggregator, I recommend that you get a recent version of this very good software (at least version 1.6.2) as the search function has been vastly improved.
By big frustration with my OPML file and with all the news aggregators I have tried is that I found no way to arrange my almost 300 news sources in alphabetical order. That can be a real pain because it makes even a trivial task such as searching for double/redundant subscriptions difficult.
IF ANY OF YOU CAN WRITE AN APPLICATION OR A SCRIPT (awk, Perl, Python - whatever) CAPABLE OF DOING THIS PLEASE CONTACT ME. Please keep in mind that my OPML file includes English, Russian, French, German, and Spanish language information sources and that the file is full of XML tags.
I urge you to try out a news aggregator. Now that you have the OPML file already available, the hardest work is done. I hope that you find this as useful a technique to beat the Imperial brainwashing machine as I have.
Kind regards and best of luck!
The Saker
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Surviving in a world of zombies: using news aggregators
Not too long ago a wrote a short piece entitled "Take revenge on the bastards now!" in which I recommended a total boycott of the Zionist corporate media. I also provided the URLs of some websites which provide streams of alternative TV and radio stations. If all you have is 10-15 mins a day, listening to Russia Today, Press TV, Telesur or al-Jazeera is not the worst option. Listening to shows like DemocracyNow! or Guns and Butter is another excellent option. Lastly, you might want to sign up for one of the many excellent mailing lists out there (too numerous to list here). But for some of you this might not be enough.
When the purpose is to research a topic, or to get hard to find information or analysis, you need to canvass the Internet much wider and deeper. One option is to use Google or another search engine, but those rely on popularity ranking: what if what you are interested in is not popular at all, or the popular slant on your story is the "official" one? You can also visit your favorite websites, but what if there are too many such sites? There is a far better and effective solution: use a "news aggregator", sometimes also called a "news reader".
A news aggregator is a special program which makes use of something called "real simple syndication". You can think of it as a "headlines collector" (check out the Wikipedia entry on RSS for mode details). Depending on how it is configured, it will tell you what items have been added to a website, give you a headline/title, and possibly a short blurb. This information will then be combined into a single interface which you can conveniently consult and, in most cases, which can you search for specific keywords.
There are plenty of good and free news aggregators out there. Check out the website RSS Readers for a list. Personally, I use Liferea, an excellent news aggregator for GNU/Linux and UNIX. If you are still one of the most unfortunate users of Windoze or Mac OSX, you can try RSSowl: it's free software and multi-system.
Both Liferea and RSSowl are easy to use with an intuitive interface. Basically, here is how they work: you go to your favorite website and see if they provide RSS feeds. This will be indicated with with "rss" or "atom" and, sometimes, "syndication" or even "subscribe". Look for the RSS logo
(shown here). You will need to find a special URL which will point to this feed. It will look like something like this: http://www.rssowl.org/newsfeed (I took the one of RSSowl as an example). You copy this unique URL and add it to your news aggregator. Repeat that with all your favorite websites and, voila!, you have a single place where to read all your news. By the way, Goggle offers a very good newsreader online. Check it out here.
Keep in mind that, unfortunately, not all websites offer rss feeds. And some do offer them, but they do not work. So trial and error is the way to go, but it is well worth the effort.
The beauty of it all is that once it is installed and configured, your news aggregator runs in the background. You can tell it to refresh all the subscriptions as often as you want (I set mine for every 3 hours), and it does so automatically. I leave my main computer on 24/7 so it also does it overnight, and once I wake up in the morning I find all the news updated within the last 3 hours ready to be parsed with a minimal amount of time and effort.
To save you some time, I would like to share with you the OPML file I am personally using (you can think of the OPML file as a list of websites with rss feeds). You can download mine by clicking here. What you will need to do is download this short text file to your computer and import it into your rss reader. Then you will automatically have the full list of websites I use to do my research. Currently, I have 29 personal blogs listed, and 124 websites. Combined, they are currently showing 7887 unread news stories! I have setup Liferea to keep 100 stories per subscription. So if I search for the word "Gaza" 616 hits; that is 616 news items. And the search only takes a few seconds (depending on the power of your computer).
Now, if you take a look at my list, you will see that it contains a real hodge-podge of websites, including some major corporate news sources (Asia Times), to personal blogs, to some really specialized ones, all this is 5 languages. Please do not think that I endorse or "trust" these information sources. The only reason why I have included them is because I have found interesting news items or analyses on them, that is all. At the end, caveat emptor and the rest of the usual disclaimers apply: you need to decide for yourself which sources you trust and which you don't. My personal main criteria of selection was "news sources which the Empire would not want me to access". Naturally, my sources are skewed towards topics and regions which I know more about, YMMV. And, of course, many are missing.
In this context, I would like to ask you all for your help:
Please share with me, and the rest of us, all the websites which you turn to for info or which you can recommend. In particular, I would like to identify websites with rss feeds from Turkey, India, Far East Asia and Africa. I would be interested in news sources not only in English but also French, German, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese or Dutch. I would also be interested in personal blogs, of course, as I find that often they have much better analyses than regular news sites.
I hope that you find news aggregators as useful as I do and that you will share your experience with them with the rest of us.
Many thanks in advance!
The Saker
When the purpose is to research a topic, or to get hard to find information or analysis, you need to canvass the Internet much wider and deeper. One option is to use Google or another search engine, but those rely on popularity ranking: what if what you are interested in is not popular at all, or the popular slant on your story is the "official" one? You can also visit your favorite websites, but what if there are too many such sites? There is a far better and effective solution: use a "news aggregator", sometimes also called a "news reader".
A news aggregator is a special program which makes use of something called "real simple syndication". You can think of it as a "headlines collector" (check out the Wikipedia entry on RSS for mode details). Depending on how it is configured, it will tell you what items have been added to a website, give you a headline/title, and possibly a short blurb. This information will then be combined into a single interface which you can conveniently consult and, in most cases, which can you search for specific keywords.
There are plenty of good and free news aggregators out there. Check out the website RSS Readers for a list. Personally, I use Liferea, an excellent news aggregator for GNU/Linux and UNIX. If you are still one of the most unfortunate users of Windoze or Mac OSX, you can try RSSowl: it's free software and multi-system.
Both Liferea and RSSowl are easy to use with an intuitive interface. Basically, here is how they work: you go to your favorite website and see if they provide RSS feeds. This will be indicated with with "rss" or "atom" and, sometimes, "syndication" or even "subscribe". Look for the RSS logo
(shown here). You will need to find a special URL which will point to this feed. It will look like something like this: http://www.rssowl.org/newsfeed (I took the one of RSSowl as an example). You copy this unique URL and add it to your news aggregator. Repeat that with all your favorite websites and, voila!, you have a single place where to read all your news. By the way, Goggle offers a very good newsreader online. Check it out here.Keep in mind that, unfortunately, not all websites offer rss feeds. And some do offer them, but they do not work. So trial and error is the way to go, but it is well worth the effort.
The beauty of it all is that once it is installed and configured, your news aggregator runs in the background. You can tell it to refresh all the subscriptions as often as you want (I set mine for every 3 hours), and it does so automatically. I leave my main computer on 24/7 so it also does it overnight, and once I wake up in the morning I find all the news updated within the last 3 hours ready to be parsed with a minimal amount of time and effort.
To save you some time, I would like to share with you the OPML file I am personally using (you can think of the OPML file as a list of websites with rss feeds). You can download mine by clicking here. What you will need to do is download this short text file to your computer and import it into your rss reader. Then you will automatically have the full list of websites I use to do my research. Currently, I have 29 personal blogs listed, and 124 websites. Combined, they are currently showing 7887 unread news stories! I have setup Liferea to keep 100 stories per subscription. So if I search for the word "Gaza" 616 hits; that is 616 news items. And the search only takes a few seconds (depending on the power of your computer).
Now, if you take a look at my list, you will see that it contains a real hodge-podge of websites, including some major corporate news sources (Asia Times), to personal blogs, to some really specialized ones, all this is 5 languages. Please do not think that I endorse or "trust" these information sources. The only reason why I have included them is because I have found interesting news items or analyses on them, that is all. At the end, caveat emptor and the rest of the usual disclaimers apply: you need to decide for yourself which sources you trust and which you don't. My personal main criteria of selection was "news sources which the Empire would not want me to access". Naturally, my sources are skewed towards topics and regions which I know more about, YMMV. And, of course, many are missing.
In this context, I would like to ask you all for your help:
Please share with me, and the rest of us, all the websites which you turn to for info or which you can recommend. In particular, I would like to identify websites with rss feeds from Turkey, India, Far East Asia and Africa. I would be interested in news sources not only in English but also French, German, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese or Dutch. I would also be interested in personal blogs, of course, as I find that often they have much better analyses than regular news sites.
I hope that you find news aggregators as useful as I do and that you will share your experience with them with the rest of us.
Many thanks in advance!
The Saker
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Memento: where to get your info about the Middle-East
Al-Jazeera: http://www.tvtuga.com/al-jazeera-english-qat/
Al-Jazeera: http://www.livestation.com/channels/3%20-al_jazeera_english?page=2
Press TV (using Mplayer): mplayer mms://wms.edgecastcdn.net/200216/ipresstv
Russia Today: http://rt.com/On_Air.html
Al-Jazeera: http://www.livestation.com/channels/3%20-al_jazeera_english?page=2
Press TV (using Mplayer): mplayer mms://wms.edgecastcdn.net/200216/ipresstv
Russia Today: http://rt.com/On_Air.html
Question to all: can somebody help me to define the actual video stream on http://www.tvtuga.com/al-jazeera-english-qat/?
I would like to pipe it directly into mplayer like I do with the Press TV stream.
I would like to pipe it directly into mplayer like I do with the Press TV stream.
Thanks!
Friday, February 19, 2010
Take revenge on these bastards now!
Today, 1,000 Signatures from Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth) were submitted to Congress citing new scientific evidence of explosive demolition at WTC. This global event included special press conferences conducted in over 23 cities worldwide with the press conference in San Francisco broadcast worldwide over the Internet.
Now take a look at the sickening bullshit the corporate media was broadcasting to the American public. Please, do watch it: only suffering through the 14 minutes of this idiotic performance will allow you to fully measure the degree of helpless imbecility in which the leaders of the USraelian Empire want to hold us all.
And once you are done this, consider what you can do to strike back at these bastards: take the following two simple steps:
1) sever ANY and ALL your exposure to the corporate media: throw away your TV (smash and burn it - it's fun) get rid of all your FM/AM radios (keep a worldwide shortband receiver and a police scanner), take a solemn vow never to hold a newspaper in your hands again, unless it is an emergency and you are out of toilet paper.
2) get ALL your info from the Internet and ONLY from the Internet. Here is a short list of some alternative news outlets:
Internet Radio:
http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/
http://www.tvlizer.com/content/view/242/374/#
http://www.livestation.com/channels/3-al_jazeera_english (no video)
Press TV:
http://www.presstv.com/
mms://wms.edgecastcdn.net/200216/ipresstv (direct stream)
Telesur:
http://www.telesurtv.net/noticias/canal/senalenvivo.php (in Spanish)
Russia Today:
http://rt.com/On_Air.html
Of course, none of these TV stations are to be considered The Word Of Truth (all in caps), but they are at least not controlled by the USraelien Empire and, as such, represent a valuable alternative.
And if you cannot do these two simple things, then watch the Tiger Woods press conference over and over and over again until you feel the urge to do so with relief and joy.
The Saker
Now take a look at the sickening bullshit the corporate media was broadcasting to the American public. Please, do watch it: only suffering through the 14 minutes of this idiotic performance will allow you to fully measure the degree of helpless imbecility in which the leaders of the USraelian Empire want to hold us all.
And once you are done this, consider what you can do to strike back at these bastards: take the following two simple steps:
1) sever ANY and ALL your exposure to the corporate media: throw away your TV (smash and burn it - it's fun) get rid of all your FM/AM radios (keep a worldwide shortband receiver and a police scanner), take a solemn vow never to hold a newspaper in your hands again, unless it is an emergency and you are out of toilet paper.
2) get ALL your info from the Internet and ONLY from the Internet. Here is a short list of some alternative news outlets:
Internet Radio:
- Pacifica radio KPFK-LA: http://sc1.mainstreamnetwork.com:9042/listen.pls
- Pacifica radio KPFA-Berkley: http://www.kpfa.org/streams/kpfa_24k.m3u
- "No lies radio": http://sc10.spacialnet.com:24594/listen.pls
- Radio4all: http://www.radio4all.net/
- Radio Indymedia: http://radio.indymedia.org/
http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/
http://www.tvlizer.com/content/view/242/374/#
http://www.livestation.com/channels/3-al_jazeera_english (no video)
Press TV:
http://www.presstv.com/
mms://wms.edgecastcdn.net/200216/ipresstv (direct stream)
Telesur:
http://www.telesurtv.net/noticias/canal/senalenvivo.php (in Spanish)
Russia Today:
http://rt.com/On_Air.html
Of course, none of these TV stations are to be considered The Word Of Truth (all in caps), but they are at least not controlled by the USraelien Empire and, as such, represent a valuable alternative.
And if you cannot do these two simple things, then watch the Tiger Woods press conference over and over and over again until you feel the urge to do so with relief and joy.
The Saker
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