Turns out you can make new posts not show up in the RSS feed in Blogger, but the only way to to do it is to backdate them far enough that, chronologically, they are more than 8 entries ago.
Oi, working around the limitations of closed platforms is always frustrating.
youtube-dl by Ricardo Garcia Gonzalez (Public Domain)
One of the things I really enjoy watching on Youtube are "Let's Play's": regular people recording their play-throughs of (typically classic) video games in an episodic format. I have a lot of childhood memories associated with various 8- and 16-bit titles, so it's always a fun trip down memory lane.
Unfortunately Youtube's playlist interface can be summarily described as "awful" and the interface still does not support altering playback speed for most videos. Worse, Adobe Flash just sucks and doesn't belong anywhere near Linux.
I used to use an extension for my web browser to download individual videos, but youtube-dl makes life much easier by letting you download an entire playlist into a directory. You can even resume downloading where you left off so it's easy to get partial playlists or keep your local archive up to date as new videos are added.
Is it worth it to waste disk space storing videos you can download for free whenever you want? Of course! For one thing, it's nice if you have a monthly download quota like I do since playlists with HD videos can often exceed 20GB: you can download some content in advance to watch later when you might be near the quota.
For another, mplayer is far superior to Youtube's player. You can set a default (faster) playback speed and apply video filters like unsharp mask and add noise which really improve perceived video quality, or use vdpau to get hardware acceleration for 1080p movies.
Finally, you can move each file into a "watched" subfolder as you finish watching it, which I find to be far more intuitive than any of Youtube's playlist-type features.
The only thing I thought youtube-dl was missing was support for parallel downloads of all files in a playlist: Youtube limits standard defintion video downloads to about 100k/s, so if you want to max out your connection, parallel downloads are necessary. I tend to run it in GNU screen on a server, though, so it doesn't bother me if it takes a while to finish.
Overall, youtube-dl is a fantastic script. Thanks, Ricardo!
Spotlight on Open Source is a periodic feature where I highlight a piece of open-source software that is making my life better. If you liked this entry, why not view the previous features? Open-source projects usually benefit from publicity, so I encourage you to spread the word as well!
I'm glad I can program, because personal programming in the small is fertile ground and tremendously useful. [...] Writing concise to-the-purpose solutions is a primary reason for programming in the twenty-first century.
Indeed. One of the best parts of taking the effort to learn about software is that you get to customize your tools to behave exactly how you want them to instead of being stuck with a few options someone thought were most likely to appeal to the unwashed masses.
Working is a lot more enjoyable when your tools do exactly what you want.
Don't get me wrong; I like the trend towards app stores, too. It's just that, for most of what I want to do, There's No App For That™.
It feels a little kludgy, but I managed to get Hyphenator installed on this blog so the text can be justified.
I'm not sure if editing your template to add the hyphenate class to the post-body entry-content div is the only way to do it, but it worked for me. For some reason I already had my template under version control so it's pretty easy for me to add stuff to it even though I run into bugs in Blogger every time I try to update the template.
But I'll spare you the boring details of my complaints about Blogger.
Google is like NASA of the internet - they have the best and brightest on their payroll - and I'm not just talking about their developers. If there was truly an abuse to the API they would have developed a way to handle it without shutting it down. So, in this case, the abuse is nothing more than a smoke screen.
If you woke up one morning and found out that Google is going to charge for their API you would start bashing Google left and right for charging for something that used to be free and their PR would flat line - essentially - they would look like the monster taking candy from a child.
