Evolution-RSS

For years I have been using Liferea for RSS feeds and Evolution for email. After years of searching for information in mailing lists using Evolution then switching to Liferea for RSS I got tired of it and started looking for a RSS plugin for Evolution when I found Evolution-RSS. That was a few months ago when the stable version was 0.0.8. Since then a newer version has been released but not updated in the sunrise overlay. I took the 0.0.8 ebuild and Auke Booij's advice on Gentoo Bugzilla and created this ebuild:

/usr/local/portage/gnome-extra/evolution-rss/evolution-rss-0.1.0.ebuild

The newest Evolution-RSS has the ability to display feeds using either Gecko or Webkit (if installed). You can also use Evolution's excellent search function on your RSS feeds. It makes finding information so much easier. The downsides are that it is still incomplete and I have come across a few crasher bugs (adding a feed within evolution crashes evo for me). Also there is no dbus integration so downloading feeds directly through Epiphany is a no go. You need to manually add feeds using evolution-import-rss.

Watch TV on the internet with Miro

If you haven't heard of it yet Miro is an opensource internet TV application available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. It uses RSS feeds to grab torrents and then downloads them for viewing. There are is also a guide to watch free television but what if you want to watch a show that isn't in the guide? There is an easy workaround that should be familiar to you if you use bittorrent already, it's called Mininova.

First you need to navigate to Mininova and search for the show you want to watch. I will use the Daily Show as an example. You will get a list like this:


Click on any actual Daily Show episode. Notice that some results that are displayed are for other shows. When you do click on a torrent it will load another page with links like this at the top of the page:



Click on the show title, in this case "The Daily Show". This will load another page that prominently displays an orange RSS feed link:



Now open Miro and and from the toolbar menu choose Channels->Add a new channel. Use the rss feed for the show you searched for as the URL. That's it. Now you have a channel in Miro that will automatically download the latest feeds.

There are a couple of things to note. While this works quite well for me it isn't without issues. You will tend to get multiple of the same episodes because of the nature of a bittorrent search site. Also Miro isn't exaclty light on resources and it is a bit buggy to boot. The good news, at least for linux users, is that Banshee is going to be incorpoarting the same technology into their 1.4 release due out in September. If you haven't used it Banshee is one of the best media players for Linux and after the aforementioned 1.4 release I believe it will be the best media player hands down on any platform.

For Gentoo users out there here is an ebuild for the latest version of Miro (1.2.6) that I adapted from an ebuild for version 1.2.4 found on the net:

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/miro-1.2.6.ebuild

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/files/setup.py.patch

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/files/MozillaBrowser.sed

Evolution-RSS

For years I have been using Liferea for RSS feeds and Evolution for email. After years of searching for information in mailing lists using Evolution then switching to Liferea for RSS I got tired of it and started looking for a RSS plugin for Evolution when I found Evolution-RSS. That was a few months ago when the stable version was 0.0.8. Since then a newer version has been released but not updated in the sunrise overlay. I took the 0.0.8 ebuild and Auke Booij's advice on Gentoo Bugzilla and created this ebuild:

/usr/local/portage/gnome-extra/evolution-rss/evolution-rss-0.1.0.ebuild

The newest Evolution-RSS has the ability to display feeds using either Gecko or Webkit (if installed). You can also use Evolution's excellent search function on your RSS feeds. It makes finding information so much easier. The downsides are that it is still incomplete and I have come across a few crasher bugs (adding a feed within evolution crashes evo for me). Also there is no dbus integration so downloading feeds directly through Epiphany is a no go. You need to manually add feeds using evolution-import-rss.

Watch TV on the internet with Miro

If you haven't heard of it yet Miro is an opensource internet TV application available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. It uses RSS feeds to grab torrents and then downloads them for viewing. There are is also a guide to watch free television but what if you want to watch a show that isn't in the guide? There is an easy workaround that should be familiar to you if you use bittorrent already, it's called Mininova.

First you need to navigate to Mininova and search for the show you want to watch. I will use the Daily Show as an example. You will get a list like this:


Click on any actual Daily Show episode. Notice that some results that are displayed are for other shows. When you do click on a torrent it will load another page with links like this at the top of the page:



Click on the show title, in this case "The Daily Show". This will load another page that prominently displays an orange RSS feed link:



Now open Miro and and from the toolbar menu choose Channels->Add a new channel. Use the rss feed for the show you searched for as the URL. That's it. Now you have a channel in Miro that will automatically download the latest feeds.

There are a couple of things to note. While this works quite well for me it isn't without issues. You will tend to get multiple of the same episodes because of the nature of a bittorrent search site. Also Miro isn't exaclty light on resources and it is a bit buggy to boot. The good news, at least for linux users, is that Banshee is going to be incorpoarting the same technology into their 1.4 release due out in September. If you haven't used it Banshee is one of the best media players for Linux and after the aforementioned 1.4 release I believe it will be the best media player hands down on any platform.

For Gentoo users out there here is an ebuild for the latest version of Miro (1.2.6) that I adapted from an ebuild for version 1.2.4 found on the net:

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/miro-1.2.6.ebuild

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/files/setup.py.patch

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/files/MozillaBrowser.sed