Disneyland, California

Posted 13 years, 20 weeks ago.

This post could be called “Anaheim, Caifornia” but the real truth is, we barely ventured outside of the park except to sleep and then there was that one time we ate dinner. Therefore… DISNEYLAND.

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Orlando, Florida

Posted 13 years, 21 weeks ago.

Today I sit in a chair in Anaheim. We flew into LAX this morning from Orlando, here we spent a short three days at Universal and also at the pool. Orlando was a bittersweet visit. Good things happened, bad things happened.

Allow me to explain.

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New York, New York

Posted 13 years, 22 weeks ago.

I’m currently on a flight to Orlando, having just finished up the first leg of my trip to the US: New York. It’s been a great few days; we did a whole load of shopping, visited touristy places and even caught a Broadway show.

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Automating Your TV Downloads

Posted 13 years, 31 weeks ago.

Up until this weekend, I’ve maintained a download/conversion managing system cobbled together with PHP, chewing gum and a paperclip. But when I decided to bring my manager over to my Mac Mini, I decided to put together a new system.

My first thought was to write my own app (since that’s the cool thing to do), but with little time, that didn’t seem feasible. So I turned to Google and over the course of an evening or so, I put together this handy little system that takes my shows from the intertoobs and feeds them directly into my Apple TV without me having to do anything manually.

No really. If you’re a Mac user and you download your TV or whatever, follow this simple guide (that has some not so simple steps, but don’t worry, I’ll explain them).

And so it begins.

UPDATED (16 Feb 2012): I’ve moved the hosting of the AutoConvert.scpt file over to Gist. This new version creates a log file to capture Handbrake output, which is deleted once the conversion is done, and can be used to determine the progress.

UPDATED (26 Feb 2012): I’ve made some additions to AutoConvert.scpt that help to get things processed faster (because iFlicks can run more often) and to help ensure that files are not processed more often than they should be.

UPDATED (15 Jan 2015): If you’re still using this method, and haven’t updated to use iFlicks 2 in place of my applescript, then shame on you. It takes care of detecting the completed downloads, converting (with better handling of compatible video types) and loading into iTunes.

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