Where’s the peanut butter?!

This post should probably be titled “pirating anything for dummies” or “Yes, there really is more porn on the internet than you could ever know what to do with (not that you don’t have some ideas…)” but there are some slightly less corrupt uses of usenet and what anyone does with information like this is really up to that person.

What’s easynews?

Easynews is just one online provider who sell access to usenet. Usenet, then, is an old newsgroup system on the net and one that is still in wide use for newsgroups - collaborative forums where people post conversations and also tons and tons of binary files (music, pictures, and videos). A lot of people aren’t familiar with usenet at all so an analogy might make it a little clearer - hotmail:email::easynews:usenet. Hotmail is Microsoft’s service that gives you access to the technology known as email. Or livejournal:blogging::easynews:usenet. Sort of. hopefully you get the idea.

The model works like this: I decide to start a conversation (or upload some file). I send that post to my usenet provider (easynews). It propagates to other usenet servers (hosted by other companies, like giganews, etc.). You access your usenet provider, see my post or the file I uploaded, and then we have a flame war. Or violate copyright laws. That’s free speech in action, baby!

Why easynews?

There are other providers who sell usenet access (and you probably get some free usenet access from your ISP, whether you know it or not), but easynews offer a couple nice features.

First, they have a bitchin web interface. This is really what this post will be about once we get down to the “how do I use it?” section.

Next, it’s very fast. Way faster than bittorrent or the other systems you may have used. At least this is true for me.
Next, their retention is pretty good. All companies who sell usenet access have to purge old posts that have been uploaded because they don’t have unlimited disk space and people are constantly uploading new goodies to the fray. So after a week or a month or a couple months, those files will be gone from your usenet provider. Based on my rough experience - easynews offer about a 45-60 day retention in binary newsgroups, which means there is still always more stuff to download than I could ever even go through (and I’m a pretty hardcore packrat).

They also rollover your account quota. You pay $10 a month and can then download 10GB of files. If you only download 5GB, then next month you’ll have a 15GB quota.

Why not usenet?

You can’t download anything in the word off easynews - you can only get whatever someone else has recently uploaded. The collected bittorrent networks and other systems like oink probably let you be a lot more selective and get exactly what you want. Usenet (and easynews) is a lot more like going to a really awesome smorgasboard.

It’s probably still piracy. There are plenty of legitimate uses of usenet, but a lot of it isn’t - so please remember to not just rip off the artists or engineers if you think about using it in that way.

How do I use easynews?

The traditional way to access usenet is (naturally) with a newsreader. This is a special program designed to access usenet newsgroups over NNTP (like how your web browser accesses webpages over HTTP or how your email program talks to an email server over SMTP or IMAP). But this can suck sometimes and almost definitely sucks if you’re looking for binaries on usenet. Newsgroup hierarchies are pretty arcane. Also, you might need to search a dozen newsgroups to find the group that has the file you’re searching for (or to find that the file is currently unavailable).

Easynews offer a web interface so that you don’t need to use a newsreader or really understand a lot of the headaches you’ll see in a dedicated newsreader (like configuring its connection parameters, dealing with complete or incomplete multipart binaries, assembling parts of multipart binaries, and so forth).

It feels like you didn’t answer “how do I use it?” No, you didn’t. How do I use it???

Simple - after you get an account with easynews, you just…

1. Fire up your browser and go to their global search page. This lets you search across all newsgroups and gives you a convenient view of search results.
2. Set your search criteria for what you’re looking for. Some convenient filters…
   • If you only want music or videos or archive files (.zip, .rar), check the appropriate “Type” checkbox to exclude other file types from coming back in the search.
   • If you’re searching for a video of a recently uploaded TV show, set the “Date & Time” to only search posts from the past 7 days.
   • Also, if you’re searchig for a video of a recently uploaded TV show, you might find that people upload these with different video qualities. There might be an HDTV upload that is something like 1GB for a half hour TV show, or there might be a 250MB xvid version. You can probably set the “Size” range so that only the format you want comes back in your results.
   • Depending on what you’re searching for you might want to get back a list of files posted or (for videos) you might want to see a thumbnail of the video (otherwise when you try downloading a video from your search for “Shooter” you might get something very different from what you expect).
3. Then run your search and see that there are many things you might like to download.
4. Now you’re ready to download!
   • To download a file, click the file and it’ll start.
   • To download a bunch of files, you can use easynews’ zipmanager. Check a checkbox next to the first file you’d like to save and another next to the last, then click the “range” button and all files between that range will be checked for you. Then click the “zip” button and all those files will be collected for you in a single zip file for you to download.

And that’s all there is to it!

Appendix: isn’t this totally illegal? Why does this system still exist??

That’s a great question and I don’t really know the answer. It would be totally easy to shut down piracy on usenet but nobody seems to have bothered. When you search around, you’ll see that in any given segment of the binaries areas, there are probably fewer than 50 people who are seeding most of the illegal content. It’s not anonymous at all and these people are very prominent (because they’re the ones uploading everything) and there are relatively few of them. It would be a breeze for some anti-piracy group to prosecute 10 of the top uploaders. The absence of these individuals would definitely be noticed (and discussed) by other system users and it would cut off the majority of the of the input to the system. Piracy solved. But I suspect so few people use usenet that the copyright owners just haven’t bothered. It’s really stupid, though, because instead of shutting down one piracy platform that would be very easy to stop and which is responsible for a niche but high-volume market on piracy, they focus on decentralized systems that are almost impossible to control.

Carbo-loading is a process runners use to crank up their glucose stores in advance of a race. I promise I’ll try to make this exciting but you probably know right now whether or not you want to continue reading. And if you want to cut to the chase, click here…

This is useful because you’ll fuel your body during endurance exercise with glycogen (the body’s synthesized form of glucose) or, after you’ve mostly used up your glycogen supply, fat. Basically it goes something like glycogen is far more readily usable as an energy source but once it’s used up you have to switch to fat and when that happens, you’ve hit the runner’s “wall” or “bonked” and though I don’t think I’ve ever experienced it personally, I hear it totally sucks. So you want to have a good supply of glycogen to fuel your exercise as far as possible (it’s also important to get replenish your energy during and after exercise, of course). Your body generally doesn’t need to store huge amounts of this energy source, though, so it doesn’t and marathoners tend to run out (typically around mile 20 or so - again this all based on what I’ve read).

So endurance athletes commonly try to crank up their body’s storage of glycogen in advance of a big competition to stay stronger as long as possible and this is done by carbo-loading, but how do you do that?

First, you don’t do it by eating a giant bowl of fettuccine alfredo immediately before a run. For starters it’s full of fat. It also won’t be usable energy at all during the race. Finally, that’s just eating a bunch of carbohydrates, which isn’t a bad idea but isn’t increasing your body’s ability to store carbohydrates and glycogen, which is what carbo-loading is about. If you do, you might wind up like Michael Scott:

There are a couple older approaches to do carbo-loading that involve about a week of paying close attention to your workout schedule and diet and taking in fewer than normal carbs in the first half of the week and then bumping up the rate for the three days before the race (moderately or extremely, depending on which plan you’re following). Doing this triggers a carbohydrate retention response that significantly increases your glycogen storage capacity, but it has the downside of taking days and forcing you to have a totally wonky diet leading up to a big competition.

Performance Nutrition for Runners, which I’ve previously called awesome, outlines a newer approach - the Western Australia carbo-loading method that I plan on trying before Portland (aside: the book’s author has an article on the approaches but I feel imitation is the most sincere form of flattery and a great way to learn so I’ll keep typing). It’s basically two steps all done in a single day and can yield a 90% muscle glycogen storage improvement.

1. The morning of the day before the race, you do a very brief high intensity workout (about 2:30 at 1 mile pace followed by a 30 second sprint).
2. Then you consume 12 grams of carbs per kilogram of lean body mass over the next 24 hours.

For me this comes out to over 800 grams of carbohydrates, which sounds pretty tough but basically you add a ton of Ensure and Endurox R4 to your diet and you’re rockin! A little over a week from now I’ll be able to report back with how it went.

Since my friend Paul started working for them, I’ve gone to the U District Food Bank’s annual fund raising dinner, which has a silent and live auction. By the way, if you’re in Seattle and reading this and not already at my table, you should totally go! It’s in a week, it’s a ton of fun, and for a good cause. Anyway, a year ago they auctioned off a pub crawl and last night I finally cashed it in. It was fun, but we didn’t get back till after 1 and the auction item should have included someone coming to turn off my alarm so that I would skip this morning’s long run.

I met Joe (or as he’s known in the club, “Fast Joey“) for coffee today and we chatted about puppies, unicorns, and what an amazing coinkeydink it is that we work so close to each other! And also about blogging systems and why sometimes images or links don’t work in a blog when the RSS feed is read.

For some dumb reason, it seems like Simple PHP Blog will let you write a post and embed an image and do so with a relative path (relative to the post location), but when it serves up its RSS feed, it doesn’t translate the image path from the relative to an absolute path (which is necessary because the relative path won’t work when its read not on the original page). Consequently, if you read a Simple PHP Blog post from its RSS feed (in bloglines, feedreader, or whatever) you won’t get working images. It doesn’t seem that Simple PHP Blog gives the author control over this, which is lame. I suppose the best way to solve it might be to figure out the full path to the image when composing a post and use that. Or switch to wordpress

I finally booked a room in Portland. It’s not downtown but there’s really almost nothing available in the city any more. Next time I run a marathon I need to remember to take care of this more than a week before the race. Anyway - this place *is* only about 3/4 mile from the MAX, so I should be able to make it to the starting line. Now I need to check out Nick incorporated the countdown timer to add to my main page…

Vino composite 2, originally uploaded by Peru Tha Damaja.

A couple weeks ago I parked my scooter in Capitol Hill around lunchtime and someone backed into it, knocking it over and scratching up the exterior. That was a drag, but insurance is going to get everything fixed up. But that gets me wondering whether I should change up some of the paneling and go from just blue (which is the stock I’ve got) to a composite with the blue and silver. I think I like this composite but have also thought about just getting the back wheel cover in silver.

JEALOUS, originally uploaded by Peru Tha Damaja.

I was emailing my sister about running races over the weekend and she told me that in DC she owns her own timing chip for races where they do that kind of thing. It frequently gets her an entry discount, she doesn’t have to take the chip off at the finish chute, and she gets one chip she’s familiar with fastening. I think this sounds awesome and immediately called Super Jock n Jill to find out if such a thing is available in Seattle. It’s not. First, she got a totally awesome Barbie for Christmas and now this. What’s next?

So I ran the Brew Ha Ha 5K in Fremont this morning. It was great but I really did not do what I set out to…I intended to finish with a 19-20 minute time which would have been a huge improvement over my previous best 5K time (21:16) but got out there and there was Rose, another ChuckIt runner and definitely one of the fastest people in the club, and I paced with her for a while. I got there late so I didn’t get a chip for my time but according to my watch I ran a sub-19 and with a time that would project a new best 2 mile time for me. So I’m a little disappointed I didn’t hit what I was aiming for, but I guess if I miss my target that’s the side I want to be on!

Rose, incidentally, handily beat me. She had a vampire getup for today (to find her at races, look near the front for someone in an awesome costume who is crushing the race and that’s her) and I think the wings might have been filled with hydrogen and given her an advantage. OK, probably not…

A couple recent developments of no particular importance

• Herkimer Coffee is now open around the corner from my house. I was totally excited by this because one of my updated running routes takes me past their Phinney location and I’ve wanted to go there but it’s always been closed. But it turns out this branch is only open till 6 every day, too. Drat. And they have one power outlet. I’d love for some coffee shop in the neighborhood to stay open till midnight or 1. Ideally one without lousy service and a terrible ambiance. But until that happens I can keep cruising to Bauhaus which is and will probably continue to be my favorite coffee shop ever.
• I Sennheiser HD202’s in the mail today. I don’t know much about really good headphones which is why I didn’t want to spend more than about $20 on a pair and just trusted the user ratings. These are massively sweet. I must always ensure that I have a decent pair of headphones in my list of tangible possessions throughout the rest of my life. Few things could be more satisfying than listening to Thunder Road on a sweet pair of cans.
• Today was a relatively easy 12 miler. I did most of the run with Jay-a-resa and felt good throughout. I’m already feeling a little antsy about the taper, though, so I’m going to run the Fremont Oktoberfest 5k tomorrow. I’ll aim to finish in under 20, which should do all of: be a personal best, be pretty easy (give me room to set future personal bests), take the edge off, and give me a hankering for the festival that afternoon!
• I’ve been doing some web work for the coach that I think will totally help out the website and he seems pretty happy with it. It’s way easier for him to enter new training schedules for upcoming marathons and I’m working on some more google maps integration for our run routes and my pioneering work in Seattle runners’ lavatory and drinking fountain cartography. It’s still got a little ways to go, but it’s already pretty sweet.