My very own SLOM torrent
Since nobody else seems to have gotten around to creating a torrent of the now-they’re-there, now-they-aren’t Exploratorium iPhone-format Secret Life of Machines episodes, I just did it myself.
That’s the torrent’s page on Mininova; feel free to distribute it to other torrent sites if you like. This is the Azureus magnet link for the torrent.
I’ve only got a poxy home DSL account to upload with, so don’t expect speedy downloads until a few more seeds show up. If you’ve already downloaded the files, you can help seed: Start downloading the torrent, stop it, copy the files you already have into the directory that’s just been created for the download, and then restart the torrent. Your BitTorrent client should check the files, see that they’re finished, and switch over to seeding.
(Note that you can also help seed even if you don’t have all of the files. Just follow the above instructions, copying whatever files you do have to the download directory, and when you restart the torrent you’ll seed the files you have while downloading the others.)
UPDATE: The original version of the torrent seemed to have stalled (dead tracker, or something), so I’ve re-announced it on The Pirate Bay, here.
I tried to tell the Exploratorium dude, Ron Hipschman, about this, but his e-mail address bounces. It's the Administrative and Technical contact address for exploratorium.edu, but it's still an unknown user.
I guess science museums just aren't what they used to be.
[UPDATE: I just tried again, in late August 2008, and he's back now. So is the Exploratorium's direct-download page, which came back at some point after the initial rush abated. You might as well still use the torrent, though, to avoid eating the Exploratorium's bandwidth.]
Comment by Daniel Rutter — November 5, 2007 @ 12:59 am
Now seeding all the bits I got before the site went under... via my 10 megabit cable connection...
Comment by ex-parrot — November 5, 2007 @ 8:03 am
Thank you! I'll help seed this.
Comment by fnaah — November 5, 2007 @ 8:26 am
I guess I'll help out as well, with whatever little I have got. I guess we will have people getting the first few episodes pretty quickly at least.
And as a side effect, I guess I'll be downloading the rest. Oh well, can't be helped...
Comment by magetoo — November 5, 2007 @ 9:47 am
Luckily I grabbed the last episodes first ;)
My ISP informs me that they are now charging me $2.95/gigabyte of uploaded traffic so enjoy eating my salary everyone ;)
Comment by ex-parrot — November 5, 2007 @ 10:01 am
well I was hugely lucky to catch the original post at the right time, and leave firefox flash-getting overnight, so woke up in the morning with the whole lot :) so I'm going to sit here seeding for a while to give all these eps back. (I've watched the entire lot since I dled them, and it's true, they are fantastic.)
Comment by atarax — November 5, 2007 @ 10:47 am
Did I just write "I guess" three times in that comment? I suck.
And it's a shame that the Exploratorium
peopledudes couldn't figure out bittorrent; this is pretty much the type of scenario (serving large files to the public from a bandwidth-limited web server) the thing was created for, after all.Hey, I wonder if any blog readers live in the right area or timezone to get in touch with them?
Comment by magetoo — November 5, 2007 @ 10:52 am
I'm glad that people who've never seen this show are now being introduced to it.
In case you haven't seen it yet:
In the episode about washing machines, Rex rolls a car.
If they ever make a show about wireless networking, I presume the moon will explode.
Comment by Daniel Rutter — November 5, 2007 @ 11:13 am
I actually must have seen the fax machine episode when it was originally broadcast - so apparently the bit where they make a fax from their lathes is a memory of mine from age 8! really happy to finally get the chance to see the rest of the series
Comment by atarax — November 5, 2007 @ 12:06 pm
That endeavour cost me $23.68
Now who can guess what country I'm from? ;)
Comment by ex-parrot — November 5, 2007 @ 5:10 pm
New Zealand? :)
I'm seeding the whole lot when possible, right no my ratio is 19735%! Thanks to Dan for noting they were available to dl, I watched them all as soon as they were done and had a blast doing so. And all still so relevant. And the host, always going "whoops!". You just don't see this straightforward style much anymore :)
Comment by Devar — November 5, 2007 @ 6:00 pm
I tried the torrent but two of the episodes give me errors ... "An invalid public movie atom was found in the movie." Is there any way these can be separated into individual torrents so I don't have to try again for the whole torrent (3 days)!
Comment by wc — January 16, 2008 @ 8:56 am
I haven't played through every second of every episode here, but all of the eps open OK, in Windows at least.
I presume you're using QuickTime on a Mac, to get that error; try using the Mac OS VLC player instead for those episodes (or for all of them :-).
Comment by Daniel Rutter — January 16, 2008 @ 9:11 am
I tried the VLC player. It quits the player. Something in that episode is corrupted. The ipod .m4v is really neat. I guess I can try the torrent again until that episode ... I get about 12 kbps on that torrent. It take some time (1-2 days).
Comment by wc — January 16, 2008 @ 10:34 am
Hold the phone. The file 'self repaired' itself. Wow. Spooky. The problem seems to have gone away. I tried to check it out ... seems like a header 'bit' that QT is very strict about in QT 7.3. Thank you for presenting the files in .m4v form.
Comment by wc — January 16, 2008 @ 12:16 pm
Is anybody willing to burn the episodes to a DVD and post them to Brisbane? If so please contact me, I can also throw a couple of dollars your way for the trouble. Cheers.
Comment by Argon — January 23, 2008 @ 8:23 am
You should be able to get my e-mail now.
Comment by Argon — January 23, 2008 @ 8:25 am
ljcp@powerup.com.au
Sorry for the multiple posts.
Comment by Argon — January 23, 2008 @ 8:26 am