I wanted to start a new thread since the previous one was overloaded
with other topics and other folks who might not be interested.
Firstly, in addition to all your efforts to fill this group with
worthwhile content, THANKS MUCH for taking the time and effort to
respond with useful tips and suggestions, and the encouragement to
check the teevee group for more stuff I might like. I had seen you
mention this group a few times, but had tried one of the movie groups
before and found it too overwhelming and tedious to process. I
figured the teevee group would be much the same, and it is. But
already I have downloaded many things I didn't have and am delighted
to get, so I thank you for the extra push!
FYI, I use Forte's Agent both as my newsreader and as my news server.
When I clicked to get the headers of teevee, the status line told me
it was getting just over a billion possible headers. I knew it would
take a while, and let the machine run overnight. My download speed is
3.5 Mbps, so not very fast. After ~9 hours of chugging, the progress
bar indicated about 10% complete, so I stopped it there to begin
exploring the group. I had nearly 9 million headers, covering from
Sept. 2009 to early 2012. Typically, I like to sort by author, and
try to delete as much crap as possible first, but that isn't practical
with this much data. I checked and the DAT file was over 40 Gb, so if
I had gotten all the headers, it would have likely overflowed my 500Gb
SSD hard drive and crashed. So far, I've just been searching for
"BBC" and even that can take 10 minutes between finds, and I'm only
about halfway thru the headers on this simple search... anyway, this
is why I loved the documentary group so much better, as the vast
majority of TeeVee content is not something I would watch, even if I
could just flip on the TV! But since you've got me started, and I've
already found a few little nuggets of gold in all the rubble, I plan
to keep going to see what I can find. (it took me about 2 years to
fully parse all the headers in the documentary group, so I'm caught up
with that group, at least.)
I had never heard of tweaknews, but it certainly looks cheap enough.
If I understand you, I just need to get one of the Block Subscriptions
to upload, and can continue to use Agent for my downloads. As for
whether my identity would be secure with tweaknews, I just don't know
enough about how all this works, but odds are, there's probably not a
lot of copyright concerns for stuff that was on broadcast tv, like PBS
and the BBC... and teevee might be the better place for me to post
anyhow, and be lost in the crowd.
I got an ebook, Malware Analyst's Cookbook, and chapter one is about
how to make yourself anonymous with TOR, and they give links and make
it all very easy, except that I've only glanced at the book and not
spent the time actually reading and trying what it says, so I don't
know if I need to do that or not, but will get to that soon, I hope,
as it would make me feel more secure about posting.
I love your signature, about the 10 types of people. another favorite
siggy I've seen said:
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.
also, fyi...
extra info, if this should be of interest, some tips about Agent. You
use Agent, i think, right? if not, don't bother reading on.
for example, I now have about 10% of the headers, how do I get the
rest? first, I must process everything I have before getting any
more. the reason being that Agent is stupid in some ways. If there
are any headers in a group on my machine, and I want to get new
headers, Agent takes HOURS to get very few headers, if the group is a
large one like teevee or documentaries. If I have processed and
deleted everything in the group on my machine, I can get new headers
in SECONDS. Big difference. Thus, I must process everything I have
from teevee, and have an empty group, BEFORE attempting to get the
next block of headers. When I am ready then, I need to select SAMPLE
RECENT HEADERS, and calculate how many days to request. What I have
ended around February 2012, so I need to count days to Jan 2012, to
give a little overlap. I calculated about 1700 days to retrieve.
Since I now know, that I can't handle that many days because of the
size, I'll stop it after about 10-20% complete, and process that
before getting the next block.
Agent has lots of stupidities, but I still love it. I used to
complain to tech support, but gave up, as their stock answer to
everything I reported was that it was too hard to fix, so I learn
tricks to manage as best I can. One thing that used to really burn me
was using the mouse to select things. It is so handy, I still use it,
but have to be very careful, because stupid Agent has a supposed labor
saving feature which really sucks! If you are holding the mouse and
dragging to select, and let it continue for so many seconds, not many,
but I don't know the exact number... what it does is LOCK Agent, and
preceed to select everything in the direction you were dragging, which
can take a VERY LONG TIME, even hours in these monster big group with
thousands of headers (and now millions of headers!). So my fix, since
I like to use the mouse as much as I can, is to drag a few seconds and
stop and back up a tad, then drag some more, but never for more than 5
seconds in one direction... stupid agent, as this is a worthless
feature, because there is no need to overload the mouse behavior with
this, and anyone who wants to "select all" in a certain direction can
easily do that with the keyboard much much faster, Control-Shift- and
either Home or End, depending on which you want. I have never ever
needed or wanted to do this, actually, so it is a stupid, unneeded
feature some butthole programmer tacked on and refuses to back out for
fear it would break something else... stupid plus lazy! I am a
retired software developer, so bad programming practices especially
annoy and frustrate me.
Also, I hate the fact that the button to thread articles is turned on
automatically when I select to sort things a certain way, which can
hide things I'm actually looking for, that often don't belong where
the threading feature puts them!? stupid Agent! I have to remember
to always click that off when I re-sort headers, because once it is
set on, it stays set on. re-sorting a 40 GB dat file is also very
time consuming. Date sort is fast, but author sort is very slow,
hours, i suppose, i didn't time how long it took...
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