Yes, according to the Register, Time Warner will start distributing movies in Germany using the “peer to peer” tech usually found in dirty, dirty IP pirate software.

Bonus point and “no shit Sherlock” award of the day for this quote from a Time Warner bod: “One of the most effective weapons for defeating online piracy is providing legal, easy-to-use alternatives.”

Not treating your customers as criminals helps too.

On a related note, has anyone tried the Sky Movies Broadband service yet? Basically, if you subscribe to Sky Movies you can then download an watch them on your PC for no extra money. There is some use of DRM but it’s not utterly bonkers. Now if they would just have a mac version… (ha!)

EDIT: NEW VERSION 1.6 added

Here is a Windows version of a 20six blog downloader script I original wrote in PHP.
It should work quite nicely, and it’s good enough to recommend people using Windows give it a go!

Here it is:
Blog Backup for Windows 1.6 (50Kb zip file)

It should run on any recent flavour of windows, although it uses the .NET framework 2.0, which you may need to download from Microsoft (22Mb) if you don’t already have it. Sorry!

Recent Changes:
v1.6
Bug Fix

• Doesn’t crash when given src = "" tags

Continue reading 20six blog archiver for Windows, version 1.6…

Well, the site redesign is finished and rather than a stock wordpress theme we now have a lovely Robot-tastic customised ‘pool’ theme! (including some nice random quotes and backgrounds, which I’m quite happy with)
Also the old posts and comments from 20six have been imported.

So, what do you think?

Here is an importer for RSS-format archives into WordPress 2.0:

WordPress RSS Archive importer v1.1

It is based on the RSS importer that ships with WordPress 2.0, but it has been changed to work with my 20six backup script and windows tool. These download comments as well as simply posts, and use html ‘div’ tags to indicate where each comment is, whilst keeping the same format as 20six comments (including ‘sweeties awarded’). It also does a better job than 20six at spotting comment spam – it will import them but flag them as ‘needs moderation’.
To use it, download the zip file, unzip and upload rss-archive.php to your WordPress installation at /wp-admin/import/ and then upload your archive-myblog-year.xml files to /import/ and your images to /images/, on your web server. (use any FTP program to do this; the details will vary according to your web site configuration)

Then simply go to the WordPress admin page at /wp-admin/ in your web browser, click on Import and then RSS Archive, and just choose the archive to use! I will be using this to import my old 20six posts to this blog later today, and bobble is going to be using it as well!

To archive your 20six blog:

Use the PHP Archive Script or Windows users may want to use my Windows 20six Backup tool. It doesn’t have full support for tagging comments yet, but it probably will do in a couple of days. (Currently the comments are imported as part of the post, rather than as ‘proper’ WordPress comments)

Updated: version 1.1 now copes better with blogs that use tables in comment formatting, rather than line breaks.

You can download the 20six PHP archiver script here: 20six Blog Backup PHP Script

Full instructions are included, simply install PHP 4.3 or above and then edit the script to supply your username & password.

You can use it with the WordPress RSS Archive Importer to transfer your blog from 20six to WordPress. Yippee!

Alternatively there is a Windows version available as well. The features are nearly the same, but vary as I’m either improving the PHP version (at home on a Mac) or the Windows version (at work on a PC) so they are often out of sync!

Those crazy guys at Snapstream have built an 11 Tuner personal video recorder!

Although “personal” is a bit of a minsomer… this could record video for a whole building!

It’s the sort of thing I’d be interested in if Sky+ didn’t work so well. One for the future ‘techno house’ perhaps…