Some say it’s immature and childish, others think it’s damn funny. I’d number myself among the second group.

So I was hooked when I stumbled across a post in a german forum which was a request to help creating one of the biggest RickRolls in the world. Actually, this could be even bigger than the RickRoll Youtube did.

Basically, all you have to do is to visit http://ema.mtv.co.uk/vote/, scroll down, select »Best Act Ever« and enter »Rick Astley«. But that is way to complicated if you want to vote more than once (well, we have to make sure that Rick Astley becomes one of the nominees). So you can simply use this link to vote for him.

If you’re using a UNIX (e.g. Linux or BSD) and you really want to support this, you can open up a terminal and enter*:
while true ; do wget -O /dev/null 'http://ema.mtv.co.uk/vote/#!fields[category]=Best+Act+Ever&fields[artist]=Rick+Astley&action[suggestions]=Vote' ; done
This will vote for Rick endlessly (until you hit CTRL+C to abort).

* Don’t use the above command if you don’t have a »flatrate« (which is unmetered internet access, so you pay a monthly fee and it doesn’t matter how much you download).

Unfortunately, I can’t begin with the interesting part – embedding the video itself – because my copy of PyQt4 doesn’t include the Phonon-Module. My attempts to compile them myself failed. I think I’ll have to tell the (K)Ubuntu package maintainers.

Nevertheless, here is today’s screenshot:

The second thing is that I’m starting to write a graphical VeohTV replacement. Torben Gerkensmeyer’s VeohProxy somehow »inspired« me. Although VeohProxy is great, I’d like to have a graphical interface and the possibility to search videos offline. So I started developing »Keoh«. It has this name, because it was supposed to become a KDE4-app. However, it is a pure QT4-app now, because I realized that this makes it much easer to run on other platforms, too.

Here’s a first Screenshot:

Screenshot of Keoh 0.1

Fortunately there is a fix for this:
If you’re using Ubuntu, you just have to add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nicolai-spohrer/ubuntu hardy main
This can be done by using an editor like nano:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

After appending the line to your sources.list, you need to install the update by typing this into a terminal:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

After installing the fix, it’s recommended to remove the line you’ve added from your sources.list.

If you’re using Debian or ArchLinux, you can find fixed DEBs and TGZs at the Server of the University of Applied Sciences in Esslingen, Germany, all other Linux-Users find Patch-files for Pidgin and Licq there.
There’s also a patched DLL for Windows users, that need to put it into their Pidgin-directory.

Kopete users may try the patch at the KDE Bug Tracker.

Please note that these patches are NOT official and neither me nor the guys that made these fixes assume any responibility.

EDIT: Pidgin released Version 2.4.3, which fixed the Problem. You can get the Source from their homepage and compile it yourself, but I think it won’t take too long until your distribution will add it to its repositories.

So there have been some other solutions:

You can install VeohTV in wine, but in my opinion, this is not a proper solution, because it needs a second copy of Mozilla Firefox installed in wine.

An alternative was using OpenVeoh, but that doesn’t work anymore.

Fortunately, I recently came across a new way to watch VeohTV-Videos by using VeohProxy.

Installation

You’ll need »python«. On Debian, you can install it by typing this into a console:
sudo apt-get install python
After installing »python«, you have to download VeohProxy:
wget http://veohproxy.googlecode.com/files/veohproxy-1.3.zip
Then unzip it by typing:
unzip veohproxy-1.3.zip

Usage
First, start VeohProxy:
python veohproxy-1.3/default.py.
Now you take the Video-ID from a Veoh-Link, e.g.:
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v1021877pQkpC7Hz?rank=13
With this ID, you can start downloading:
wget -c --proxy=off http://127.0.0.1:64653/v1021877pQkpC7Hz

Please note:
Sometimes the download seems to freeze, but that’s no problem. The download will continue after some time.

Please note that the Gtk2-perl-bindings are required.

DOWNLOAD!

If you need help during installation, read the INSTALL-file included in the archive.

I know the Sourcecode is not a masterpiece, but be lenient toward me, it’s my first Perl project

If you want to contribute to the code, feel free to send me an email.

DOWNLOAD!

If you need help during installation, read the INSTALL-file included in the archive.
Happy downloading

As you can see, this is my first post to this blog. The aim of this blog will be to offer some useful tricks or scripts to use on a Linux system (most will work on other Unixes like BSD or Solaris as well).

Holzhaus