NorthWest Miscellanea

One thing I enjoy doing with my Asus Eee Ultra Laptop is playing youtube files from a flash drive hooked up to it. That way I don’t need internet access, and I can play a bunch at a time, while in bed before going to sleep, or whenever.

The most common script for downloading YouTube videos is “youtube-dl”, written by Ricardo Garcia Gonzalez. This can be Googled and downloaded freely, and runs on all platforms without modification. Python is good that way.

Before I get to my small helper script, I’ll add that if you indeed want, “out of the box”, you can call this script with a bunch of youtube URL’s as parameters. Don’t know of a limit.

c:\python\python.exe youtube-dl http://youtube.com/watch?v=BqLvBUSJucg <anotherurl> <anotherurl2>

But if you’d like to just simply have a text file that you open up conveniently (name it youtubeurls.txt, cuz that’s what it refers to in the script below or change it of course), each line containing one url, and be able to call one script to take care of it, instead of having to paste a bunch of url’s in the command line, use the following script (maybe there’s a way to do in DOS, but I couldn’t figure it out.)

————————————–name this something.py—-

import os
urlfile = "youtubeurls.txt"

youtubefile = open(urlfile,'r')
for line in youtubefile:
    os.system("c:\python25\python youtube-dl.py " + line)

youtubefile.close()

Somehow Zonealarm got set on “High” for internet security, and I did not know it. This prevented web pages from loading, and it prevented outlook from getting email. The error messages looked exactly like I either had a cable problem, or something with my network card.

Embarrassing to say, I spent half the day troubleshooting, and then took a 20 mile drive to Fry’s for another network card.

Yes, because of a radio box that was set in Zonealarm.

All I had to do was take the basic troubleshooting steps that anyone, even the least tech-savvy should know, and simply remove all resident programs to make sure software was not the cause.

So I got back with the network card, plugged it in, and it is working, but only because zonealarm was accidentally not loaded due to another reason.. i didn’t know it was connected to the problem. I thought the new Network card fixed it.

Upon another reboot, somehow Zonealarm reverted to that High security radio box being set, and dang if the Internet was once again unreachable.

.. does Checkpoint (Zonealarm) do this on purpose when it knows that you’ve been using their free version for many years and not contributed a dime to them?

So really, though, the “Thanks Zonealarm” is moreso a genuine thanks, rather than the sarcasm that probably comes across at first.

This teaches me to the need to be smarter when it comes to eliminating causes that are soooo easy to eliminate (right click on context icon, choose EXit!)