How to listen to a netradio channel when the firewall blocks the port

TCP port 8000 is being blocked in the customer's premises where I'm currently working. This is a Windows box. Putty resolves the problem easily for me, with some support from a remote FreeBSD setup. A GNU/Linux box would do the same.

1. Configure Putty to forward a TCP port to some local port in the FreeBSD machine.
From Putty configuration,
-> Connection -> SSH -> Tunnels -> "Add a new forwarded port"

• In the Source port field, type some port, that is the port where you will be connecting to from your media player. Use for example, 8080.
• In the Destination field, type for example, localhost:8000.

2. Now with Putty's SSH port forwarding configured, SSH to your FreeBSD/Linux account.

3. Now we need to forward the netradio data to the port what is being forwarded to the Windows machine. For that, I'm using wget and netcat. So in the Linux/FreeBSD account, command

 wget -qO-  http://relay5.slayradio.org:8000 | nc -l 8000

The above is redirecting wget's output to stdout and that is then piped to netcat that is listening to local port 8000. That was the port that is being forwarded. Note that in some version of nc, you may need to add the -p switch for it to work, e.g. "nc -l -p 8000".

4. Now, the netradio data is available from port 8080 from the Windows computer. You may now connect to http://localhost:8080/ using your favorite media player and start listening.

Basic's not the answer, write in C

This made me laugh, and so I must link it here.

Denied to pay for music

It is amazing how they do their best to prevent us from paying for music. I was listening to Dream Theater's great album Octavarium that lays on my hard disk in a free format when I decided to find out if DT has released anything after Octavarium. According to Wikipedia they indeed had released an album titled Systematic Chaos.

Nowadays I don't have much time for enterntainment and I don't have any music tracker accounts that I used to have in the past. I loved to use the trackers because they made it so easy to get what you wanted quickly and the delivered product was always high quality and actually worked on my devices. I have never bought a physical music cd because I consider physical objects very impractical compared to digital bits when we talk about music. In my childhood when we didn't have internet nor mp3 files, I wasn't so much into music. I only began listening music when we already had Napster and friends to help us.

With no access to music trackers I had to look for alternatives. The iTunes is infamous for selling music that you cannot listen to, so I decided to check if Nokia's music store sold music files that actually work because I prefer music that I can listen to.

So I went to the Nokia music store. They said they don't support my operating system and my browser. I'm running Firefox on Linux. Sigh.

Now my hunger for the album only grew stronger, because when something is denied your desire only grows. I hadn't kept myself up to date about Apple's current stand on DRM and I decided to give iTunes a try. In my lust I was hopeful and naive to think that if I pay for my music, maybe they would, after all, let me have music files that are not broken, ignoring all the bad reputation that I was perfectly aware of. The risk wasn't great, because iTunes allows me to buy one song for one dollar, so I could safely test it.

On my Powerbook, I logged in, gave my credit card details, searched for the album and bough one track from Systematic Chaos. I had to click a few times to get rid of completely useless user agreements, that Apple itself never reads, but the buying process was manageable. Of course it was more difficult than music trackers are, but I was surprised that I even managed to buy the song, because usually premium internet services do their utterest to prevent users from buying anything.

Now I had the song on my laptop. Next phase was the most dangerous one; transferring the song to my PC that is attached to my stereos. I was only one step from being able to listen the song that I had paid for, but no... after transferring the song via netcat it wouldn't work. The file opened in VLC but the track was blank. Clearly the file was broken.

I don't have any use for songs that work only on my laptop because I want to use my stereos to get a good sound. I don't have time nor motivation to switch my audio wires every once in a while. The lesson I learned was that if I want to get music, I must once again go and find some high quality music trackers that actually are able to offer digital music that works on my devices.

I was denied to pay for music. I was allowed to pay for air.

Top C64 remixes

Having listened Slayradio in excessive amounts for a couple of years, some of the remixes have stood out, and here are my favorites in random order.

• Da Phuture Kemist - Tristesse
• DJ Skitz - Super Huey (Storm Mix)
• Infamous - Spy Vs Spy
  
• Peter W - Outrun (no speed limit remix)
• Thermostatic - Metal skin
• Machinae Supremacy - Sidology 2 Trinity
• Machinae Supremacy - Great Giana Sisters
  
• DJ Mitch - Cauldron (Hexenkche Walpurgisnacht HardTrance Mix)
  
• Chronberg - Gyroscope - Unzalicious version
• Makke - Glider Rider
• Dreamer - Turrican
• Obscuresounds - Arkanoid
• Binster - Ghouls And Ghosts Poltergeist Mix
  
• Dafunk - Hardcore Power (We Believe in Goa)
• Dafunk - Destruction - The New Beginning (rmx)
• weebl - Deltaplus
• Tonka - The Last Ninja - Palace Gardens Loader

Most of them are available from http://remix.kwed.org/