How to Watch Anything, Anywhere

So you've moved into your dorm and it doesn't have TV. Or you want to watch something but your roommate is currently using the TV to watch something else. Or you're stuck in the library studying during the big game. Whatever the situation, if you have a computer, tablet or smartphone, you can likely get access to the program you want to watch via your device. 

How, you may ask? Here are some methods:

1. Television Service Providers

Do you, your parents or your friends subscribe to a cable service, such as Comcast, DirectTV, dish or something else? If not, skip to method two. But if you or someone you know does pay for cable, you might be able to stream your favorite shows directly from the service provider. If your provider allows you to do this (and many of them do), all it takes is logging in to the provider's website (or app) and you'll be watching things just as though you were at home on the couch. 

2. Specific Channels' Sites and Apps

If you're trying to watch a specific program, you might be able to watch it through the broadcaster's website or app. Some broadcaster's will impose a wait period between the time a show is broadcast on TV and when it's available online, but sometimes—especially with sports programs—you might be able to watch live. Check out what's available with channels that you watch regularly, and you might be surprised to see how much they offer for streaming.

3. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu+, and Other Subscription Services

There are plenty of subscription services out there where you pay a monthly fee to have access to that site's collection of shows and movies. Netflix is one of the most-used due to the sheer volume of titles that are available, but Amazon Prime Instant Video, Hulu+, and other TV streaming services are gaining in popularity. Unfortunately, you'll find that most of them won't work when you travel abroad: the sites restrict access to videos to users in the United States because of possible copyright restrictions. Fortunately, you can easily get around geo-restrictions by installing a VPN, which will provide the site you want to stream from with a fake IP address, hiding your true location. 

4. YouTube

We all use YouTube to watch comedy videos or music videos or whatever else, but sometimes you can find TV shows or movies on there as well. Of course, the legality of this is often contested and YouTube usually takes these videos down when it notices them, but you might find something you're interested if you try searching for the movies you want. Just make sure you adjust your settings to only show longer videos (otherwise you'll bring up a bunch of clips). And scroll past anything with a link in the description of the video: these generally send you to illegitimate sites that prompt you to enter your credit card information. 

5. Torrents

Another way to get your fix of TV and movies—and to get videos that you can watch when you're not connected to the internet—is to download torrents. You've likely heard about torrenting and pirating before and know that there are risks involved in downloading torrents, even if the content is entirely legal. But plenty of people do it anyway. Here's another place a VPN comes in handy. Not only will it disguise your location, but it'll also encrypt the information traveling between your computer and the server you're accessing and vice versa, meaning your downloading activity is hidden from your internet service provider, university or hackers. 

If you have a computer or other device, you really can watch anything from anywhere. These are five different methods that you can use, though there are others out there, so that you can get watching all your favorite shows and programs with minimum fuss. How do you prefer to watch your programs? Are there any other methods you use? Tell us all about it in the comments! 

About the Author: Caroline Black is a freelance technology blogger for Secure Thoughts, one of the premiere internet security companies. She enjoys the freedom and flexibility that streaming shows online gives her—because no one can be home in front of the TV 24/7!

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How to Create a Custom Octopress Blog

This post was originally featured on tibsar.github.io. Check it out here.

Blogging is a great way for anyone to hone their writing skills. Today I'll be going over how set up an Octopress blog. Octopress is a static blogging framework that utilizes Jekyll. Wait a minute. Let's break that down.

Static

A static web page is a page that does not change user to user. The content that is displayed will be the same, no matter who views it.

Blogging Framework

A blogging framework allows a user to make changes to their blog with minimal coding. The framework takes care of the major code, so that the user can create the content easily.

Jekyll

Jekyll is the underlying framework. Jekyll creates templates that are stored on your computer and used to build the web pages of your blog so that the server does not have to. This allows the website to be loaded quickly.

Now that we've covered that, let's get started!

Step 0 - Initial Setup

If you haven't already, create a GitHub account! Don't worry about making a GitHub repository quite yet. Next, create a local directory on your computer for your blog. This should be someplace that you will remember easily, so that you can find it when you want to make a post. Once you have that created, use the command line to get into that directory. If you do not have experience with the command line, try out this tutorial. Primarily focus on how to navigate directories. You're also going to need a text editor. I suggest Sublime Text, but you can use any editor designed to edit plain text.

Step 1 - Getting Octopress

Once you are in the directory that you want your blog in, run the following commands using your command line:

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git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git octopress cd octopress bundle install

In the above code snippit we are first cloning, or making a copy, of imathis's repository, which is called octopress, from GitHub. Then, we are moving into the octopress folder. Next we are installing the ruby gems specified in the Gemfile.

Step 2 - Getting Rake

Rake allows us to automate tasks. This makes many tasks related to our blog a lot easier. In the command line, type the following command:

1	rake install

Oh no! Did that throw an error? Don't worry! If that didn't work for you, enter the following commands:

1 2	bundle exec rake install rake install

We've done a decent amount, so let's commit what we've done to git.

1 2	git add -A git commit -m "Creates and sets up my basic octopress blog"

The first command tells git to track all the new additions or deletions in the directory that we are currently in. The next command commits these changes to git with a message. The message can be anything, but it's best to describe what changes you are committing.

Step 3 - Setting Up _config.yml

It's time to view your files in your text editor. If you are using Sublime Text, you can do this by typing sublime .. Once you have the directory open in a text editor, navigate to the _config.yml file. You should see a block of code similar to the code below:

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title: # Used in the header and title tags subtitle: # A description used in the header author: # Your name, for RSS, Copyright, Metadata description: # A default meta description for your site

Fill out each of these fields with information about your blog. When you're done, it should look something like this, but with your information:

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title: A Very Amazing Blog # Used in the header and title tags subtitle: Blogging With Octopress # A description used in the header author: Jane Doe # Your name, for RSS, Copyright, Metadata description: A blog about Octopress # A default meta description for your site

This was a big step, so let's commit to git again.

1 2	git add . git commit -m "Configures _config.yml"

This time we used git add ., which will add all additions to git, but leave out any deletions. We did not make any deletions, so this will not cause any problems at this point. You could also use git add -A, which in this case would complete the same action.

Step 4 - Hosting Octopress on GitHub

We are going to be using GitHub Pages to host our blog. First, create a new repository on GitHub called username.github.io. Username should be replaced with your GitHub username. Make sure the check box that initializes the repository with a README is UNCHECKED. Next, we are going to put our blog into the repository that we just created. From the command line, enter the following command:

1	rake setup_github_pages

Next, you'll see:

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Enter the read/write url for your repository (For example, 'git@github.com:your_username/your_username.github.io.git') or 'https://github.com/your_username/your_username.github.io') Repository url:

Go back to your repository on GitHub. Find Quick Setup and set it to SSH. Copy the URL provided and paste it into the your terminal. The result should look something like this, with your information as the url.

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Enter the read/write url for your repository (For example, 'git@github.com:your_username/your_username.github.io.git') or 'https://github.com/your_username/your_username.github.io') Repository url: git@github.com:tibsar/tibsar.github.io.git

So what did we just do?

• The url: line in _config.yml was changed to contain the url of your blog
• You were moved to a new source branch, where all editting of your blog will occur
• You were given access to push your blog to GitHub

Since we can now push our blog to GitHub, let's do that using git push origin source.

Step 5 - Writing A Post

You officially have a blog! That means it's time to make our first post. Go back to the command line and enter:

1	rake new_post["My First Post On Octopress"]

The string in quotes within the brackets is the title of the post. You can make the title anything, but it should probably have something to do with the content of the post. Now, go back to your text editor. Navigate to thesource/_posts/ folder. This is where all of your posts will be stored. Right now, there should only be one file, with the date and title of your post as the file name. Open that file and find something along the lines of:

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--- layout: post title: "My First Post On Octopress" date: 2014-04-28 13:03:17 -0400 comments: true categories: ---

You can add categories into the categories section that relate to your post. To enter multiple categories, you can use the syntax ["cats", "octopress", "babies"] The content of your post will go under the second ---. You can write anything here! Since it's the first post though, you may want to keep up tradition with "Hello world!"

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--- layout: post title: "My First Post On Octopress" date: 2014-04-28 13:03:17 -0400 comments: true categories: ["Octopress", "Hello World"] --- Hello world!

If you want to see what your post is going to look like, before you deploy it, simply enter:

1	rake preview

This will start Octopress locally. To see our blog, open a web browser and go to localhost:4000. You can now see what your blog is going to look like! If you don't like the look, don't fret. We will be going over how to customize your blog in another post. When you are done previewing your blog, you can stop by hitting ctrl + c on your keyboard.

Step 6 - Deploying

Now that we have a post, we need to know how to get our blog online. Go back to the command line and enter:

1 2	rake generate rake deploy

Now, we should send all of our changes up to GitHub. Do you remember the commands from earlier?

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git add -A git commit -m "adds my first blog post and deploys my blog" git push origin source

Congratulations, you now have an Octopress blog! Now test it out! Go to username.github.io in a web browser to see your newly deployed blog. If you love your blog, but hate how it looks, checkout Customizing Your Octopress Blog.

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