I didn't want to abandon RSS Ticker's users (especially with the shutdown of Google Reader imminent, already leaving one less feed reading option), but I also couldn't dedicate the time to completely rewrite the add-on and keep all of its features. So here's what I've done:

RSS Ticker has been completely rewritten. This has given me the opportunity to use the knowledge I've gained in the last seven years of programming to improve the overall design of the ticker and to restructure the code to play nicely with the new Firefox APIs.

What hasn't changed? RSS Ticker will still scroll your feeds in your browser. You can still choose to put it at the top or bottom of your Firefox window. You can still exclude specific feeds. You can mark as read, mark feeds as read, open in tabs, open all in tabs, etc. You can temporarily disable the ticker. You can change the ticker speed, smoothness, and direction. You can hide the ticker automatically when it's empty.

What has changed? In order to continue supporting RSS Ticker, I've had to drop a number of features. Here are some things you can no longer do with RSS Ticker:

• Manually refresh the feeds.
• Specify how often the feeds should refresh.
• Randomize the order of the ticker items
• Limit the number of items per feed
• Display items that have already been read
• Show unread items in bold
• Manually limit the width of ticker items
• Customize the context menu

I know some of you liked and used these features. I'm sorry I had to remove them, but it was the choice between removing them or abandoning the add-on altogether.

A few features haven't been removed, but they have been changed (a.k.a. "improved"):

1. All of the remaining options (six of them, down from a total of 37) are displayed inline in RSS Ticker's section of the Add-ons Manager.

2. If you want to temporarily disable the ticker, just uncheck it in the View > Toolbars menu.

3. To remove a feed from the ticker (but not from your bookmarks), right-click on it in the Bookmarks Manager and uncheck "Show in RSS Ticker."

This new version will be available in a couple of weeks after some more testing, but if you'd like to test it early, leave your e-mail address in a comment or ping me at cfinke@gmail.com and I'll send you a copy.

Thanks to the OPML Support users who alerted me to the problem via email and in the comments here, since I don't often have occasion to check whether my buttons are disappearing.

I say "GIF", but apparently lots of other people pronounce it "GIF".

Get it?

I learned it as Ess-Cue-Ell and was very confused the first time someone asked me if I had worked with my sequel. "My sequel to what?"

Still not sure about this one. Thankfully, I never have to say it out loud.

I remember reading a newsgroup post where someone was ridiculed for calling it "C Pound." That someone was not me, but it could have been.

Gee-You-Eye is not as fun as the correct gooey pronunciation.

My college roommate was a diehard Apple fan and especially loved their operating system, "Mackossex" (Mac OS X).

Firefox extensions use a file format called XPI, pronounced "zippy", not "ex-pee-eye."

For years, I thought that LaTeX was spoken the same as latex until I heard a professor mention that he had used "layteck" to typeset his papers. In my senior year of college. Dodged a bullet there.

I have a coworker from Iceland named Egill. It's not "Ee-gill", "egg-ill", or "Ay-gill". It doesn't even have an L-sound if you say it properly, and I've been informed that because I'm not from Iceland, I probably can't physically pronounce it.

As a public service, here's a pronunciation guide to my name.

Being a programmer in the early twenty-first century is like being a blacksmith in the early twentieth century. No matter what is available to the public at large, you have the advantage of being able to build your own tools.

A few days ago, however, I was made aware of a new project using Typo.js: NoTex. It's a browser-based reStructuredText editor.

The author, Hasan Karahan, has used Typo.js to support 87 (!) different dictionaries. I'm happy to report that spellchecking in the app is smooth and indistinguishable from the native browser spellchecker.

You can follow NoTex's development on GitHub.

For posterity, and for anyone reading this via a feed reader, here's how my site looks right now:

It's a beautiful (and more importantly, readable) theme designed by Joen Asmussen.

If you want to follow Twenty Thirteen's development, subscribe to the Twenty Thirteen tag on the Make WordPress Core blog.

1. No metadata. All I see on TiVo is the title (which is just the filename of the video). I'd like to see the year the movie came out, the MPAA rating, the description, etc. just like I do for movies I recorded off of TV.
2. No commentary tracks. The best part of owning a physical DVD is access to the commentary track(s); unfortunately, pyTivo isn't able to stream the video in such a way that alternate audio can be selected via TiVo's built-in audio selection, so the default leaves you with just the first audio track.

I've written two scripts to fix these problems, and they're available at GitHub.

pytivo_metadata.py

pyTivo uses metadata files to supply information to the TiVo about each video file, like the description or the year the movie came out. pytivo_metadata.py generates metadata files for all videos in a given directory (and subdirectories) so you don't have to write them yourself.

Here's an example of a filename from a ripped DVD:

/path/to/movies/The Family Man.m4v

This is the movie "The Family Man," starring Nicolas Cage. Without any metadata, this is what the movie looks like on TiVo:

Running pytivo_metadata.py /path/to/movies/ will query The Open Movie Database API for information on all videos in that directory that don't have metadata files; here's the metadata that pytivo_metadata.py will save to The Family Man.m4v.txt:

title : The Family Man
vProgramGenre : Comedy
vProgramGenre : Drama
vProgramGenre : Romance
isEpisode : false
year : 2000
movieYear : 2000
description : A fast-lane investment broker, offered the opportunity to see how the other half lives, wakes up to find that his sports car and girlfriend have become a mini-van and wife.
mpaaRating : P3
vActor : Nicolas Cage
vActor : Téa Leoni
vActor : Don Cheadle
vActor : Jeremy Piven
vDirector : Brett Ratner
vWriter : David Diamond
vWriter : David Weissman

pyTivo will automatically use this file to supply the metadata for The Family Man.m4v to TiVo.

(See the pyTivo wiki for more info on the metadata file format.)

No guarantees are made regarding the correct movie being returned from the API, so maybe do a cursory check of that after running the script. Or don't. Whatever.

pytivo_commentary.py

If you rip a DVD and include multiple audio tracks in the file, you can stream each of those tracks via pyTivo by using pytivo_commentary.py.

If you're using Handbrake, go to the Audio tab and add each commentary track as an additional entry:

Then, add a note to the filename to let pytivo_commentary.py know that there's a commentary track available:

The Family Man (Commentary).m4v

If the movie has more than one commentary, name it like this:

The Family Man (Commentary x 3).m4v

(Yes, The Family Man, starring Nicolas Cage, does have three commentary tracks; one of them is completely dedicated to the music score. What a country!)

pytivo_commentary.py will then generate multiple copies of the video and metadata file (one for each commentary) and add "Commentary #1" (or #2 or #3) to each title. The additional video files are only hardlinks to the original, so no additional disk space is needed.

Then, add this line to the [Server] section of your pyTivo.conf (and restart the pyTivo service):

audio_lang=commentary

This causes pyTivo to choose the first audio track it can find that includes the label commentary. In the metadata file for each commentary track, you'll see a line like this:

Override_mapAudio 0.2 : commentary

This tells pyTivo to explicitly use the label commentary for the second audio track instead of whatever the label was which means that when you stream this video, pyTivo will send the commentary audio track instead of the original audio. Because the metadata file for the non-commentary version doesn't have this override, pyTivo will send the first audio track.

Conclusion

There you have it; now you can rip your DVDs to a hard drive, stream them to your TiVo, listen to the commentaries, and never have to worry about scratches, extra remotes, or mandatory previews before your movie.

These scripts were tested with the wmcbrine version of pyTivo (specifically, the version pulled as of this commit).

The scripts and their required module (pytivo_utilities.py) are available on GitHub in the pyTivo Utilities repository.

Do you like the Internet? Working from home (or coffee shops or co-working spaces or libraries or your friend's house or a grassy area with Wi-Fi access)? Making a difference for millions of users? Being part of a profitable company? Retina displays? Work with us.

Do any of these places sound like interesting locations for week-long team meetups? Hawaii, New Zealand, Mexico, Spain, New York City, Miami, San Francisco, Iceland, Boston, Las Vegas, San Diego, Italy, Berlin, Amsterdam, Montreal, Portugal, New Orleans, Chicago, Winnipeg, or Montevideo, Uruguay? Work with us. (And that's just a selection of 2012 meetup locations.)

Are you a backend developer? Work with us. Mobile developer? Work with us. Customer service and support? Work with us. Designer? Work with us. Front-end developer? Work with us. Wordsmith? Work with us. Sysadmin? Work with us.

Do you dislike cubicles? Dress codes? Commuting? Working 9-5? Work with us.

Working at Automattic is the best job I've ever had, and I've even worked at AOL, so you know that it must be good. Won't you come work with me and treat yourself to the best job you've ever had?