Update: Comcast now offers ESPN360. So, if your neighbor has Comcast and you don’t, they can also now provide the initial connection goodness you’ll need to get it running on a different provider (instructions below).

Update: Cox now offers ESPN360 as well!

Have Comcast (or Cox, or other non-participating internet provider) and hate them (yet, secretly love them) for not caving in to ESPN and paying licensing fees for ESPN360.com? (ESPN is the real villain here)

You have a few choices:
#1) Change providers. Lame, and in many cases impossible.
#2) Convince a friend who has a participating provider to set up Dynamic DNS, OpenSSH, and Port Forwarding, then set up Putty so you can tunnel your traffic over a Socks Proxy through their connection. (WAY too complicated, and puts a huge strain on their connection, if it’s even fast enough to handle it!)
#3) Load and switch.

Alex, I choose ‘Load and Switch’ for $800.

The idea is simple: ESPN360 only authenticates your network provider’s IP when loading their player. So as long as you boot up the service on a supported provider, you’re all set! There’s a few ways you can do this:

#1) Take your laptop to Starbucks (or some other AT&T hotspot), start the player in your browser, put your computer to sleep (browser still open) and go home.
#2) Get permission from your neighbor who has slow AT&T DSL to use his wireless connection to connect and load the player. Then switch back to your connection.
#3) Wardrive. (I do not recommend this one!)

I happen to live on a campus where I can use my school’s slow, highly-restricted network to connect, (all .edu or .mil providers get access!) and then toggle over to Comcast for the real streaming.

Now, combine that with Fullscreen viewing on Mac OS X and you’re all set!

How many KU Jayhawks games did I have to miss before I discovered all this? Far too many. Thankfully, that problem has now been rectified. Rock Chalk Jayhawk!

This week my frustrations with the fact that I have two calendars going on non-compatible platforms finally came to an end. The task? I wanted to sync my iCal calendar on OS X Tiger (10.4) with my Outlook 2007 calendar on Windows Vista. Even more importantly, it had to be a two-way sync, with changes to either calendar being reflected on the other. Furthermore, I wanted to be able to sync multiple calendars, not just one. As a bonus, this would all be accessible on the web.

Now, this wouldn’t be too hard if I wanted to spend cold, hard cash on commercial software (or even worse, subscription-based software), but I wanted to do it all for free. I tried to do this last spring, and failed miserably. Thankfully, things have changed now, much thanks to the free availability of Google Calendar with multiple calendar support, and the recent free offering of Calgoo. Here’s the full tutorial, then:

First, set up equivalent calendars in all three locations.

(Google Calendar, iCal (version 2.0.5 on OS X Tiger), Outlook 2007)

1. Set up multiple calendars in Google Calendar
2. Set up multiple calendars in iCal 2.0.5
3. Set up multiple calendars in Outlook 2007

Then, tie them all together.

(Using GCALDaemon, Lingon, and Calgoo Connect)

1. Sync multiple iCal 2.0.5 calendars with Google Calendar
2. Sync multiple Outlook 2007 calendars with Google Calendar

That’s it! You’re done! Sure was easy, wasn’t it? As you can see, all changes everywhere are synchronized through Google Calendar nearly instantaneously: now you can keep all your Outlook, iCal, and Google Calendars in sync for free.