Neat ad-hoc networking trick

I didn't realise it for a long time, but instead of relying on DNS or directly entering IP addresses, most machines in my home network actually self organise. Many of you will already know this, but for those that dont...

Most devices support a thing called Multicast DNS - apple devices also do this.

Here's the article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local

This is why things like Transmission, SickBeard, XBMC and SSH keys are useful: you can simply point to xbmc.local:8080 and get to a basic remote control.

This lets you simply refer to whatever the machine is and start talking to it. On a local wifi network, it's great.

Wish:
Ubuntu made this much clearer in some fashion - the first time you join a network, it should flash a welcome message. If it hears about a particular host, it should notify "xbmc.local is available" or similar, indicating a few machines it has detected.

Xbmc remote experience

Samsung galaxy ii trumps ipad in almost everything.
It has more apps and better integration of my google and other services.
The only thing it needs is the auto discovery of xbmc hosts in the official app. The ipad has xbmc constellation which is just a touch nicer. The ui is better as is the volume controls.

XBMC vs Boxee vs file browsers

I ditched Boxee the other day. I was sick of it eating far too many resources, never quite keeping up with my mouse, fighting me with strange user interface metaphors; ignoring some files it would never recognize and providing me with not much enjoyment.

I installed XMBC and got rid of boxee. That was before I realized how good I had it: Boxee's scraper doesn't work off regexp and demand you do crazy things to your filesystem.

What I am struggling to understand is why I can't simply have a damned metadata layer and scraper for my desktop which plugs easily into the file browser.

All that both Boxee and XBMC are really doing is scrape, fetch, and organise. XBMC does it better with a few widgets like "recently discovered espisodes"; but even then; how hard is it?

I advocate the semantic web stack just because this is the very problem those tools should be able to solve in a trivial fashion; but I don't understand why this has not been achieved by anyone else in the last decade.

It's not like web scraping is mind bogglingly hard, nor matching little bits of string against certain sources. Musicbrainz solved the problem for mp3s some time ago: if the same can't be done for video content, I would be surprised. Additionally, it's not like relational databases are a new thing: they have been around for a bit, and that's all you really need: schema, inserts, and the web scraper organising it all.

So it really, really pains me when the Boxee/XBMC/Gnome world can't get it right. Why does Gnome/Gnautilus still treat media basically like this:

Whilst your original design might have been GUI filesystem explorer, what I actually want from you is GUI-like-XBMC-Metadata-displayer.