In all honesty, I don’t think the DSi XL is part of Nintendo’s standard line-up. It’s a reaction to the popularity of the Wii in retirement centers and is aimed at a much older – and much different audience – than the new 3D DS, aptly named the 3DS. Older folks who may have been put off by the DSi’s small size and “kiddie” features will be able to handle the XL just fine.
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CNBC is hand-wringing a little about the launch of the DSi XL being hampered by the announcement of the 3DS. This is a lot like worrying that bocce ball sales will go down because a new soccer ball has been announced – the two items are so different, and aimed at such different audiences – that the connection is dubious at best and ludicrous at worst.

Then you have this line: “The larger screen size will also let people see the games, rather than just the device.” I don’t have any idea what that means.

Anyway, as Dave noted in his review, this is a Nintendo for Moms and Dads, not kids. The obsessives who have to have the latest and greatest will pick up a 3DS. The old-timers will keep picking up the DSi XL for years to come.

The Trimix is another favorite because it looks like some weird mash-up between a Seiko my dad used to wear and something Hunter S. Thompson would buy. I’m really curious as to what the build quality is like on these old timers. Sadly there’s no pricing on this one.

This point of this guide is to get people acquainted with the basics of Usenet, but if any of you beardy old-timers have any tips, tricks, advice or tearful memories to share about your decades on the ‘Net, that party’s in the comments. Anyway!

What is Usenet?

I’ll spare you a deep historical and technical explanation, because it’d bore you to death, and I’m not the guy to give it: Usenet has been around since the late 70s as one of the bulletin board systems that the first generation of true nerds cut their teeth on. It was designed for discussion, and lived across tons of decentralized servers. For most purposes it’s been replaced by the internet as we know it today, but it’s still very much alive, albeit with a different face.

You see, somewhere back in the 80s, someone started uploading binary content—files, not words—to Usenet. This was, and in some ways still is, an awkward fit, but it quickly became one of the main uses for the service. Why? Because nobody seemed to care much about regulating it—they still don’t, for whatever reason—and because, man, it was fast. These factors made it a perfect refuge for for files of all types, and now the pure amount of stuff available on Usenet rivals—and in a lot of categories, exceeds—the best torrent trackers, which are getting picked off anyway.

Why Do You Want It?
This one’s easy: Aside from serving a huge amount of content, Usenet is usually the first place popular downloads show up, and unlike torrents, once they’re up, the downloads immediately run at full speed. Speaking of which, it bears repeating: Usenet is extremely fast. Unless your service is absolute crap, you’re probably going to max out your broadband connection. Once you’ve tasted this kind of speed, torrents almost seem silly. And lastly, you don’t have to seed, or upload, anything.

For download junkies, Usenet is a wonderland. But it’s got a longstanding reputation for being a little tough to get into, so most people don’t even give it a shot. This isn’t really fair, since Usenet isn’t at all hard to use. Here’s how to get started:

Choosing a Usenet Service

There was a time when ISPs weren’t just cool with Usenet binaries—they actually hosted them. Some still do, but in those rare cases there are usually crippling bandwidth restrictions, throttling measures and all kind of missing content. To mine the Usenet gold you really care about—the alt.binaries content—you’re going to need to buy access. Sorry! Usenet isn’t a peer-to-peer service, so you’ve got to pay someone, somewhere for all that bandwidth and storage. The good news is, you can get away with spending about $15 a month for unlimited, unthrottled access. If you’re not comfortable with this, get your feet wet with a free trial, like GigaNews‘, or just buy a one-off download pass, good for a few gigabytes.

There are a couple things to look for in a Usenet provider, but most major, reputable services are roughly comparable. Retention is a word you’ll see a lot: Usenet servers, given the pure volume of content they get loaded with, have to clear themselves out every once in a while, meaning that files have a limited lifespan. Retention is just a term to describe how long a provider can afford to keep uploads, and the longer they can hold onto uploads, the more files they have. You shouldn’t settle for much less that 300-day retention nowadays.

Providers also advertise how many parallel connections to their servers they permit at one time. More=faster, but past about ten concurrent downloads, the numbers really stop meaning anything, unless you’re on some kind of insanely fast commercial connection, in which case WHAT ARE YOU DOING DOWNLOADING FILEZ, HMM?

Lastly, there are download limits. This should be more obvious, but just just in case: This represents how much you can download from your provider in a given month. This one’s all you, so if you really don’t think you’ll break 10GB a month, only buy 10GB a month. Once you really start to kick your torrent habit, though, you might be surprised at what you’re capable of.

I’ve been using Astraweb for years—they’re cheap, and fast enough to saturate my connection—so the rest of the tutorial will assume you’ve chosen them. If you’ve gone with another provider, the only difference will be your server settings, which they’ll give you after you sign up. Remember: Usenet servers are all meshed together, so no matter who your provider is, the available downloads should be about the same, at least for as long as your provider keeps them around.

Choosing a Client

As with torrents, there’s some pretty weird stuff going on behind the scenes with Usenet. As I mentioned earlier, adding binary files to Usenet was kind of an afterthought, which means the procedure for downloading them kind of complicated, at least on the back end. For example: Usenet binaries have relatively low size limits, so any larger content—movies, software, etc—needs to be split up into lots of small pieces. You know how sometimes a torrent comes in about about 40 .RAR files that have to be rejoined once they’re downloaded? That’s because it came from Usenet, where files can’t be much more than 20MB. So, your client’s got to be able to handle all these group downloads, and preferably join them together for you automatically.

There a plenty of Usenet clients out there, but most of them are either don’t support the kind of file downloading we want—your email app probably falls into this category—are command-line-based, or cost money. I’m done spending your dollars for today, so I’ll point everyone toward the only free, cross-platform Usenet binary client I know of, and one I’ve been using for quite a long time: It’s called SABnzbd. The rest of the guide will be based around this app, though you can try to follow along with some other free alternatives if you like. Mac OSers may want to try Hellanzb (GUI version linked) and Windows folks could go with Alt.binz. But SABnzbd is, to put it bluntly, pretty great.

SABnzbd runs a local web interface, so it’ll look the same no matter what OS you’re on. Here’s how to get started.

1.) Download and install the client (For Windows, it’s an installer like any other app; for Mac OS, it’s a .DMG)
2.) Start it up. It should open a browser window to a control panel-esque page, clearly label as SABnzbd.
3.) Navigate to the “Config” Page and click “Servers”
4.) Enter the server settings your Usenet provider gave you after signup (Astraweb’s at left)


5.) Staying in the “Config” page, click “Folders”
6.) Choose where you want downloaded files to go, and where you want the temporary files to live before they’re finished downloading.
7.) Choose a “Watched” folder. This how SABnzbd will know what you want it to download. Make it a place that’s easy for you to save to, from a browser.

That’s it! Now just leave SABnzbd running, and we’ll start to explore Usenet. Feel free to play around with more of SABnzbd’s options, like the themes, one of which is featured on this article’s top image, but follow this general rule: if it’s not totally obvious to you what an option changes, you should probably ignore it. The only thing you might have to worry about outwith this setup procedure is enabling an SSL connection, if your ISP is throttling your download speeds. More on that here.

Finding Those Files

Now that you’ve got access to Usenet, and the right tools to draw those sweet, sweet files from it, it’s time to dive in. Since Usenet in the raw is an incomprehensible mess, something has emerged called the Newzbin, or NZB standard. NZBs are a lot like torrent files: They’re little pointers that contain information about all the little scattered pieces of a given download, and which give clients like SABnzbd everything they need to make downloading look seamless to users. To “explore Usenet” is really to explore indexes of NZBs, and to do that, you need a good search engine. The best is at Newzbin, from the people who invented the NZB format. Unfortunately, it too is paid, and currently invite-only. Instead, you should use one of the decent free alternatives, like NZBs.org, Binsearch or Newszleech. Searching takes some practice, but once you get a sense of how people name stuff ’round these parts, it’s a breeze.

Once you find your NZB, download it to the directory you marked “Watch” in SABnzbd. Alternately, you can just download it to wherever you want, and add it to SABnzbd at the program’s homepage, under “Add File”. Now check on your SABnzbd queue, where you should see something like this:

It’s working! And yes, it’s really going that fast. If it’s not downloading, you may need to check your server settings: Sometimes ISPs block the default port, 119, meaning you’ll have to use another one that your provider supports. 8080 is a common one, as is 1818. Refer back to step four for this; changing it should only take a second.

SABnzbd takes care of all that nasty .RAR rejoining and extracting for you, so once the download is done, your designated download folder should have a fully-cooked, ready-to-watch/listen/run file waiting for you. Bask in it.

So, that’s Usenet!

Odd and Ends

As you’ve probably guessed by now, there are a lot of ways to make SABnzbd more powerful. For that, have a look at this fantastic thread on SomethingAwful by one of the app’s developers, and the SABnzbd wiki, which answers just about any support question you might have.

Also, there’s a big subject we didn’t even address here today, which is how you actually add stuff to Usenet. The process can be a little involved, and hey, you’re brand new to the world of Usenet—let the rest of us worry about uploading for now. That said, when you’re finally ready, here’s a primer.

So that’s about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments—your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. Happy torrenting Usenetting, and have a great weekend!

They had their ways. Although old-timers may tell you they had to wank uphill both ways in the snow, there was porn to be had. It might not have been great porn, but mankind got off before there even was porn.

The only odd part about many of these methods is that you had to interact with somebody to get your porn. An oddity in today’s one-man private show in front of the computer.

Gizmodo ’79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

Thanks to Noobs-R-Us in sparking the idea for this post

Sneaking into porn theaters. Yeah, there were porn theaters. These looked like regular theaters on the outside, but on the inside there were many, many more penises and vaginas. If you were underage but clever, you could somehow sneak into the theater via an older brother, a friend working at the theater or a fake mustache.

Of course, once you were inside and watching the movie, you still had to hold it until you got home. Despite it being a communal function, it was still generally frowned upon to pull one out while other dudes were sitting next to you.

Porn quality: 10
Privacy: 5

Using lingerie and clothing catalogs: Various women’s undergarment catalogs like JC Penney provided ample material for the youngsters of the 70s. What they lacked in actual nudity they made up for in quality of models (sometimes).

Although guys (especially young ones) had easier access to these catalogs than more mature fare like Playboy or Penthouse, it was just as hard to explain away why they had one of these stashed under your bed. The excuse of shopping for a birthday/Christmas/Hanukkah present would be tenuous at best.

But, the fact that the models had most of their clothing on provided a great imagination-building exercise that strengthened minds for the future. This explains why movies today are just uninspired rehashes of what we already saw in the ’80s.

Porn quality: 3.5
Privacy: 8

Image credit

Mental spank bank: The ultimate in bare-bones beating, this required you to be ultra-vigilant during your day in order to store images for later use. Trips to the beach, the department store changing room, the food court at the mall, the post office, the pool, the dentist’s office, the Grand Canyon and the polling booth could all obtain lucrative deposits for your bank.

The downside, of course, is that this relied solely on your memory. So any errant noise or smell could interfere with the delicate recollection process, making an already longer-than-usual activity take even longer.

But, the fact that you can do this anywhere, in any position, trained you well for life down the road. If you can squeeze one out standing up in the shower, lying down in bed, squatting in the woods, kneeling in your neighbor’s bushes or face down in your backyard, you could literally squeeze one out anywhere. At work, during your lunchbreak? No problem. At night, while you were visiting grandma’s smelly apartment? Cake. In the car, waiting for your old lady to pick up the dry cleaning? Done and done.

Porn quality: 0-3 (Depending on how well your imagination worked)
Privacy: 10

Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler: As a teen, you may not have legally been able to get these magazines, but when has that problem stopped any kid from getting anything? You could bribe the guy at the corner store, swipe your dad’s when he wasn’t looking, borrow one from your friends, ask your older brother to buy one for you, or just plain steal one.

Although the more commonly available magazines didn’t show hardcore penetration, it was usually enough for kids in the ’70s to get the job done. If you somehow froze that same kid in 1979, unfroze him in 2009 and showed him YouPorn, he would simultaneously masturbate while holding up his other hand to shield his eyes in disgust. It’s a new world, my friends.

Porn quality: 7
Privacy: 3

Nude scenes on TV: Before VHS (or Betamax) became common, people had to stick to their programming schedules. As Adam Carolla (a man who was alive and masturbating during the ’70s) says, they had to time their diddling sessions in accordance to whatever movie was airing.

If something had a nude scene 57 minutes into the film and started at 11:00 PM, you would do the mental calculations and turn on the TV at 12:25 (accounting for commercials) and see maybe a boob and a half. That would have to last you for a week and a half.

Porn quality: 3
Privacy: 2