About 2 years ago the Portland Indymedia video collective made a really cool and funny little video about dumpster-diving. The group has made a lot of cool videos, but right now the only way to get them online is using bit torrent and other peer-to-peer technology, and though I have always liked these methods in principle and in theory, sometimes it's a pain. The good thing about them is that you can save on bandwidth, and users get a fast download, because the download gets split up amongst a bunch of people who have the file.

The bad news is that as time passes, less people are sharing the file, until there might be zero peers that have it, or maybe just 1, if you have a reliable tracker/seeder that keeps offering the file. So then you have real slow downloads. There ought to be alternatives. We should be making better use of resources like archive.org, and we should, after an initial wave of popularity for new stuff, be offering stuff as regular http downloads.

Right now on my hosting service I have more drive space and bandwidth than I know what to do with, so as an experiment I'm going to offer DIY Dumpstering 101 right now as a good ol' http download. We'll see how my bandwidth usage goes up and if it's not crazygonuts then maybe I'll procede with more of the old pdx stuff. I also want to gather and upload a bunch of my older stuff too.

note that the file is huge (about 100 megs) and it's in DIVX format. For more information about how to play such files, see the page on portland indymedia about that. Also see more about the video on the portland indymedia site.