Watching Youtube on a Slow Connection

WARNING: It's about to get nerdy up in here.

At best, the internet at my house is like a fast 56k connection, and at worst (when it's working at all) I could probably get faster download speeds from my cell phone. I have been using the wget utility to download important files, which works, but wget uses the command line prompt and could never be called user-friendly.

But wget does not work on youtube videos, so I've been totally lost on pop culture. I didn't discover The Rock Obama* until a month ago, and spent probably 45 minutes watching the status bar load (even less fun than watching water boil). You can often view youtube videos by pausing it and waiting for the whole video to load before watching it, but if internet connection drops out while it's loading, you can't resume loading it without completely restarting. This happened probably 5 times while I was trying to watch the This Too Shall Pass* video -- incredibly frustrating!

I think I have found a solution using Firefox plug ins. I had, like Owen Barder, recently switched to Chrome, but might have to switch back now -- these pluggins are great!

The first thing to do is to add the Firefox Downloadhelper plug-in. This lets you download flash videos from Youtube at the click of a button, and is a good solution in and of itself.

Unfortunately, Firefox's download utility isn't made for African connectivity. When the download fails, you can manually restart it and it will actually resume where it left off, but if your internet is bouncing up and down, this is a real pain.

What we need to do is use wget to download the downloadhelper files. If you right click the file in Firefox's download manager, you can select "Copy Link Location" and then paste that into the command line to use with wget... but it's the year 2010, we must be able to do better than that!

Enter VisualWget, a user interface that lets you use wget in a much more friendly environment. And, VisualWget can work with a Firefox pluggin called FlashGot to let you download files from Firefox using wget at the click of a button. This works great for downloading .pdf articles and other links, but I still need to copy and paste the downloadhelper url in to download youtube videos. Also, it can take FOREVER to download, but at least it works!

Steps to Watching Youtube in Sub-Sarahan Africa, Northern New Hampshire, Or Anywhere Else with Bad Connectivity

1. Add the Downloadhelper Firefox plug in
2. Download and install VisualWget
3. Add the Flashgot Firefox plug in
4. Follow the instructions on the VisualWget website (near the bottom) to add VisualWget as the default FlashGot download utility.
5. Click the annoying spinning Downloadhelper thinger to start downloading a youtube video
   
   
6. Right click on the file in the downloads box to copy the link location, then cancel the download
   
   
7. Go to Tools > FlashGot > FlashGot All to launch VisualWget
   
   
8. Press control + v in the url box to paste in the link and press OK to start downloading the file
   
9. Get back to work. It will download, don't worry!
10. Once the file downloaded, you may have to edit the file name and delete anything after .flv. You can view it in VLC media player, or use something like Youtube Downloader to convert the file so you can watch it on an ipod.
    

Now it's time to watch some South Park!


* You can't actually watch either of these from Ghana anymore... Anyone know how to mask your IP address?

Ghana Wins!

Ghana won the FIFA Under-20 World Cup on Friday night. Wow! It was CRAZY! Everyone was far, far more excited than I expected, about on par with Argentina during the 2006 World Cup. And they were only cheering for teenagers! The World Cup is going to be quite something indeed.

I watched the game on a 40' by 30' projector set up right smack in the middle of one of the most popular streets. The game itself was a slog. Ghana was playing a man down for most of the game, but managed to keep Brazil scoreless through the entire game and extra time as well, so it went to penalty kicks (about the only situation you ever want to see PKs). When Brazil missed their final kick to give Ghana a chance at winning... wow... I really wish I had a camera...

As Ghana set up to take their final kick for the game, I wondered aloud to my friend, "What percentage of Ghana do you think is praying right now?" The prayers were answered; it was a perfect kick. It was enough for Ghana's vice-president to decide that "God is a Ghanaian".

I originally thought I wanted to go to South Africa for the World Cup, but Ghana is looking like a pretty amazing place to be.

Thoughts on Accra

I often try to place Accra within the context of Africa as I know it (from only a short trip to Kenya last year). I used to describe it as an African capital city, but also a coastal town. Or, "more similar to Mombasa than Nairobi". But the more time I spend here, the more I realize that it's not very similar at all to Kenya. Accra has neither the exoticism of Mombasa's mixed African and Arabic cultures nor furious extremity of Nairobi's vital urban center and equally vital shantytowns.

Accra is rather a sprawling suburb of mixed communities, each with its own micro-culture. There's no "bad part of town" and no city center. It's a place characterized most by its lack of extremes. It has never felt particularly unfamiliar or even very foreign.

I try with this blog to deliver unexpected and (I hope) intriguing nuggets of Ghana's culture as fodder for the imaginations of my readers (Hi Mom! Hi Dad!) when they picture my life here. But the very fact that I find it more interesting to seek out and identify differences over similarities betrays the fact that Accra is not that strange. As often as it's the differences that make life interesting here, it's the similarities that make life easy.

In the New York Times!

The education project that I described in my previous post was featured in an op-ed by the lead researcher, Esther Duflo, in today's New York Times!

Check it out here!

FAQ

UPDATE

Unfortunately, we aren't supposed to blog about the education project, so I had to take that part of the post down.

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The most frequent question that I have been getting from friends/family is: what is it that you are doing? If I revealed all of what I’m doing in one post, I would have nothing to write about next week, so I will start with the basics here and expand on it later.

I am living in Accra, Ghana, and working for an organization called Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) (www.poverty-action.org). I have been here for two months now, and am signed up for 22 more. IPA is a research organization, and I am running two “field experiments” in public policy, one about education and one in small/micro enterprise business management. The idea behind field experiments is basically that, with a rigorous methodology, you can test different policies/programs to find out if they actually work the way you think they should. They are a whole lot of work, so they are usually only done with big programs/questions.