Thanks to Reddit user /u/GreatBusinessman, we have a nicely built Wine bottle of Acestream, ready to download.

Grab it here: /acestream-download

Or for a faster download, grab this torrent magnet file: acestream-torrent-magnet (right-click and copy link)

Here's a video on how to download and use it... screenshots and directions follow.

Ok, so you've downloaded Acestream (if not, grab it here: /acestream-download)

Once it's downloaded, you'll want to copy it to your /Applications folder.

Now, the first time you run it, you'll want to right-click or CTRL-click it and click open.

Be patient on first run. Once it's working, you'll see this.

Now it's time to find your Acestream stream ID. It's a big long string of characters. You'll want to copy this string.

And flip back to Acestream app and paste it in.

Hit play, and be patient. It may take a while to find peers and start buffering.

There you go!

Some notes:

• (reddit thread by /u/GreatBusinessman)
• Acestream P2P -- the more popular the stream, the more peers you'll have.
• Some ISPs throttle P2P traffic. If you have constant buffering, try a VPN.

With the new Firefox being released, I thought I would revisit these three browsers for their effect on battery life.

• I completed the experiment using a Macbook 11" from 2011. This is the "couch computer" at our house.
• It is used every day for Youtube, Netflix, Plex, Facebook, etc. It runs macOS 10.13.1. It has a 3rd party battery in it (I replaced it myself), which is about a year old.
• I turned off all energy-saving features, like screen-dimming, sleep mode, etc.
• Then I ran the browser in 'private' mode, and had it loop through videos on my Youtube channel, until the battery died.
• I recorded it using an iPad. The setup looked like this:

Here's the testing, with time-lapse videos:

First, Firefox. Started at 8:53, computer turned off at 10:16. Making it 1 hour and 23 minutes (83 minutes)

Second, Chrome. Started at 3:59, computer turned off at 5:59. Giving it approximately 2 hours (120 minutes)

and finally, Safari started at 5:53, and computer turned off at 8:13. 2 hours and 20 minutes (140 minutes)

Firefox: 83 minutes
Chrome: 120 Minutes
Safari: 140 Minutes

Some post-experiment thoughts:

• I should try this on a Windows 10 laptop. That's going to be a future project.
• How about a newer Mac?
• This is not "scientific" enough, as Youtube watching really doesn't stress the browser much. I might try and find a more representative browser benchmark and re-run the experiment.
• It would probably be a good idea to run the experiment multiple times and average out the times.

Update: View this updated post for another way of installing Acestream on a Mac: http://themainframe.ca/acestream-mac/

AceStream is peer-to-peer video streaming software. It works great on Windows. On a Mac, I’ve used a VMware virtual machine to run it.

But there’s another way: using Wine to run it inside Mac OS X itself.

Here’s my first attempt at doing that. You can try it yourself by downloading Acestream for Mac here.

(view full-screen for more detail)

Some notes:

7. The first time you run this, you’ll get errors, as you can see in the video.
8. Full-screen mode doesn’t work.
9. I find that most streams work best via a VPN, as some ISPs throttle P2P traffic.
10. I’ve tested this on a Macbook Air and iMac, on both Mac OS X 10.11 and 10.10. It may or may not work for you.

If you’re a nerd like me, you love htop. It’s the nicer version of the usual ‘top’ command.

Who doesn’t love this kind of thing running on their computer?

A long time ago, the only way to install htop was to compile it from source yourself, or worse, copy a binary that someone else compiled.

Well, there’s a better way. And it’s also a great introduction to using the Homebrew package manager for Mac OS X.

Here’s a video of install htop on Mac OS X using Homebrew. Screenshots after the video.

The first step is to visit the http://brew.sh site and copy that line of code.

Great, now open a terminal window, and paste that command in there. If you don’t have Xcode installed, you’ll be prompted to download some components.

Great, now that Homebrew is installed, you can install packages by using the command “brew install” + the package name. i.e.: “brew install htop” will install htop.

All done. Now just run ‘htop’ in a terminal window for all your system-monitoring and process-viewing needs.

UPDATE: Use this method to Install HTOP on Mac OS X instead. Much better.

If you’re a nerd (and you know you are), then you’ve used ‘top’ for monitoring your system:

Which is cool and nerdy enough. But htop is even nerdier. Linux nerds know this, which is why apt-get install htop is one of our first commands on a fresh install. It’s great for monitoring your webservers and other linux boxes.

Here’s themainframe.ca server running htop:

But this command isn’t part of Mac OS X.

Sure, you can follow the various tutorials out there, to install git, then grab the htop source code and install it yourself. Or you can be a lazy nerd and grab the binary that I’ve compiled and install it.

Copy and paste the following commands into a terminal window:

curl -O http://themainframe.ca/content/images/2011/06/htop.zip
unzip htop.zip
sudo mv htop /bin
rm htop.zip

You will need to enter your password for the ‘sudo’ line above.

Then you can run it from the terminal anywhere by just typing htop.

(I followed the tutorial at http://jeetworks.org/node/60 to compile)