Pandora for the Englishman

The easiest way to access Pandora from outside the US is Hotspotshield, a free ad supported VPN. But no self respecting geek would want his whole internet connection hijacked for this, right?

SSH tunneling is the solution. Clearly everybody has access to a server or three in the US. (Ok if you don't, there are loads of free proxy services and they generally suck balls)

Just do,

ssh -D 9999 username@your-server-in-the-US

at the terminal. Then install the FoxyProxy firefox extention. After restarting FF, go to FoxyProxy settings and create a new SOCKS v5 proxy connection, just go
FoxyProxy Options -> Proxies -> Add New Proxy -> Proxy Details
and select ‘Manual configuration’.

Foxy proxy is awesome cos you can set just the sites you need to be loaded through proxy. Just go to URL Patterns -> Add New Pattern and add
*pandora.*

Thats it, pandora should load. Pandora algorithms are impressive, the way it changes btw genres, tempo and even the sex of the vocalist suites my mood/taste much better than say LastFM.

Now all thats left is set up openvpn so that I can access hulu as well.

ps. Hulu doesn’t work through proxy cos the the flash media stream that doesn’t go through of Firefox is also subjected to location filtering.