Several Bit Torrent users look for the perfect tweak that will increase their download speed to their computers maximum effect; however, by selecting the correct torrents is important, and quite not necessarily the torrents used with the majority of peers.  The inventor of Bit Torrent protocol, Bram Cohen, explains the general misunderstanding in one of the previous blog postings.

“Mr. Cohen designed Bit Torrent to access the availability to download specific files from several different sources or areas.  The more popular a particular file is, the quicker a potential user will download, since most users will download the same item at exactly the same time, while these same users will be uploading data to many other users,” as Cohen writes in a previous article.

Indeed, this is an explanation that makes perfect sense.  The more users that download a torrent file, the quicker it is.  Although, this is a popular mantra, it is not accurate.  To quote Cohen again, he states that the description of Bit Torrent mentioned is “somewhere between grossly misleading and wrong.”

Bram Cohen continues to explain:  “There’s a classic fallacy because if one person stands up during a concert, they get a better view than if everybody stood up during a concert, they would all get a better view.  This is of course is not true.  They wind up slightly worse off by all standing, because they all compete with each other for a view.”

Now, how does one get the best out of Bit Torrent?  Or to state it differently:  Which torrent generally gives the user the quickest download times and which torrents perform the absolute best?  I will try and answer it as simplistically as possible for you.

The quickest torrents are those where the leechers (downloaders) tap into upload capacity.  If a user has a lot of leechers and seeders with 1,000 people in it total, it will obviously be faster when more seeders are present.  Why is that?  Seeders do not download while their uploading capacity is presently available to leechers.

Several users can understand the fundamentals.  A torrent with 70 leechers and 30 seeders is quicker than a torrent of 100 seeders and 900 leechers; however, it becomes rather confusing when different size torrents are compared.

An example would be:  a torrent with 300 seeders and 700 leechers (30% seeders) will be typically faster than a torrent with 1000 seeders and 5000 leechers (20% seeders).  Why is that?  The Swarm has a tinier percentage of total seeders.

This is a main reason why many private trackers have quick downloading speeds.  Since various users are obligated to seed as much as they can, they have torrents with over 100 seeders and typically less than 10 leechers.

If you are continually looking for faster torrents, pick up those with the best seeder/leecher ratio OR the one with the high percentage of seeders.  When you do not have a viable choice, do not complain about the slower speeds when only a few of the seeders in the large swarm.  More importantly, seed as much as you can if you do not need the uploading speed for anything else.

Both books provide many interesting projects including carpentry, fitting, machinery, planes, gliders, steam engines and a lot more with neat explaination and diagrams/sketchs to help you. They introduce you to a lot of hacks and mods in day to day life. Though the books were published in the 1910s and 1920s, it still makes for an interesting read. And mods will be mods, thats something that the book will make you realize.

The site offers you PDF, text as well as DOC format. Two of the best books you can download for free, for your holiday projects.

Things to Make

The Boy Mechanic

Ghacks has come up a nice list of the Rapid share search engines and has also made a comparison between those engines. So next time if you are tired of finding the download link for your favorite movie then do Search Rapidshare. Also do check out the various ways of hacking the time limit in rapid share because it is the only irritating thing when you use a free account.

Project Giveaway fo the Day is a new initiative to distribute some really cool and best softwares. What is the big deal? Unlike other sites which let you download a trial or limited demo, Giveaway of the Day provides you with the whole product. Everyday, one software title gets nominated. This software is available to download for the whole 24 hour period. Once you download it and install it, use an activation key (provided during download) before the 24 hour time limit and you have the licensed full version registered copy of the software legally.

Now since this initiative is gaining popularity, some really hot softwares are being given away. So watch that space for something really cool might pop out.

Also Giveaway of the day, gives away one game everyday. Nope, CS is not yet being given away. But you never know, someday even that might happen.

So go grab your giveaway of the day!

Via Gizmodo.

Download Guide for composing ring tones from the “Downloads” widget on the right hand side bar of this blog.

Alternatively view it here

Read the entire article here.

It’s a small download, but one that might make you look at email on
your phone in a different way — maybe like Gmail did for email when
that first appeared. Download it now and decide for yourself!

You should check the requirements, the most important being J2ME (Java) MIDP2. Gmail Mobile is also available from your browser if you go to gmail.com (or m.gmail.com) on your mobile phone, but you won’t get these features.

You can get all this info if you just visit gmail.com homepage where the sidebar contains the info ont he release of this new feature

Technorati Tags: gmail, google, mobile, j2me, midp2, email, gmail mobile, service

Gmail with different attachment icons is another hack using Stylish firefox addon which lets you add attachment icons to your Gmail account (Well at least most of them). If you don’t have Stylish installed then no worries cauze you can do the same by just editing your userChrome.css file.
Install Greasemonkey in your firefox extension before trying out the above two scripts. I am not sure how useful these two hacks are and how imaginative people can be. But hey, just another thing to have fun with for the techies.

Gmail File Space (gspace), a FireFox extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (2.5 GB and growing) for file storage. It acts as a remote machine. You can transfer files between your hard drive and gmail. This is similar to “Gmail Drive” on windows platform. Your gmail account looks like a FTP host and you can upload and download your files. After you install, you get an option called “GSpace” in your “tools” menu clicking on which opens the window for transfer of folders/files. Works great for photos and music files less than 14MB.

Get more info on how to install gSpace and use it here.

Now use the above mentioned gSpace and get some mp3 music into you gmail account. The messages containing the MP3′s show up in your inbox and you can spot a small link next to the files that say ‘play.’ Click on it and a little player will pop up and started playing the file.

(Via)

On an unrelated topic, a hilarious goof up by gmail was when some users of Google Apps for Your Domain reported that their Gmail accounts have 15 GB of storage space. This was first spotted by Ronald Lewis who has a cool write up on the snafu. Nathan Weinberg also got this 15 GB space upgrade but only for a short time. The Gmail accounts were reset back to the plain old 2 GB in a short while after the goof up.

For more Scoop on the 15 GB gmail Account (via)

CloneDVD mobile converts your DVD movies quickly and easily into a format that your portable device (Sony PSP, Apple iPod Video, iAudio X5, Creative Labs ZEN Vision, etc) can play. You can also convert your DVDs to other file formats, such as DivX, XviD, AVI, MP4, etc.

The software has a user friendly interface and is quick and easy to use. Copying a DVD to your mobile video machine is achieved in a few mouse clicks and without the need to rip it to your hard-disk.

Features

• Convert movie DVDs to play on mobile video equipment like the Sony PSP, Apple iPod Video, iAudio X5, Creative Labs Z, EN Vision, etc
• Convert movie DVDs to other file formats like DivX, XviD, AVI, MP4, etc.
• Utilises a high quality picture conversion engine
• Supports multi-angle movie DVDs
• Video Preview shows an overview of all selectable DVD titles
• Target size freely adjustable
• Supports chapter trimming
• Very easy to use: Our unique Filmstrip assistant will guide you step-by-step through all settings – easy for beginners
• Picture snapshots while converting
• Logging window available
• Stable, fast and does not require an ASPI driver.

The product can be downloaded for a free trial and if you want to buy it then it would cost you USD 39.

CloneDVD Mobile

Update: A few sources say that the software is available on torrent sites and rapidshare.

After months of waiting, it’s finally here! Firefox 2.0 – get it now

As for changes, at first glance it’s got a whole new glossier (web 2.0-ish?) look. The main change that I noticed over the previous version is that many features like the tab manager and session restore which were available as extensions earlier are now defaault items. There is a new phishing filter and the new version claims to provide better security and safer browsing.

Another thing I noticed (and was thankful for) was that everything is now more polished, with text not going beyond the box width and buttons not overlapping on one another in options screens. An excellent addon is the spell checker, that checks spelling rel time as you type into any text box – real neat! Google and Yahoo searches in the search box come with a Suggest option and there is now a search engine manager.

Unlike other reports that I’ve seen elsewhere, I don’t think there’s any big change in the startup time or memory usage, but the new version does seem to be far more stable than before, crashing less often. Unfortunately, some of my favourite extensions and themes don’t work with version 2.0, but we can hope that their developers will soon upgrade.

The new link buttons for Firefox 2.0 also look pretty cool

Definitely worth the upgrade, it’s a better Firefox – our favourite web browser.

It lists plugins for:

Image Effects (37), Photo Enhancement (26), Web Design (6), Patterns / Textures (5), Painting & Drawing (3), 3D (3), Various (14), Image Format / Importing (14).

To list a few from the huge list that I found interesting:

Harry’s Filters
… contains 55 filter effects. They include filters for changing the image color or mood, for creating artistic effects, producing colorful gradients or impressive patterns, warping images, adding special noise effects to images, encrypting and decrypting images with 64 bit keys and producing various other effects like zoom, mirror or paint effects.

Ulead Free Plugins
Ulead started offering their commercial Art Texture plugin for free some time ago. Now they also offer Particle.Plugin and the FantasyWarp plugin (for Windows) for free, too. Particle.Plugin creates eight natural particle effects, e.g. smoke, fire, bubbles, clouds and rain. FantasyWarp takes any image or selection and warps, distorts and twists it into surreal patterns. Don’t miss these plugins!

Photo-Plugins
George Fournaris offers five filter plugins (for Windows) called B/W Conversion, Local Contrast Enhancement, Soft Focus, Contrast Mask, Gradient Blur, Lens Corrector, High Pass Sharpening and Selective Saturation for free. Additionally the ppLabCor plugin corrects a bug in the current version of ColorLab* that concerning Lab TIFFs.The most interesting one is probably the B/W Conversion plugin which offers a lot of options for creating B/W images. The author asks for a donation via Paypal if you like and use his plugins.

And a hell lot more. So if you are a designer and swear by Adobe Photoshop, then this is your one stop place to find some fabulous support.

111 Free Adobe Photoshop Plugins for Windows and Mac

Tags: blog editor, software, downloads, qumana

The things that you can expect from it are:

# Protection against phishing scams, using technology that  comes from Google.

# Improved RSS support.

# A new history option, with ‘open recently closed tabs’ feature.

# An inbuilt spell check that will work on all text fields.

Though the RSS integration is not great, yet it is far better than that available in firefox 1.5 ( the current stable version). The history menu, previously unavailable in ver1.5 seems to be a very welcome tool.  But the best of the package is the built in antiphishing tool that is being developed with the help of Google.

you can download it from mozilla’s FTP server, over here (please download the .exe file).

P.S here is a useful hack to enable your ver1.5 plugins to work with the ver2.0 beta. Type “about:config” in the address bar, right-click and create a New String. Call the new preference value “app.extensions.version” and give it the number (e.g., 1.5.0.4) of the version you want extensions to think you’re using.When you install an extension, it will look to this preference value (if it exists) rather than your actual version number when it’s checking compatibility.

 Firefox Ver2.0 beta

Flock is the new kid on the browser block. It’s still in the Beta stage but there has been a steady development ever since the first beta version was released. Flock is a social networking oriented browser that is being developed based on Mozilla technologies. Quoting from the Wikipedia article on Flock:

The first technology preview released on June 22, 2006 had the following features:

• Bookmarks, in addition to being saved offline, can be replaced with del.icio.us. When a bookmark (known as a favorite) is added, it is added to one’s del.icio.us account
• Favorites can be tagged
• A favorites and history are integrated into the favorites manager
• Built-in full-text search using Clucene. Search as you type for pages in the cache
• Flickr integration
• Technorati tagging
• Blogging tools
• News aggregation
• “Drag-and-drop” capability and a clipboard like feature known as “The Shelf.”
• Built-in spellcheck capability

Additional features in recent preview releases:

• Private bookmarking is supported with the introduction of the ability to store bookmarks at Shadows.
• A Yahoo! Maps
  topbar has been introduced. Addresses can be dragged into the topbar,
  whereupon they will be mapped by Yahoo! Maps. This feature has since
  been removed, to be re-introduced at a later date.
• Uploading images to Photobucket is now supported.

This blog post has been published using the built-in blog editor in Flock. It allows you to write and publish blogs to different websites and even gives you the option of tagging your post and submits your posts to Technorati.

Most of the features of flock are available to Firefox users as extensions, so in that way it does not have a very great advantage over Firefox (for e.g. Performancing is a blog editor extension for Firefox). New extensions are being released which are Flock-specific and many Firefox extensions are avaiable for Flock too.

There are still some very obvious flaws with the browser that need to be ironed out. The next beta release is scheduled for September, 2006. Till then you can check out the features of the current version.

Flock

technorati tags:bothack, flock, browser

Blogged with Flock

Adobe

FLash Player Download

technorati tags:bothack, flashplayer, flash, player, update

Yahoo! have brought out the Beta version for their popular IM Client, Yahoo! Messenger 8. There are minor changes in the interface but the main new feature this time is the introduction of Plug-ins to Yahoo! Messenger. You can get the Yahoo! Messenger Plug-in SDK here. A list of user-submitted Plug-ins can be found here. This is a great addition to Y! Messenger and it is in line with the continuing trend of different software developers providing SDKs for user customisation, probably the next best thing to open source software.

Some other new features provided as built-in plugins are access to random questions on Yahoo! Answers (giving only part of the question, tempting you to click on it and get redirected to their website) and updates on Yahoo! 360.

Yahoo! have been talking about a possible merging of MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger contacts, but that has not been implemented as of now.

Yahoo Messenger 8

Get Yahoo! Messenger Plug-in SDK here

Yahoo! Messenger Plug-ins gallery

Yahoo! Developer Network

Google has brought out the latest installment of one of it's more popular softwares – Google Earth.

The new version boasts of new features, including a new interface, textured 3D buildings, integration with Google Sketchup and a new way to share and implement user-generated terrain and locations. It has a larger viewing area with the navigation panel taking up less space hovering over the viewing area, and visible only when in use.
Google now encourages users to submit models and textures, as well as terrain and details using the available APIs for Google Earth and Google Sketchup.

More areas of the world are now displayed with higher resolution and Chennai/Tamil Nadu users will be delighted to know that they can finally zoom in better than before (I could spot my house! )

The latest version works on Windows 2000/XP, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.
Google Earth has been much talked about ever since it's release and it only seems to be getting better, with more detail and features with each newer version.

Google Earth 4

Google Earth Home

Google Sketchup

applet2app

Click here to get the latest Java Runtime Environment and Java Developer's Kit

This is a great site! A treat for music lovers around the world. It is an online community site for everyone who loves to listen to music (who doesn't?).

Last.fm attempts to record the listening habits of whoever prefers to enrol, compares music tastes of a large number of people and recommends tracks which suit to each person's taste. It provides extensive statistics for each user and suggest music from a variety of bands that sounds similar to the kind played by your favourite bands.

First you need to register and download a plugin called Audioscrobbler for your preferred  media player. It keeps track of the songs that you listen to and when connected to the internet, transfers the data to your last.fm profile. Once the user has listened to a good number of songs, charts are created and other users who have similar music tastes are listed as your "neighbours".

You can also download the last.fm radio player which will play songs that it thinks are similar to a band that you specify. This is an excellent feature and lets you discover new previously unheard bands and tracks. Though I sometimes felt that the music was not all that similar, it still got me some great finds. 

There are other features like journals where you can write entries about songs or music in general, tags for songs, groups for users with common interests and other community oriented features. there is also information posted about bands and songs, as well as related statistics. Last.fm even provides you with html code that you can insert into your website/blog which displays you most recently heard tracks or your overall favourites.

It's a very interesting concept that has a lot of potential and you can spend hours going through the site, having a lot of fun in the process and expanding your playlist.

last.fm