Tired of searching a dozen different BitTorrent trackers every time you're looking for your 100% legal downloads of open source software? (We're going to assume that's all you look for on BitTorrent sites). NowTorrents is a BitTorrent search engine that lets you search a dozen sites including Mininova and The Pirate Bay.

While NowTorrents is hardly the only multi-site BitTorrent search tool, it does have one nifty feature - it offers a real time search to show you exactly how many seeders and peers are available for each file. The result is that NowTorrents looks a bit like the travel site SideStep, in that search results start popping up right away, but the page will continue to reload with fresh information until all NowTorrents is finished searching all 12 BitTorrent trackers.

[via MakeUseOf]

Canonical is set to ship Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on Thursday. The latest version of the popular Linux distribution packs a bunch of new features, including:

• Integrated desktop search with Tracker
• Streamlined Firefox add-on support
• Read/write access to Windows partitions by default
• 3D desktop effects are enabled by default on systems that meet the minimum requirements.
• AppArmor security
• Improved printer support (Shuttleworth says they're getting closer to being able to say that if your printer works with OS X it will work with Ubuntu)

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth held a conference call with reporters today in advance of the October 18th release. The sound got a little funky during the Q & A portion, so here's a recording of Shuttleworth's presentation followed by a few notes from the Q & A.


First off, our favorite part of the audio clip is about 12 and a half minutes in, when Shuttleworth refers to 3D desktop effects as "bling."

A few other notes:

• Canonical estimates that there are about 6 million Ubuntu users today.
• A number of smaller internet companies have begun using Ubuntu Server as their backbone, including Joost.

The roadmap for Ubuntu 8.04 will be determined at the Ubuntu Development Summit in Boston later this month.

So you use basecamp for project management or Google's apps, or something else, but how do you track your time on a project? basecamp offers time-tracking, but you have to pay a bit for that feature. Any cheapskates out there who like to get something for nothing, even if it means remembering yet another logon to yet another website? Many of us would jump at the chance, it isn't like any of us have a problem with web accounts, how many do you have again?

Toggl is an excellent solution, offered in a completely savvy web 2.0 interface that gets you where you want to go. The site tracks time and lets you hit a toggl (whoa, go figure) button to start and stop your "billable hours" timer. I was a bit wary at first that toggl wouldn't offer a way to change the time it had recorded, leave you stranded with pushing the button every 108 minutes until you got the right amount of time, but my worries were completely unfounded. I was ready for something much harder than clicking on the box and reentering my own length of time.

If you think pie is easy, toggl is easier. Complete with a reporting feature and multiple projects, toggl's goodness clocks in (pun somewhat intended) at the right price of free. As you know, our motto here is one more happy cheapskate, or wait, I don't think we actually have a motto. I'll have to get back to you on that. meanwhile check out toggl, and you will never wonder if you charged your client enough for the hours you spent on that killer project.

Add "toggl" to your spell-checker, jack, and you won't be disappointed.

TorrentFreak is reporting that three top BitTorrent tracker sites--The Pirate Bay, mininova, and Torrentspy--have accomplished the inevitable and entered the Alexa 200, the top 200 most-trafficked sites on the web acccording to Alexa. Torrentspy has the highest rank at 153, followed by mininova at 165, and The Pirate Bay barely squeezing in at 198. While nobody argues that Alexa's rankings are the picture of accuracy, it does give a pretty good indication of web trends, and this seems like a pretty big trend. TorrentFreak speculates that it was IsoHunt's recent (temporary) shutdown that bumped these sites into the top 200 (with its spillover traffic going to them), and the Alexa chart would seem to confirm that. Now that IsoHunt is back up, I wonder if it will gain back that traffic, knocking the other sites down a notch.

While you were busy learning how to sync your Google Calendars and Gmail with Outlook, the search giant cranked out some unique new Calendar features and fired up their translation engines. First on the list is the addition of 'web content events' - you can now easily add icons to the top of your calendars that display the weather, phases of the moon and when new Google Doodles land on their search page. You can even publish this new data in the iCal format, and instructions on all this can be found at the announcement post.

The other big update is the addition of 17 new languages to the Google Calendar UI, including: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Polish, and English (UK) (those are all links to Google Calendar in their respective tongues).

As usual, these are good updates to a nice Google service, but I can't help dinging them for blatantly missing some of the fundamentals of the calendaring paradigm, such as a bloody todo list (like, um, every other calendar app on the planet) and the ability to set alarms on all events, instead of just those in the default calendar.

I don't want to sound ungrateful though, as I am a happy user of gCal, and thankfully, users in 17 new languages can be too.

What shall we obsess over while the World Cup isn't on? How about the Tour de France? Tour de France Live Tracker is a Google Maps mash-up that plots the route of the Tour and its riders in real time. It also displays riders' vitals, like heart rate and speed. Of course, at this hour nobody's moving, which makes it pretty boring, but once they get going again you can track your favorite rider across France.

[Thanks, Martin!]