There are several options out now for users that want to search several engines at once for torrrent downloads. My current favorite is still uSniff, but I'm always on the lookout for something newer and better.
Thanks to a persistent commenter, I found out about TorrentFly this morning and decided to check it out.
TorrentFly will search up to twelve sites at once (Sumotorrent, Mininova, PirateBay, Monova, NewTorrents, SeedPeer, Fenopy, TorrentZ, MyBitTorrent, BtJunkie, TorrentHound, Idealtorrent) and you can select which engines you'd like to search.
You're also able to set your preferred column to sort and number of results per page. Clicking any column heading will re-sort your results by health, name, size, seeds, peers, or engine.
When the iPhone launched almost all possible web services, whether officially or via a third-party, gained an iPhone-specific portal. However Yahoo!-owned Flickr only recently (October 1st) gained a well-designed web version. With the iPhone SDK on the block however, a number of iPhone-native Flickr clients are available for both Flickr browsing and uploading.
AirMe does a plethora of tricks when uploading to Flickr (as well as other services including Facebook) by using the iPhone's location-awareness to name, tag and geo-tag the image with your location. For browsing Flickr, however, Exposure from Connected Flow is perhaps the best. Available in both free (ad-supported) and paid-for ($9.99) versions, Exposure allows you to view photos from your own photostream, your contacts, today's Flickr 'Explore' pages, and the handy 'Near Me' feature which will find photos taken near your current location.
At least for now there's no Flickr uploading - but if, like me, you want to be able to show off Flickr photos using your iPhone, enjoy a slick way to view your contacts' photos on the go, or simply see what others are taking near you, Exposure is just the ticket.
Online productivity app makers Zoho have publicly rolled out Zoho Mail, a webmail application that's been in private beta up until today. While the world may not really need yet another webmail app, there are a few things that make Zoho Mail a notable challenger to offerings from Google, Yaho!, Microsoft, and AOL.
First and foremost, Zoho Mail offers an offline mode thanks to Google Gears. If you have Gears installed for Internet Explorer or Firefox, you can configure Zoho to download your most recent email messages and attachments so you can catch up on your email when you're stranded somewhere without an internet connection. Yahoo! offers a similar feature, but despite the fact that Zoho Mail's offline access is powered by Google Gears, Google's Gmail does not have an offline mode... yet.
Zoho Mail also has a user-friendly interface that, like many other Zoho Office apps, feels more like a desktop application than a web app. You can sort messages by labels, Gmail-style. And there are a bunch of options for customizing your display. For example, you can open emails in a split-pane mode or in a pop-up window.
There's also a "send mail as" option that lets you change yoru reply to address. In other words, if you decide that you like Zoho Mail but don't want to bother letting everyone know that you have another new email address, you can just forward your old email account to Zoho Mail and change your Email ID so that nobody will ever know the difference.
You can clear up space on a Windows desktop by minimizing applications you're not currently looking at to the taskbar. But what happens when the taskbar is so overrun with programs that you can't make heads or tales of it? Wouldn't it be nice if you could just minimize your applications to the system tray? TrayEverything is a Windows utility that lets you do just that.
Just download and install (or download the no-install ZIP version) of TrayEverything and run it. You'll see a list of running applications. Right click on any program you want to minimize to the system tray and it will disappear from the desktop and Windows taskbar. In the system tray you'll see a small icon representing the program. Just click that icon to bring the program back up.
Note that TrayEverything needs to be run each time you want to minimize an application to the system tray. Once it's restored, clicking the program's minimize button will send it to the taskbar, not the system tray. If you're looking for a more permanent solution, you might want to check out Trayconizer, a command line utility that you can add to any program shortcut in order to automatically minimize it to the system tray whenever you hit the minimize button.
The developers behind open source office suite OpenOffice.org plan to officially push the next major release on Monday. But if you just can't wait to get your hands on the first stable, post-beta, post-release candidate copy of OpenOffice.org 3.0 you can download it today.
That's because the OpenOffice.org team has already sent out the files to a long list of mirror sites. Just pick one in your region, navigate to the folder marked "stable and grab the appropriate files for your operating system from the "3.0.0" folder.
If you're looking for the Windows version you can also download it today from FileHippo, SoftPedia, or MajorGeeks.
For better or for worse, the Apple AppStore has a bucketload of To-Do apps. If you're looking for a heavy-hitting [and location-aware] application designed specifically for the GTD mavens, you'll want OmniFocus ($19.99), and if you're looking for something a little lighter on the wallet, then Erica Sadun's free To-Do app might just be the answer.
But over the last few months, I've used and grown to love Cultured Code's application Things ($9.99). At the AppStore's debut, the number one qualm that I had with most To-Do apps was that my task lists were only ever accessible via the iDevice. However, just like OmniFocus, Things also works with the identically-named Mac sibling* and seamlessly syncs your to-dos over a local WiFi network.
The appeal of Things isn't just that it syncs, however. The application has always been easy to use, and unlike some competitors, friendly to those not versed in the David Allen Getting Things Done methodology. It's also got a delightful user interface: elegant, admittedly rather beautiful on the eye, the app is one of the few I've tried that actually kept using from day one.
In amongst a swathe of lacklustre applications on the AppStore,Things (like my other favourites Exposure and Twitterrific) is one of the few apps to look, feel and work as though Apple themselves produced it.
* The Mac-only desktop version of Things at the time of writing is still in 'preview' [beta], however the developers have announced it will launch at Macworld Expo in January for $49.
Micorosft has launched a new web site that tracks popular political news stories and blog posts. Political Streams works a bit like a news aggregation service like Techmeme. But the layout is unique.
Items are listed either in the News or Blogs category based on the source. Scrolling over those colorful bars brings up the number of blogs or news sites writing about the main item. There's also information about related people and places. And if you click a headline you'll be taken to a sub-page with an excerpt from the article and links to related sources.
Each item also has a graph that shows how much "attention" a person or place has received in the last month. Political Streams draws its information from the links between blog post and news articles and from information found in Freebase, a community-driven information database.
It's not clear whether Political Streams uses a white list of selected blogs and news sites or if the headlines are drawn from Microsoft Live Search results. While I wouldn't recommend using Political Streams as your primary source of news just yet, the web service does offer a glimpse at some of the hot political topics in the US right now.
I do a lot of troubleshooting on various operating systems for customers, and I've got to provide a lot of phone support. Without VirtualBox, I'd need a whole lot more hardware than I care to cram into my workspace.
On a single XP Pro desktop, I've got Windows 98, 2000, Vista, Server 2003, and Ubuntu virtual machines at the ready. Giant hard drives are cheap, ram is cheap, and my CPU has plenty of juice to do a little virtualization.
I find VirtualBox a little less confusing and just about as powerful as VMWare. It has all the functionality I'm looking for anyways, and it's totally free. It would be nice if the SATA controller and RDP support were included in the Open Source edition, but that's not problematic since I'm not using VirtualBox for enterprise-grade situations.
Because VirtualBox operating system installs are damn near as responsive as your real OS, it's an awesome way to fix one giant issue with some new laptops. Several companies don't bother with XP drivers on some of their laptop models which can make downgrading a royal pain in the ass. Leave Vista in place, decrapify it, and then do your XP install in a virtual machine.
No driver issues to worry about, and all you've really got to teach someone is how to launch VirtualBox, start the machine, and how to use the hotkeys. It amounts to about 5 lines of instructions, and I've guided some pretty technologically challenged individuals through it without any trouble.
I also love that it's open source, modular, cross-platform, and that Sun gets a little loose on their screenshots page, declaring that "Damn Small Linux runs damn well" in VirtualBox.
Application Manager is a tiny Windows utility that monitors your running processes and compares it with a user-configured list of applications. If Application Manager notices that one of the apps you specify is not running, it will relaunch that program. In other words, it will restart any program that crashes.
Say you want to make sure that your instant messenger or desktop Twitter application is always running so you don't miss any important messages. This program can check every thirty seconds, every two minutes, or whenever you specify to see if it's running and if it's been accidentally closed, Application Manager will relaunch it.
This utility could also come in handy if you're running a web server, or if you tend to leave your computer on overnight to download files from BitTorrent.
One of the most reviled components of Windows Vista is the User Account Control menu. It pops up when you're trying to install software, configure system changes, or make other changes. Sometimes it feels like it pops up if you move your mouse the wrong way. But there's hope. No, not for Windows Vista users, but for anyone interested in the next version of Windows. Microsoft plans to roll out a new and improved version of UAC for Windows 7.
One thing to note is that UAC isn't intrinsically a bad idea. It's designed to prevent users from accidentally granting software access to protected parts of their systems. In other words, it can prevent security breaches, viruses and all sorts of other malware from infecting your Windows machine. But it's heavy handed, and according to anonymous usage statistics, Microsoft says that the UAC prompts showed up during 50% of all user sessions within the first few months after Vista was released. What's more, over 775,000 unique applications caused the UAC prompt to come up because of the way they were written. That number is now down to about 168,000, as software developers have learned to adjust their applications.
But there are still a few major issues to address. First, nobody can understand what the heck the prompts are saying. Microsoft conducted a study and found that just 13% of participants could figure out why they were seeing a prompt. Windows 7 will feature easier to understand warning messages, which should help users figure out whether or not it's really safe to click the Continue button. Right now, most people do click it most of the time, whether they really know it's safe to do so or not.
Another thing Microsoft plans to do is make it easier for users to adjust the range of notifications they receive. While you can currently disable UAC notifications or surpress them, there's no good way to say that you want to receive certain types of notifications but not others. It sounds like Windows 7 will include that feature. Windows 7 will also have fewer duplicated system prompts. For example, right now when you download and run software from the internet using Internet Explorer you'll receive a message from IE7 asking if you really want to run the application and then you may also see a Windows UAC prompt. Eliminating that duplication is also on the agenda.
Having moved from Windows to Mac OS X, one thing that has given me trouble is dealing with hidden files and folders, and particularly hidden system files and folders. OS X does a good job of hiding these folders from regular users - so good, in fact, that there is no way to interact with them without knowledge of Terminal commands, or using an external utility. And while I don't mind learning Terminal commands every once-in-awhile, for something I'm going to do often, I'd rather use a utility.
Houdini is a Mac utility that is intended to make working with hidden files and folders much easier. It allows you to toggle hidden file visibility, create hidden files and folders, and pretty much do anything you need to do with them. And, it's free.
RealNetworks executivies may have thought that the company was releasing a lawsuit-proof DVD ripper when it decided to add mandatory DRM to its RealDVD application launched last month. After all, while the software lets you rip DVD movies and save the video on your hard drive, it makes it extraordinarily difficult to share the media with other users, or even to watch it on a portable device or another computer you own.
The movie studios apparently saw things differently because they filed a lawsuit last week and received a temporary injuction against RealNetworks that prevents the company from selling the software. During a hearing on Tuesday, a US district court judge made that injunction indefinite. The next hearing won't be scheduled until November 17th or later, which means that RealDVD will be unavailable for at least a month.
Honestly, I'm still not sure why anyone would pay $30 for a DVD ripper when there are so many free, (and DRM-free) options available. But the case is interesting, because RealNetworks is insisiting that by leaving the CSS encryption intact it is not violating anyone's copyrights.
If this argument is upheld in court, it could be seen as both a win and a loss for supporters of DRM. On the one hand, it would help bolster the argument that DRM prevents piracy and that utilizing DRM is a valid option for studios that want to abide by the law. On the other hand, it would mean that companies like RealNetworks can create software that uses DRM to get around exactly what the movie studios wanted to use it for in the first place - to keep people from making copies of DVDs.
Either way, it would be yet another instance of companies and courts telling users how they can and can't enjoy the media they've legally purchased. But it's not at all clear how the courts will rule on this case yet.
For the longest time, I thought I needed to use Dreamweaver to edit my web code. That bothered me. I didn't like the way it handled saving files to my remote server, and it was just too damn bulky for my taste. And there's the price tag. I wasn't really a fan of that either.
Fortunately, I discovered Notepad++. It's totally free, extremely powerful, and does everything I need an editor to do (and a whole lot more). It's based on Scintilla, which is a fantastic foundation for source code editing.
What makes it so great? For starters, it's portable, it supports tabs, syntax highlighting,drag and drop, macro recording, regular expression search and replace, and auto-completion. That's barely the tip of the iceberg.
Multiview editing lets you two documents at once - or two views of the same document. Collapse regions of your code that you don't need visible while editing. Zooming makes code easy to read even on small screens (like my MSI Wind). Bookmarking important or troublesome locations in your files makes navigating them snap.
Plugins add another dimension to N++, and I've got a few favorites. Light explorer adds a small but very useful file browser pane, FTP Synchronize automatically updates your server with changes saved to a local copy, Quick Text offers powerful snippet management, and Secure Pad adds encrypt/decrypt functions.
There are several other great add-ons, and Notepad++ has an enthusiastic, supportive community. They have also contributed tons of autocompletes, translations, themes, and language additions - everything from Smarty to UnrealScript.
If you're tackling some graphic design project or maybe even your wall decor, getting color hints from ready made color templates from professional designers can be useful. Below are 10 of the better sites to help you out on your design challenge.
ColorCombos - nice color palettes to choose from. If there's a particular website whose colors you want to snag, check out their "Grab Website Colors" engine. You just input the URL of the site you're reviewing and ColorCombos extracts the palette for you.
COLOURlovers - this is pretty close to color mecca. This post should actually be filed as a Timewaster because you can spend hours checking out the various palettes and patterns and rolling your own. The site is full of features such as create your own palette from a URL you're inspired by, join groups devoted to colors (srsly), shore up on the latest color trends, contribute your own content and vote on others.
ColorExplorer - another site that's feature rich and full of color goodies. Color import from images, palette export to most programs, convert any number of colors into a matching palette, 1 click palette filters and adjustments, plus no requirement for site registration.
Kuler - not surprisingly, Adobe has a fetching web app to help you generate color schemes and if you have Adobe's Creative Suite 4, Kuler is built in. Kuler has great tools such as color extractor from an image, theme creation from 1 to several colors, as well as a community you can join and give and receive comments on yours and other's creations.
ColorJack - very nice color site featuring several apps such as Color Sphere which allows you to choose the right color scheme supporting 18 formulas and 9 color blindness simulations. There's also Color Galaxy, an online color visualizer with colors from 27 libraries including everyone's favorite forever and ever, Crayola.
FMX Team is a motocross game where jumping and pulling off tricks to rack up your score is the name of the game. It's a typical side-scrolling motocross game, but is executed quite well and is fun to play. Unfortunately, the points system in the game is a little bit simplistic, so the best way to rack up your score is to consistently pull off the highest number trick that your rider can do, over and over again.
FMX Team has one gimmick, which is that you have a stable of three riders to choose from, and you can not use any one rider twice in a row. I found the #2 and #3 riders to be the most useful due to them both accelerating faster than the #1 rider, even though rider #1 has a higher top speed.
To get a high score, it seems that you need to find a jump where you can sit and perform flips and tricks over and over again without advancing through the level, but then make sure to make it to the end before the time is up. But if you're not too worried about getting a high score, and just want to have a fun quick time waster, FMX Team is worth your 15 minute coffee break.
For better or 
FMX Team
