ctrl.altered.mind

I have always used Bittorrent while on Windows, probably because of the high bandwidth connection at work, when I need to work on Matlab and Labview. However, I just recently tried out KTorrent - the default Torrent handler for KDE - and the experience was very impressive. KTorrent goes a step further than other clients such as ABC (Another Bittorrent Client), Azureus, and even Shareaza. The feature that I liked the most, is the ability to selectively download files within a torrent bundle. The latest version of KTorrent is 1.2rc1, and has an official SUSE 10.0 rpm for download, which was nice :-). Also, KTorrent allows integrated custom searches for torrents using your preferred engine. Google and Bittorrent.com are no-brainers, but you might also want to add sites such as OpenWares.org and Sourceforge.

One of the most valuable features of the Firefox browser is the ability to add custom keywords to search boxes within any website in the world. Its as easy as right-clicking on a search box and adding a custom keyword for that search. Once this is done, a search can be performed by entering the keyword in the location bar of the browser, followed by the search terms. This is an incredibly fast way of searching for information, even faster than the search box embedded in the browser window (which uses a drop-down menu where you can add more search engines as well). Firefox includes a few by default, such as ‘dict’ followed by a search term, searches Dictionary.com for the definition of the search term. I’ve added a few for myself, such as ‘wiki’ to search Wikipedia.org, ‘thes’ to search Thesaurus.com and ‘olga’ for the Online Guitar Archive at Olga.net.

There is only one place I ever need to head to for information on any topic - Wikipedia. For those unfamiliar with the name, Wikipedia was started by Jimmy Wales (with others) in 2001 as a free content encyclopedia that could be edited by anyone.

I thought of finding a good open source implementation of a wiki project that I could place on my website as well, that would serve as a freely editable section for visitors to my pages. I thought PmWiki, an open source PHP implementation by Patrick Michaud, to be the easiest to set up (even for administrators with restricted privileges). For now, I can only think of using it as a place for visitors to write scraps or add some ‘graffiti to the wall’ (did you know the singular form of graffiti is graffito?) Well, if you have some suggestions for a better use, you know where to head to!
My Wiki