Friday, July 21, 2006

Opera + BitTorrent = Sweet Lovin'

In the internet world, time is measured in microcyberpixelseconds, which means time moves very fast. It has to, otherwise your megabits won't get to your computer in time and then your JPEGs would load backwards. What all this means is that whatever I say in this blog is old news, and you can safely ignore it. Like this: Opera now has a built-in BitTorrent client!

Cool Opera kids

Look out, only the cool kids (and a Dungeon Master) use Opera now. Oh, targeted ads, how you amuse me with your silly ways.

Glossy ads aside, the BT integration works surprisingly well right out of the box. I googled for some legal torrents and ended up at - lo and behold! - www.legaltorrents.com, where I found some nice stuff that creative people have released under the Creative Commons license. Click on a torrent link, and a dialogue pops up with a message warning you about sharing the file with other people. Click OK, and the download shows up just like all your other downloads in the Transfers window, with kBs and whatnots whizzing away without a care. If you're behind a firewall, you don't have to open any ports if you don't want to, but it helps.

Speaking of legal torrents, take a look at the short film about trusted computing (ignore the unfortunate grammatical errors in the film, it has a nice message), and prepare to be amazed by Studio Trophis's The White Chamber. It's a scary point-and-click adventure with fairly simple puzzles and nice graphics. I downloaded an old version from LegalTorrents, so I have no idea how the new voice acting sounds. I might get back to you on that one.

In the mean time, have fun with BitTorrent. Looks like P2P is getting some well-deserved attention. They could have picked a less crappy protocol than BT, I guess, but oh well.

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