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!

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.

Sweden Day

Today was the national day of Sweden. Nothing much happens in our town on this day, partly because it was only recently made a holiday. People aren't sure how to celebrate it, or if it's even worth celebrating, although apparently some people in Gothenburg and Stockholm really welcome this holiday, judging by what I saw on TV just a while ago. Still, the reporters never seemed to find anyone who could explain the point of a national day, even among the people who wanted one.

Anyway, it was a sunny summer's day, and there were people on the streets doing watchable things. That's pretty much all I need.

More animals

No need to take a stroll in the forest to see small animals anymore; the squirrel is visiting us now.

Eurovision Song Contest Winners

In case you missed it:

Quite simply the best winners ever.

Edit: I found the video, and I'm still wiping away tears of joy after watching it.

Console inflation

I made a diagram that shows how much consoles actually costed; all prices are adjusted for retail inflation. Maybe I'm just weird, but I think it's actually pretty interesting. You can see how Nintendo just keeps dropping in price; according to my calculations, consoles will be free by 2012. Until then, a special deal: Trade in your old Atari 2600 for 3 Wiis!

Edit: It turns out that the graph I based my adjusted version on already has a sister graph showing the exact same data I calculated. D'oh.