How to increase Bittorrent speeds - Part two

The second most important thing to do when downloading with bittorrent is to find torrents which has a good peer/seeder ratio. Peers are the one who are currently downloading and seeders are the ones who have already downloaded the file and are giving away for upload.
The best choice would be a torrent with a good number of seeders and peer number half that of seeders.
There are many private trackers which you could use. Most of them require that you maintain a certain ratio of uploaded and downloaded amount. Meaning, if you download a 750 MB file. You are expected to let others download from you by uploading 750 MB's. Thus making sure others will have the opportunity to get the file.

Some of the most famous trackers are:
www.thepiratebay.org
www.demonoid.com
www.mininova.org

You cant find a comparison on of torrent trackers here http://comparebt.blogspot.com/

Hope this has been useful to all, leave a comment or opinion and wait for more.

How to increase bit torrent speeds - Part One

There are a couple of ways which you can employ to improve your download speeds while using bit torrent. I have been an avid user of torrents for quite some time. Here I am going to share with you, some of the settings or tricks by which I try to attain the maximum allowed bandwidth and download speed.

Always use PEER GUARDIAN

This is the most important thing to do when you are downloading using torrents. Remember, when you sometimes download that 'movie' or download that series and your bandwidth graph shows you’re your download speed is the maximum available bandwidth of your connection, but the progress bar does not increase as it should, and the hash files or wasted files size keep increasing. This happens when you are trying to download a poisoned torrent.

You can search more about poisoned torrents, but for the moment you just need to remember that this will cause your torrent client to download a lot of unwanted hash/waste files which are trying to appear as genuine content of the file you are attempting to download. Most of the time, this is being done by people who are trying to give you a hard time because you maybe downloading their content or movie.

You can prevent these people from connecting to your computer and sending you waste files by using peer guardian. Now you won’t have to wonder why the file which is supposed to be downloaded within 3 hours is taking days to finish.

What peer guardian does is, it has an updatable database of IP addresses which people have found to be actively poisoning torrents. It also has other categories of IP addresses which you could prevent from connecting to your computer, such as known government IP addresses, known educational bodies IP addresses which might be monitoring P2P for studies purposes, etc.

So to conclude, Peer Guardian will assist you to be partially invisible to monitoring bodies such as governments, movie companies, and so forth. It also helps you to download the content faster by preventing known computers from sending you fake files or waste data. This is a must have tool for any bit torrent user.

I almost forgot… Peer Guardian is open source software, thus you don’t have to worry about it having a backdoor or spyware which might be collecting information about you.

I will continue with the second part in the next post. Do let me know your thoughts or questions in the comments.

Torrent client software : http://www.bittorrent.com/
Peer Guardian software : http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/

Which is the best Bittorrent client?

I got a call from a friend the other day, he wanted to know the best torrent client to use. I gave him a short answer, µTorrent. Actually µTorrent has now been acquired by BitTorrent Inc. so lets refer to it as BiTorrent client from now on. I have to mention both these clients because, initially µTorrent was written in C++ and was a closed source freeware. Before BitTorrent acquired µTorrent around end of 2006, before then BitTorrent client was written in Python and it was an open source client.

I have used many torrent clients over the years, Azureus, Opera, BitComet, KTorrent, µTorrent. i find BitTorrent to be the least resource intensive and also the amongst the best featured clients out there. Even the installer file is only 853KB. Imagine that,nowadays you don't find that many installers which you can put on a floppy disk.

BitTorrent gives you all the features which you may have been using on other clients, in a very efficient and small package, and it does not have a huge memory signature as some of the famous clients like Azureus.

The funniest video on youtube, HILARIOUS!!!

gets me everytime...

A president who puts interest of his nation before himself

This is a thought provoking read. Depicts various aspects of Gen. Musharraf's life and how he came to lead a nation on the verge of falling apart. Describes in detail, the plots and executions of many attempts on his life. Talks about his various experiences under different leaderships, and how these have been taken into account for the betterment of the nation.

I came to know about this book from the Jon Stewart's Daily show, where he interview's president Musharraf regarding his memoir. Unfortunately Jon Stewart did not bother to read the book, thus not much information on the contents of the book were given.

This is one of those books which makes you picture the actual scenes in your mind, which forces you to read till the end. A book which leaves you feeling that you have actually gained some knowledge on the subject, yet instigating a lust for more information on it.

This books starts with the childhood experiences and interactions which define the course of a man, and moves onto the life of a soldier which helped build character. The reasoning of a strategist who analyzes without being emotional, and finishes off with a leader who puts the interest's of his nation before himself and popularity.

This book actually contradicts some of the information which we have come to know from the media. After reading this book, one might feel that there is more to what is being portrayed.

I find this book worth blogging about, and i would recommend it to others. Yet my knowledge on politics and current affairs is limited, and i am reluctant on making a judgment based solely on this book. I would say that this book invokes respect.

ENGADGET VS GIZMODO

As with many of you who are interested in being up to date with technological news, i too go about taking my daily doze from various tech sites and blogs. Most frequent being Gizmodo and Engadget. Over time i have come to notice that a very high percentage of the breaking news and articles are practically the same on both these blogs.
i have been too lazy to go about running a proper comparison to see which blog actually brings the news quicker and comes up with more original content.
Then again, one might argue that there are many other tech blogs to satisfy ones needs, i am just mentioning the onces which i am familiar. If you happen to know of a better place to take the daily dose of tech news, do let me know.

suffering due to bittorrent

What happens when someone on your shared network uses torrents to download. Does it have any have adverse effect on others even when they have the upload and download limits set to a acceptable value? Does their use impede your web experience?
Don't get me wrong here, i have been an avid bittorrent user for quite sometime. I find it to have a high degree of availability as well as being a reliable source for downloading various items.
Recently i have been experiencing difficulty getting online from msn messenger. Every time i run the diagnostic tool, it informs me that ports are unavailable. I have asked the couple of guys with whom i am sharing my 513kbps ADSL line via a router. It seems even though someone sets the upload and download limit to an acceptable value for others to use the connection, the bittorrent uses up a lot of ports according to the settings done on the bittorrent client. Thus at times the bittorent client uses ports which are required by msn messenger to connect and prevents anyone on the same LAN to connect to the msn service.
I have tried a couple of times to resolve this, by setting the number of peers to a lower value and so forth.. has not yielded any positive results.
if any one you readers have experienced this or have resolved this issue, do inform me by commenting on this post. Thanks in advance.