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Mac/Linux: The popular open-source BitTorrent client Transmission has updated to version 1.8, bringing with it support for magnet links, trackerless torrents, Quick Look in Snow Leopard, and several more improvements and bug fixes.
If you don’t really know what a magnet link is, it’s likely the future of BitTorrent, so added support is a very good thing. Beyond that, this latest update is full of nice improvements, including:
- Add support for trackerless torrents
- Add optional “incomplete directory” where partial downloads are stored
- Find more peers by announcing to each tier in a torrent’s tracker list, rather than only one
- Faster management of large peer lists
- Use less CPU when making encrypted handshakes to peers
- Better filtering of bad IP addresses
- Quick Look restored on Snow Leopard
- Improved reveal in Finder functionality on Snow Leopard
- Add speed limit “turtle mode” support (web client)
- Double-clicking a torrent opens/closes the torrent inspector (web client)
You can browse the full changelog here. If you’re a Transmission user, head to the download page for the latest. Not sure what BitTorrent client you prefer? Take a look at our Hive Five Best BitTorrent Clients.
Transmission is a free download for Mac OS X and *nix platforms.
It’s hip to be square. Foursquare, that is. The esteemed academic institution Harvard has partnered with Foursquare to create a campus-based game that rewards students with badges and points for exploring the school and surrounding places of interest.
The news hails from the Harvard Gazette, which describes a partnership that essentially tacks an official Harvard-specific game with a special collegiate badge on the existing Foursquare functionality and purpose.
The primary idea behind the collaboration is to encourage students to connect more with friends and professors through location-based game play, as well as to inspire campus visitors to explore the grounds and uncover tips or share to-dos.
If you think about it, tapping into the hyper-local university scene is brilliant. Think about freshman still trying to acclimate to a new campus. They can use the app and game to uncover the university hot spots, find the best social gatherings (maybe even a great kegger), bond with their peers and actually learn a thing or two about social media in real-life context. We think it’s genius.
For another look at a university getting creative with Foursquare, check out what UNC Charlotte is playing with.
[img credit: Stephanie Mitchell, Harvard Staff Photographer]
Tags: foursquare, Harvard, higher education, Mobile 2.0, social media, social networking
Greenpeace, the well-known environmental organization that speaks out against nuclear power and climate change, has revised its “Guide to Greener Electronics,” a ranking of 18 major electronics companies based on how eco-friendly they are in their practices. While it didn’t top the list, Apple came out the big winner, jumping 4 places higher on the list to fifth place — that’s 11 places higher than Microsoft, which bottomed out the ranks, beating only Nintendo.
Taking factors into account like use of toxic chemicals, recycling, energy use and operational cleanliness into account, the Greenpeace guide celebrates Nokia and Sony Ericsson as the top two greenest company in the business. This is good news for Sony, which scored the highest out of any gaming console maker while its peers performed miserably.
Apple was able to up its score by eliminating toxic polyvinyl chlorides (PVCs) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) from its products and packaging — that earned it big points. It also lobbied the European Union to pass restriction on these and other types of hazardous substances used in especially plastic consumer products. It lost a couple points for not being more transparent about its supply chain. All in all though, this is pretty good news for the company, considering how hard it has worked to buoy its green image in the past year. Not only did it withdraw from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its unwillingness to support carbon emissions legislation, it also launched its Apple and the Environment site detailing its efforts to be more eco-conscious.
Microsoft, on the other hand, actually lost points this time around for opposing legislation limiting toxic chemicals used in its products. It fell to 17th place from 15th since the last guide revision was released. Nintendo also got dinged for the same reasons, bringing up the rear yet again, as it has since console makers were first introduced to the list in 2007. Dell (14th place) and Lenovo (16th place) also got scored down for use of toxic substances.
Another notable placement on the list is Panasonic, lodged right in the middle at 10th place, which earned points for being more energy efficient than mosto f its competitors, but still got a bad rap for producing more e-waste and not recycling as much as it could. Look for Panasonic to work its way up the list as it becomes increasingly interested in green. Not only has it made deals to produce batteries for zero-emissions vehicles, it is looking into home and grid-scale energy storage systems that could drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions in the future. It just need to internalize these values.
While Greenpeace has been marginalized to some extent as a more radical organization, like PETA, it’s still pretty informative about how and why electronics companies are approaching environmental measures. It’s unlikely that the list will make a huge impact on revenue or consumer decision making, but hopefully it will encourage the companies that are already on the right track, like Apple, Toshiba and Philips, to keep up the good work.
Microsoft has revealed the four editions of Office 2010 that it will be selling at retail, along with their prices. It’s also trying something new by offering what it calls Product Key Cards. While you can still buy them at retail, they don’t actually contain the software; rather, they contain keys to unlock installations of Office 2010 that are pre-loaded on some new computers.
The keys are cheaper than the full retail boxes, but there aren’t many people who will be thrilled with any plan that involves pre-loading software that they can’t use without spending more money. The other notable thing about 2010 is the inclusion of Office Web Apps, a cloud version of Office.
Here’s a list of the four retail editions of Office 2010, which applications they will include, and how much they will cost.
Priced at $99, this edition includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access and Office Web Apps. It’s basically a cheaper version of the business-aimed Professional edition, but it’s reserved for “qualified students and educators.” It will be sold through campus bookstores and retailers.
This one will set you back $149 for the boxed version and $119 for the Product Key Card. It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Office Web Apps. It will be the most basic retail edition, separated from its peers primarily by its lack of the Outlook e-mail application. It will also be available in a Family Pack that will include licenses for three computers in your home, but Microsoft hasn’t officially announced the pack’s price.
The price: $279 for the box, $199 for the Product Key Card. For that, you’ll get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and Office Web Apps. Yep, compare it to Office Home and Student and you’ll find that Outlook alone will cost you either $130 or $80 depending on whether you buy the disc or the key.
At $499 boxed or $349 for a key, Office Professional will give you Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access and Office Web Apps — the same as the much-cheaper Office Professional Academic version. This is the full suite for small businesses; apps like Access aren’t necessary for most home users.
Microsoft hasn’t announced pricing for its non-retail editions, which include the two enterprise SKUs for big businesses. Office Professional Plus will add SharePoint Workspace to the mix. Office Standard will also be an enterprise option, and it will include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and Publisher. Finally, there will be Office Starter edition. It will cost nothing, but it will be supported by in-app ads. Limited versions of Word and Excel are all you’ll get out with that one.
Tags: microsoft, software, web apps
Mutations are the raw material of natural selection, providing changes that help all organisms adapt to new environments. In fact, a variety of experiments with bacteria show that strains with high rates of mutation can adapt more rapidly than their peers. But mutations can also knock out vital genes, which is why cells have many mechanisms intended to limit or repair changes in their DNA. So, how does it all balance out? New research suggests that, for E. coli, a rate of about 10 times normal provides a nice compromise.
The researchers performed a systematic test of mutation rates, swapping out the bacteria’s normal DNA Polymerase I gene (which handles repair and a portion of the normal DNA copying duties) for mutant versions that naturally produce higher and lower rates of mutation. All told, over 60 different mutant forms were tried, with the most potent mutator creating DNA changes at a rate 1,000,000 times higher than that of the the least mutation-prone. The engineered strains were then subjected to a bacterial version of Survivor, dumped in culture in various combinations for up to a month in order to see which ones were left alive.
For the first week or so, normal strains actually outgrew the competition. But, after a few weeks, mutator strains began to pick up helpful adaptations, and quickly came to the fore. By 30 days, only 8 strains (out of 66 initially) survived in culture: all the wild type and low-mutation versions had been driven out by the competition. But so had the strains prone to the most mutations; instead, all the strains fell in a narrow range, with somewhere between three and 47 times the normal mutation rate, with most on the high end of that range.
There seem to be three conclusions: under normal circumstances, like a stable environment, bacteria seem to have mutation rates that are conducive to good growth. But, change the conditions (shift the culture media—introduce competition—and higher rates of mutation become adaptive. But, even under those circumstances, there are limits, as the strains with the highest rates of mutation die out, too.
PNAS, 2009. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0912451107
We’re not going to chalk this one up to Japanese culture, the child rearing techniques of show-biz-addled parents, or the craze-inducing effects that come from the integration of a pico projector within a digital camera — this video is too big to have such trite little lines drawn around it. Basically it answers the age-old question of what would happen if you strapped a couple dozen Nikon Coolpix S1000pj cameras to two excitable children and had them work through an incredibly awkward choreography in front of hundreds of their astonished peers. Video is after the break.
Japan’s ‘Helicopter Boyz’ turn the Nikon S1000pj into something much more disturbing originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Last week The Pirate Bay confirmed it would shut down its tracker permanently, instead encouraging the use of DHT, PEX, and magnet links. This move confounded many BitTorrent enthusiasts, who were confronted with confusing new terminology and technology. Time for some explaining.
The Pirate Bay’s recent confirmation that they had closed down their tracker since DHT and Peer Exchange have matured enough to take over, was coupled with the news that they had added Magnet links to the site. This news has achieved its aim of stimulating discussion, but has also revealed that there is much confusion over how these technologies work.
The key thing to understand is that nobody is being forced to use Magnet links or trackerless torrents. While these long-standing technologies may prove to be the future, they will co-exist with tracker-enabled torrenting for quite some time. For now, nobody will be forced to immediately change their existing downloading habits, although it may be wise to switch to a BitTorrent client that is compatible with these technologies.
In an attempt to clear some of the mystique surrounding DHT, PEX and Magnet links we will walk through all three briefly, hoping to assure those who’ve become confused earlier this week.
Using DHT instead of trackers is one of the things The Pirate Bay is now trying to encourage, and torrent downloads that rely solely on this technology are often referred to as “trackerless torrents.” DHT is used to find the IP addresses of peers, mostly in addition to a tracker. It is enabled by default in clients such as uTorrent and Vuze and millions of people are already using it without knowing.
DHT’s function is to find peers who are downloading the same files, but without communicating with a central BitTorrent tracker such as that previously operated by The Pirate Bay.
DHT is by no means a new technology. A version debuted in the BitTorrent client Azureus in May 2005 and an alternative but incompatible version was added to Mainline BitTorrent a month later. There is, however, a plugin available for Azureus Vuze which allows it access to the Mainline DHT network used by uTorrent and other clients.
Peer Exchange is yet another means of finding IP addresses. Rather than acting like a tracker, it leverages the knowledge of peers you are connected to, by asking them in turn for the addresses of peers they are connected to. Although it requires a “kick start”, PEX will often uncover more genuine peers than DHT or a tracker.
Traditionally, .torrent files are downloaded from torrent sites. A torrent client then calculates a torrent hash (a kind of fingerprint) based on the files it relates to, and seeks the addresses of peers from a tracker (or the DHT network) before connecting to those peers and downloading the desired content.
Sites can save on bandwidth by calculating torrent hashes themselves and allowing them to be downloaded instead of .torrent files. Given the torrent hash – passed as a parameter within a Magnet link – clients immediately seek the addresses of peers and connect to them to download first the torrent file, and then the desired content.
It is worth noting that BitTorrent can not ditch the .torrent format entirely and rely solely on Magnet links. The .torrent files hold crucial information that is needed to start the downloading process, and this information has to be available in the swarm.
Pirate Bay links cf. Mininova links: When the Magnet link specification first came out, in January last year it called for a particular format (“base32 encoded”). The links that EZTV, Mininova and ShareReactor have displayed for some time all conform to that original specification. In May of last year the specification was changed, in favor of “hex encoding”, and that is the format of the links being displayed by The Pirate Bay. Torrent clients should accept either format.
All the main torrent clients: uTorrent 1.8.5, Vuze 4.3.0.2, BitTorrent 6.3, BitComet 1.16, and Transmission 1.76 (and others) support Peer Exchange and DHT (via a plugin in the case of Vuze). Neither BitComet nor Transmission yet support Magnet links but Transmission is planning to include Magnet link support in the upcoming 1.8 release. Bearing in mind that no site, including The Pirate Bay, has yet abandoned support for traditional torrent files, there is plenty of time for support to be added.
We hope that this article has cleared some of the smoke that was generated by The Pirate Bay’s announcements earlier this week. There is no need to panic, cry or be angry, and it’s not a problem if you’re still confused after reading this article. Torrents will still be available and aside from some extra downloading options thanks to sites that add Magnet links, nothing drastic will change in the near future.
TorrentFreak is a weblog devoted to all-things BitTorrent and file sharing. To get all of the latest from TorrentFreak, be sure to subscribe to the TorrentFreak RSS feed.
Jessica Faye Carter is an award-winning author and columnist. Her company, Nette Media develops social media technologies for women and multicultural communities, and she blogs at Technicultr.
The expression of community has changed considerably since the emergence of social media technologies, but its basic foundation — the notion of individuals exchanging information, ideas, and opinions — remains firmly intact. Today, one of the most widely-used tools in developing these types of exchanges online is WordPress, the popular blogging and publishing platform. Part of its appeal is the ease with which users can build advanced functionality into their sites with plugins. If you’re interested in building a community around your site, there are plenty of third-party add-ons that can help create one.
These 10 WordPress plugins add features that will help you to engage your user base.
1. Featured Content Gallery – If you’re not an expert in programming or design, Featured Content Gallery makes it easy to highlight images, posts, or pages anywhere on your site. It comes with a sleek and contemporary design that is fully customizable through the WordPress dashboard, so that you can integrate your highlighted content seamlessly with the rest of your site.
2. Popularity Contest – Your users will want to know what’s popular and interesting to their peers in the community and the Popularity Contest Plugin can help. It keeps track of the most popular posts and pages on your site and acts as a leaderboard that directs users to the most active content in your community. You can customize the point values assigned to user actions on the site, such as comments or views, and display the results easily in a widgetized-sidebar.
3. Viper’s Video Quicktags – Including video in your community is easy using Viper’s Video Quicktags. Just enter the URL of the video in the prompt box and see a preview of the video right on your screen. Then specify the dimensions and other customizations you’d like to add and see your final product before saving it into your post. Supported video sites include YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and others.
4. WPtouch – Part of keeping the community vibrant means letting your users take it with them. You can go mobile with your community using WPtouch and avoid building a mobile website or the costs of developing an iPhone application. You can control the mobile user interface by allowing the browser to automatically route users to the interface of your choosing — your site or the WPtouch interface, which looks similar to an iPhone app. You can also show or hide post excerpts and customize the icons and general appearance of your mobile site.
5. Disqus Comment System – Nothing stops a potential commenter in their tracks faster than having to set up a user ID and password in order to leave a message on your site. At the same time, most of us would like some sort of authentication process we can use to identify and correspond with other users as we develop our communities. The Disqus Comment System allows users to engage with your site using their Twitter, Disqus, Facebook, OpenID or selected other accounts. This prevents users from having to set up new accounts while allowing for authentication. Bonus: the Reactions feature allows you to include the social component of user feedback into your comments.
6. Customize Your Community – Customize Your Community (CYC) provides some useful options for those building communities in WordPress. It allows you to re-brand the WordPress pages for registration, logging in/out, and lost passwords, as well as the user profile pages. In addition to giving your community a standardized look and feel, CYC helps with a long-standing navigational issue in WordPress: it automatically directs “subscribers” to their profiles and bypasses the WP backend entirely.
7. Clicky – While Google Analytics provides you with a long-term perspective on your site metrics, Clicky gives you instantaneous feedback. The dashboard includes traditional site metrics, but also offers cool features, like “Spy”, which pinpoints the location of current visitors on a map. It’s an easy way to get a snapshot of your site’s current activity and, in conjunction with Google Analytics, gives you a comprehensive overview of your site’s activity.
8. Breadcrumb NavXT – Your users aren’t exactly Hansel and Gretel, but they still may occasionally need help navigating your site, particularly if it’s content-heavy. Breadcrumbs are usually located just below a site’s primary navigation system and look something like this:
Home » Dance Music » Saint Etienne » Method of Modern Love
Breadcrumb NavXT, the successor to Breadcrumb Navigation XT, improves your site’s navigation by building this kind of virtual breadcrumb trail for your users to follow. This way, users will know where they’re located on your site. This plugin may require customization, depending on your theme; check out the Advanced Options section of the plugin’s homepage for additional instructions.
9. Advertising Manager – If you were previously using the Adsense Manager plugin, you’ve probably noticed that it hasn’t been updated in a while. That’s because it has been succeeded by Advertising Manager, which is recommended unless you are using WordPress version 2.5 or earlier. The renamed version supports a broader group of ad networks in addition to Google AdSense, such as Adify, AdBrite, and several others. It also imports your AdSense Manager settings, for users of the previous plugin.
10. WP125 – Do you prefer a more hands-on management style for your advertising? WP125 allows you to do everything from arranging the ad display so that it fits your site design to setting timelines for ads (they can be removed automatically or manually at expiration). It also provides a placeholder for empty ad space, which you can switch to your own customized version.
Do you have another plugin that’s been helpful to you in building your community? Share your favorites in the comments below.
WordPress Themes: “Top 12 Stunning WordPress Themes“, “30+ WordPress 3 Column Themes,” “20 WordPress 4-Column Themes,” “30+ WordPress 1-Column Themes,” “10 Unusual & Original WordPress Themes”
Plugins: “50+ WordPress Plugins for Multimedia,” “30+ WordPress Plugins for Statistics,” “30+ WordPress Plugins for Comments,” “30+ WordPress Plugins to Get More Blog Readers,” “Top 10 WordPress Plugins to Promote Your Social Media Profiles”
Miscellaneous: “WordPress God: 300+ Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog,” “The 7 Weirdest and Wackiest Uses for WordPress“
Tags: community, Lists, plugins, Wordpress
By now you should be thoroughly familiar with Sony’s Party-shot-loving and almost unreasonably svelte TX1 compact shooter. Its headline features — 720p movie mode and better low light performance courtesy of the Exmor R sensor — have now been put to the test and we’re here with the scorecard ready to spill the results. Reassuringly, all reviewers found image quality to be excellent for the camera’s size class, and the TX1 even outperformed its peers by keeping noise comfortably in check all the way up to ISO 800. A 1cm (or 0.4-inches for you heretics) Macro mode was another highlight, though criticisms did rain down on issues of lens distortion, a fiddly touchscreen menu that was too prone to accidental activation, and an uncompetitive price point. Of course, your biggest draw here might still be the optional (and spendy) party dock, but the thorough reviews below at least give you the chance to pretend like you’re buying this camera for the image quality alone.
Read – Photography Blog review
Read – Wired review
Read – Imaging Resource review
Read – Electric Pig review
Filed under: Digital Cameras
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-TX1 scores mixed reception originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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