EasyLinuxGuide Blog

I finally got around to looking into how to get Bittorrent trackers to work better with Azureus. I found these two links the most helpful:

Azureus Information on Ports

Explaining Port Selection

One of the main points is that ports 6881-6999 are now considered to be blacklisted. I know this is old news, but since I hadn’t looked into it in a while, I thought I would post it here for those that did not know. Using ports between 49152 – 65535 is now recommended. You only need to put one port in your configuration as opposed to the range before. Apparently this is because some ISP’s and sites are now blacklisting these ports because they were commonly used to send traffic. Azureus goes as far as to say that you should change the port you have set up every once in a while so that your ISP doesn’t block the one you had previously chosen.
Nonetheless, things could be better speed wise considering I have a 5mb line and can generally pulls files in at over 600 kb/s when not restricted by something other than my ISP. I am going to continue to work on trying to get better speeds. It was somewhat refreshing to see many of my torrents actually finish downloading this weekend and I had no issues with my entire network crapping out as I had before so it appears I am closer to a proper solution.

Cell phone saga… I have the Motorola V551 which overall is a great phone with great features but I am finding it is losing its connection too often. I will be talking to someone and then suddenly, while they can still hear me, I cannot hear them. I have an extended warranty on it which helps, however; the last time I took it into an outlet, I was told I could get a software upgrade done on it but it would cost me $40 or so because I just happen to be at a different outlet from where I had purchased which I thought was rather shite. Of course, the phone may need to be replaced which is all well and good as that may result in either a perfectly working phone or possibly an upgrade, but this will mean I will have to add most of any configuration back in manually as I have stored most of it on the phone itself as opposed to the SIM card due to the SIM being very limited in what it can do. I read about some other people complaining about the same thing in terms of losing the connection as well. It seems the firmware upgrade worked for them and otherwise the phone was replaced. It would be nice if Motorola found a way to allow users to do this instead of inconveniencing them by requiring them to take the phone in.

Another week of work has gone by and it’s the weekend. Of note are the NFL playoffs and all the TV shows that I need to catch up that were missed during the week.

Did another geekfest this weekend with some people. We used the new strategy again which is going to someone’s place and bringing over an xbox with a ton of games, ordering in pizza and drinking as much beer as we want. This offers numerous advantages – stay as late as you want (if host doesn’t mind), save a fair bit of money as you are looking at maybe $20 per person at most for an all you can eat, all you can drink fest. Also, no worries about a kitchen closing in a pub or bar and the scarce selection of food. Invite only works very well too so you don’t need to censor anything said or done. All in all, a much better stategy.

Forum News (not much): Another smiley theme was added.
Home Climate: I’m considering putting back in my air conditioners and at times, wondering why I took them out in the first place. We haven’t had very cold weather this winter in Ontario, Canada at all. Even with no heat on and my window open, there have been nights where I wished I had my a/c back in. It probably won’t be long.

Geek Stuff Online: I checked out Pandora.com today. It seemed really cool at first, but then when they start playing crappy songs, you are only permitted to skip so many in one hour for ‘licensing reasons’. Yet another licensing restriction of some kind that contributes to ruining a good idea. This rather defeats the purpose as you will be subjected to listening to whatver unsavoury tune being played until you are permitted to get to the next song. Overall, it’s a good idea though, just needs to take the restrictions off is all.

To add on to a previous post about the firefox extensions.. I am really enjoying AdBlock but would like to see them add a feature that allows the selection of multiple links at once for a site instead of clicking on each one individually. DownThemAll has worked like a champ and seems to do an excellent job at its intention.

Somewhat complacent with my own computer stuff right now — no reason to upgrade anything, all systems working fine as usual. I would consider getting another 19″ lcd or larger but the res on these things are only 1280×1024 still which is ridiculous considering what current video cards are capable of doing.

Side note — What the hades is going on with Azureus and torrents lately? Speeds have been garbage in most cases and if I leave Azureus running for hours, it crashes my net and I need to reboot my router. Never had this problem before. Maybe it’s the new kernel? Odd though, same config being used. Who knows.

For anyone who wants to use an msn messenger service but doesn’t have a hotmail account, you don’t need to get one, you can use your own!
That’s it for now!

It hasn’t taken long once the site was back up to get things running again. Blogs were set up last week and now the forums are up. The only bad news is that we weren’t able to port the old forums over due to incompatibility issues. Sometimes a clean start is better anyway. There is some theming that still needs to be done, but otherwise, they are ready to go. Feel free to register and start posting!

Last night I decided to try out a couple of Firefox extensions that I thought looked worthwhile. One was Adblock which turned out to be great. I used it on a site that previously I couldn’t even leave loaded in my browser due to all the ads constantly reloading. Adblock appears in the bottom right hand corner and when you click on it, you can highlight any of the ads on that website to disable. It works great! The other one I looked at was DownforAll which appears to be a script with a gui front end that allows you to download any or all of the images, videos or any other files from a site all in one shot and save them to the directory of your choice. Both are definitely worth checking out!

It’s been a little while, but ELG is back and better than ever. We hope you like the new site. This blog page is a place for our users to post comments and general chat. In order to make a post, you must be a registered user at Wordpress.com If you want to have access to making posts, then contact easylinuxguide at gmail dot com and we can set up access for you which is only a one time process and then you can blog away! If already have your own blog set up and want to have it linked here then use the contact information above to have that set it up.
Thanks and Enjoy!