Top 10 Alternatives To The Pirate Bay

I have sort of been following The Pirate Bay (TPB) scandal off and on for the last few months. Mainly because I frequent Digg, and TPB stories dominate the front page.

If you didn’t know, The Pirate Bay is basically going legit soon. According to TorrentFeak, The Pirate Bay is in the process of being sold to Global Gaming Factory X (GGF). When that happens, they are going to pursue a more legal business model where copyright holders get their cut.

Since TPB was pretty much one of the biggest names in the legally questionable bit torrent business, I decided to compile a list of my top ten alternatives to The Pirate Bay which are (In no particular order):

1. Mininova – This is also a very well known Torrent search engine. According to their site, Mininova “…is the largest torrent search engine and directory on the net. [They] started in January 2005 as an alternative to the (at that time very popular) SuprNova, which went offline at the end of 2004 due to legal issues. Our goal is to provide an easy-to-use directory and search engine for all kinds of torrent files. Visitors of Mininova can anonymously upload torrents to this website, tracked by any BitTorrent tracker. Scrape data (amount of seeds/leechers) is collected a few times a day.
2. isoHunt – According to Wikipedia, isoHunt “…is a BitTorrent index with over 1.7 million torrents in its database and 20 million peers from indexed torrents. With 7.4 million unique visitors as of May 2006, isoHunt is one of the most popular BitTorrent search engines. Thousands of torrents are added to it each day as well as deleted. IsoHunt users perform over 40 million unique searches per month. On Oct 19, 2008, isoHunt passed the 1 petabyte mark for torrents indexed globally. Isohunt is the 3rd most popular bittorrent site as of 2008.
3. btjunkie – These guys have 5 key elements that make them awesome. They index both private and public trackers, they have a completely automated crawler that scours the Internet, free public torrent submission, They have torrent Mail, for immediate notification of new torrent additions and finally torrent reporting and comments.
4. Torrent Reactor - Torrent Reactor is the oldest and most reliable resource for torrents. Find and download everything you need in 5 minutes.
5. VerTor – I wrote about this a little while ago. This site checks every torrent listed on their site for quality so you don’t have to. All of their Torrents are top notch!
6. Torrent Hound - Torrent Hound "...crawls the web using a custom filter to find new torrent files as soon as they are made available. (or accepts them from users who upload their torrents directly). Next it subjects them to a few algorithm-based tests to ensure that they are healthy and that if they contain adult content they are flagged appropriately. Lastly, they are included into the index and they show up on the search results until they are removed by us or until they are dead (determined when nobody is left sharing it for 2 weeks). The process is completely automated.”
7. Fulldls – Yet another Torrent search site. This one has many popular titles, and good quality Torrents.
8. Torrent Matrix – These guys claim to have the Latest bittorrent files, free downloads for PC Games, Movies, PS2, Xbox. Don’t they all though :-P
9. Bushtorrent – Not sure what they were thinking here putting one of the most hated presidents of all time right on their front page, but these guys do seem to have the full Dr. Who collection which makes my buddy Sundance happy.
10. Torrent Monkeys – Seriously, who doesn’t like monkeys? Especially monkeys that bring you piping hot Bit torrents?

I am sure there are plenty good Torrent sites that I missed. If I missed your favorite, please hit me up with links in the comments!

Technorati Tags: alternative to,the pirate bay,top ten,bit torrent,torrent,bittorrent,searches,sites,trackers

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Cool Free Screenshot Program

In my profession it seems that I am always taking screenshots. Lots of my friends love Snagit. In fact, I might go as far as to say they are the industry standard in screenshot software. The only problem is that it isn’t free. If money isn’t an object, then by all means buy it. I mean, it is a great product.

If money is an object however, then step right up. There are lots of free screenshot programs out there. Most of them, however, do little more than the built in ctrl+print Screen function built into Windows. Tools like Snagit allow you to capture a Windows, a region, or the whole screen, then add shapes, arrows, text etc to the captured image.

This free program I found does that too, and is completely open source. It is called Greenshot. Here are it’s basic features from their website:

• Save a screenshot or a part of the screen to a file within a second.
• Apply text and shapes to the screenshot.
• Offers capture of window, region or full screenshot.
• Supports several image formats.

Here is a little screen shot I took real quick:

Like most screen capture programs, there are hot keys that allow you to take images of your desktop quickly. For instance, here are some hot key combinations for Greenshot:

Capture Region	Print Screen
Capture Last Region	Shift + Print Screen
Capture Window	Alt + Print Screen
Capture Full Screen	Ctrl + Print Screen

What screen capture software do you use? Is it free? If not how much is it? Post a link to your favorite in the comments.

Technorati Tags: free,alternative to,snagit,screenshot,screen,shot,capture

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The Best Video Editor For Linux

I have been searching, and searching for a long time to find a good, reliable video editor for Linux. I needed one that was easy to use like Windows Movie Maker, and just as intuitive. I believe I have found a good candidate.

I just started playing with it today, but so far I have to say this one is very intuitive, and have a very easy to use interface. It is called Open Movie Editor. Currently it is only available to Linux operating systems, so you Windows and Mac users can just suck it I guess :-P

I tried using Kino for a while, but it just wasn't working out for me. I also tried Cinelerra, and Jahshaka, but those are too advanced for me. There are a few others, but none of them frankly compare to Windows Movie Maker, and that is sad frankly because Windows Movie Maker isn't even that good!

Here is a screen shot of me playing with it:

Here is a video tutorial from the creator of Open Movie Editor:

If you are an Ubuntu user, intallation is easy. Just install it from the repositories using apt-get!

>sudo apt-get install openmovieeditor

So what video editors do you use in Linux? Know of a better one than Open Movie Editor? Hit me up in the comments with your favorites!

Technorati Tags: linux, video, editor, editing, alternative to, windows movie maker

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