PirateBay blocked by your operator? Here is an easy fix!
The Finnish broadband and mobile operator Elisa has made headlines today by blocking the well known BitTorrent tracker and website PirateBay from it’s network. The IP based blocking of the operator, whether it was Elisa or some other service provider, is however a very inefficient method and easy to bypass. Here are a few elegant ways to do it:
1) Use Opera browser, and enable the Turbo feature. Opera is a great alternative web browser for all major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac) and is offered for free of charge. One of the great special features of the browser is a Turbo-mode which is designed to speed up web browsing in slow network conditions. The Turbo-mode is in fact a compressing web proxy server, and enabling it routes the traffic to a different path, bypassing the operators blocking efforts neatly. Get it from Opera.com
2) Use an anonymizer proxy service Get Hidden. Simply go to GetHidden.org and enter www.piratebay.org as your target web site to gain instant access.
There are several other proxy or anonymizer services on the Internet that can be used to go around the blockade and these two are just easy examples how to do it without going too technical. Enjoy!
Converting Topfield .REC files into DVD compliant format is a somewhat tricky process. There are many ways to do it, which some are easier than others, some involve commercial solutions, and some are totally free. The approach to take in the conversion process depends on many aspects, like the amount of time you wish to spend, which operating system you work on (Linux or Windows) and how long is the actual recording. This article consists of several mini-guides to get you going. It does not contain every possible detail, but this should be enough to get you started. This guide is made with Topfield PVRc-5100 MasterPiece, but should apply to pretty much all non-HD models.
Something has gone south in the recent developments of the Linux operating system. My old linux rig IBM Think T41 is experiencing significant slow downs with very latest revisions of Ubuntu, and other major distributions. This is most apparent in web browsing which suffers of notable slowdowns on web pages that have higher than average complexity – it feels almost like using a Vista! So what happens when you throw in a distribution that comes with out-of-date kernel, Xorg, and desktop environment? The damn thing works like a charm again. The PCLinux 2009.2 is like going back to the 2007 again.
VSO software has released a new major version update of their well known PhotoDVD slide show authoring software. This new version contains several improvements: the animation engine has been fully rewritten, the image processing is using our new vso scaler. Now the DVD slideshow software can generate automatically DVD menus with better chaptering management. You have more control on animation, better load performance and better quality due to the new engine.
Hardly ever has a Linux distribution raised such a mixed feelings as the Fedora has done for us. On the other hand it represents the most up-to-date software and has some cool innovations, and is backed by one of the biggest Linux contributors – RedHat. However, the out-of-the-box experience of Fedora is far behind the other leading desktop distributions (Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mandriva..) which leaves me wondering that who is this Linux distro for? We decided to give the Fedora 11 ‘Leonidas’ a whirl and try to find out.
I noticed readers of DistroWatch.com 
They could have called it the Rushed Ram or Bugsy Bear, but instead its a fictional creature Jackalope. Ubuntu’s latest tries to bring some innovation to the table, after the 
