eugene gordin

This guy. If that seems like a random thing to say, and doesnt sound familiar, I highly recommend you check out NBC’s The Office – its an amazing show, with great actors, and spectacular writing.

The reason I bring The Office up is because it, like many other shows, is one of my addictions and yet I have seen very little of it on TV. So how do I do it you ask? I download almost all of my shows, which works like Tivo for me, allowing me to watch whenever I have time.

I have wanted to write a post that explains where I download all of the things I download from for a while now, so here goes. I know that this post is long, but I believe that if you want to know the best places to download shows, movies, music, etc, it’ll be helpful. I download from mainly three sources: the newsgroups, bittorrent, and iTunes.

Though iTunes is the most user-friendly of the three, nothing really compares to the newsgroups. With the newsgroups, you can download pretty much any program, video, or music at consistant 100k+ speeds. If you want to know how the newsgroups work, you can visit this link, which does a good job in explaining it. However, if you just want to get to the downloading, you need to do the following things:

1. Go to www.easynews.com and sign up for an account (it’ll cost you $10 for 20GB or 30 days, whichever comes first). This account lets you access and browse the newsgroups.

2. The newsgroups are a big place, and your choices are either to browse them until you find whatever you want (which would be extremely arduous and timely), or you can setup an account at a site like NewzBin, which allows you to very simply search for what you want, and will let you download a nzb file which will point your newsreader to download all of the files you want. This costs something like $2 for 2 months.

3. You need to get yourself a newsreader. For Windows, a really good one is Newsleecher. For OSX, you should use Unison. Though both these programs are good, Unison, like all OSX programs, is much easier to use than newsleecher, but both will get the job done.

Once you have done these three things, you can go to newzbin, login to your account, and use the search box to find everything you would ever want, at amazing speeds. All you have to do is download the NZB file.

The second source of downloads for me is good ol’ bittorrent. Basically bittorrent is all about filesharing – instead of getting the files from some server like you do with newsgroups, you get files (actually parts of files) from other people who have already downloaded the file and are now sharing (or seeding) it. If you want to know more about how bittorrent works, click here for a great summary. If you want to just start downloading, you need to do the folllowing things:

1. Download a bittorrent program (or client). There are tons of choices out there, but for Windows I recommend Azureus, and for OSX there’s nothing better than Transmission.

2. Once you have those programs installed, all you need to do is find torrent files, which are just files that point to users who have the file. You can find these torrent files at lots of websites, but I highly recommend Torrentspy, Mininova, and The Pirate Bay. Just search for what you want on those sites, download the torrent file, and open it with your newfound torrent program.

The speeds will usually not be as good as those with newsgroups, but they will increase if you aren’t behind a router, or if you open your router ports (if you want to find out about how to do this, leave me a comment and i’ll gladly explain it).

The third and final source for downloads is iTunes. Basically, nothing beats the simplicity, and the prices aren’t too bad either. Though it only has TV shows, music, and music videos currently, by the end of this year it should have movies apparently.
Now at the end of this post, I should probably say something about the illegality of it all (except iTunes), and the moral implications and what not. But I won’t. Its only recently that I have begun purchasing more and more DVD’s of the music, videos, and movies I already have downloaded, and still download a whole lot more than I purchase. With iTunes getting more and more content, and all kinds of simple subscription models, I’m finding myself using it more and more to download. Hope this helped, and if you have questions, let me know in the comments section.

So today I had a good friend call me with what turned out to be quite a typical situation. She was working tirelessly on her computer (a brand new macbook, for the record), and for some reason did not click save inside Microsoft Word. Low and behold, when she came back to her computer, the file was no where to be seen and all of her work was gone.

We have all lost work like this, and, although at the time its terrible, its actually (for the most part) preventable. Microsoft Word, as well as all of the other Microsoft Office applications have built it security options for situations just like this. Basically, Word can save your documents for you automatically at any time interval. These settings can be found in Word (or Excel, or Powerpoint) preferences, under the save tab. Just make sure to change the AutoRecover time interval to one minute and to check the box that says Always Create Backup Copy. Below is the screenshot of the window on a mac, though it should look very similar in Windows.

Also, while youre at it, make sure under the File Locations tab you add a location for AutoRecover files. That way, if you do lose a document, you will know where Word automatically saved it. Hope this helps!