The world of Torrents is quite fascinating. Never before has watching the full season rerun of Mcgyver or Baywatch become SO possible! By installing simple software called "torrent readers" such as uTorrent, you can download just about ANYTHING from popular and safe torrent sites such as Mininova.org and Isohunt.com. This way, you can download movies, music and other stuff.

There are some controversies about the legality of downloading torrents. Many say that it is illegal, unethical and just plain sneaky. Well, let me clear things out for you. Torrent downloading is NOT PIRACY all in itself. It is originally created as a way for people to share stuff (also called P2P sharing and is not considered piracy, but there are boundaries). As long as you don't commercialize and reproduce the stuff you downloaded, you'll be fine. Moreover, in torrent downloading, there is a required activity called "seeding". Seeding is the act of "re-uploading" the stuff that you have downloaded. In a way, when you "seed" stuff, you're like saying "I do not own this, I just borrowed it".

Video Streaming Sites

The rise of video streaming sites such as Youtube, Metacafe, AOL Video, Imeem, and Myspace video has totally changed the internet, and people's lives, during the past decade. Not only can people show themselves and their own footages to the world, videos have made the internet a more exciting place. Whether you watch and upload videos for pleasure, entertainment, business, advertising, social awareness, etc., you cannot deny that it's fun!

Social Networking Sites

The internet has now countless ways for people to interact with each other. 100 years ago, this would have not been possible! Today, almost everyone has a "virtual version" of himself or herself online: the online profile! The reign of Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Everyones Connected and many other similar social networking sites has given people a variety of options to interact and connect with people around the world.

Making Money Online

Perhaps one the "best of the best" things about the internet is that you can use it to make sideline income. Many people even go as far as making a primary income online. There are many ways by which a person can make money online. He or she can try online auctions, such as Ebay. Many people earn money by retailing products and used stuff on Ebay. Others venture to blogging. When you blog, you can get paid many ways: you can earn from Google Adsense revenues, site sponsors, and referrals. Some pro bloggers I know have discovered so many ways to earn from their blog and they also figured out how to drive massive amounts of blog traffic. Meanwhile, other people venture to internet marketing, or selling both digital and tangible products online.

Search Engines and Instant Information

Google search is something that people never had one hundred years ago. In older days, people had to go to the library and make their research (I'm not saying that going to the library is a useless thing to do now). Today, most of us can enjoy the convenience of getting the information we are looking for by a simple click of a finger. In fact, the term "googling" is a new word that has been coined only during the past ten years. The word describes the speed by which information can be gathered at lightning speed.

Email and Messenger Services

Never underestimate the power of email. It has made the communication of human beings faster and more up to date. Although it has quite affected the "snail mail" or post office industry, email it has been a very important part of our lives, and one of the main communication tools in modern society.

Messenger services are fascinating, too. In the past, making long distance calls is a big deal. Today, you can do it for FREE using messenger services such as Yahoo and MSN Messenger. Thank goodness, if you're kinda lost when you're trying to figure out international codes, country codes and area codes, you can save yourself the trouble by going online and making the call via instant messenger (just make sure you have a decent headset, in which case, you have to read "Cool Headset Designs For Computer Freaks").

To wrap things up, let me say, Voila! The internet saved the day.

1. Got to the control panel in your start menu.
2. Click on performance and maintenance.
3. Click on free up space. A little box will pop up and it will be calculating what you can clear out. Then a box will pop up with a list and how much is in each thing on the list. It usually automatically checks the boxes for you but if you would like to keep any of it then you can uncheck the boxes.
4. Click ok and then it clears it off.

You can also clear off your browser with these steps.

1. Click on tools on your browser bar.
2. Click internet options
3. Under browser history, click delete.
4. Then areas you would like to delete or delete all, then click ok when the box comes up.

Back to my story, I went in and tried again to look at the profile, sure enough it jammed up again. So when I got back out and went to clean off the files again I had picked up over 12,000 MB of temporary files, just from their profile. After 11 tries I finally helped them figure out what the problem was. Can you believe it was too much bling on their page?

Do you people realize that each application you run on your profile page has to load separately? You wonder why people aren't trying to hook up but maybe you are just making impossible for them to see you at all. I was taught that in order to sell online, which is pretty much what most of these social sites are for, you are selling you, the page needs to load quickly. People don't want to wait for the ad to come up. If it's taking too long then they will stop the load and go back to a quicker one. I have done it myself. Adding all this bling and crap on your profile does not always attract attention. Sometimes it keeps you from getting it. Whatever happen to the good old days when a profile was just a profile and not graffiti and other flashy stuff?

I don't need someone to stop by and leave me stickers, a simple hello is good for me, or a how are you, something simpler than a huge sticker with flashing lights. I see you ok, you don't have to scream at me. If you want more attention you may want to tone down your bling so people can actually see who you are. It's fun but who are you under all those lights and flashy things? Sometimes the lights are so bright it's blinding.

Another thing that gets annoying is the auto play with music on profiles. I have mine like that so I can't complain much, but if I don't watch it, I go to see a friend and out blast this music that makes me jump out of my seat. Someone's page actually blew my speakers the other day. I am sure it didn't help that my daughter was online and she is into some pretty hard core rock and has the speakers too loud, but still. Wow, how much more can we say about ourselves? We're flashy and loud.

Pretty soon our whole language will be blinged up along with our profiles and some where underneath it all will be us, the users of the internet. Eventually someone will find us and tell us how to navigate through all the lights, flashing, music and get out of the bling to find the world of people we never got to see.

The benefits for early testers will be speedier Javascript handling in webapps like Gmail and Zoho Office, better Windows/Mac/Linux integration, and an improved Places (bookmarks) organizer. After the jump, see the list of Beta 5 improvements pulled from the release notes.

• Integration with Windows: Firefox now has improved Windows icons, and uses native user interface widgets in the browser and in web forms.
  
• Integration with the Mac: the new Firefox theme makes toolbars, icons, and other user interface elements look like a native OS X application. Firefox also uses OS X widgets and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates. A combined back and forward control make it even easier to move between web pages.
  
• Integration with Linux: Firefox's default icons, buttons, and menu styles now use the native GTK theme.
  
• Places Organizer: view, organize and search through all of your bookmarks, tags, and browsing history with multiple views and smart folders to store your frequent searches. Create and restore full backups whenever you want.
  
• Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in continued improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3 Beta 5, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
  

If you don't feel like braving the beta, you'd have to wait till June for the final release. In the mean time, if you decided to dive in there's a very simple way to enable your incompatible extensions.

Download the Nightly Tester Tools extension. Once it's installed and you've restarted, your Firefox 3 Add-ons dialog will have a "Make all compatible" button. Press that puppy to make your extensions work with Firefox 3 (after a restart, that is).
There's also a portable version (yay) that you can use without any impact on your computer.

1

This cool website allows you to browse through billions of archived websites. You can type in any URL and view the website when it was first created until now. Try it; put in Google and see what you get.

2

This website is very nice for those who like listening to music on their cell phone. The way it works is that nutise place shifts your music to any web-connected PC and many mobile, so you can take a copy if your iTunes library with you where ever you go.

3

You can pick a mood based on how you're feeling at the time and Mood Swings will find the appropriate websites associated with your mood. Sounds easy enough, go for it!

4

So lets say that you go to an electronic store and buy an item, but everyday you waist valuable time going to different websites, just to be sure that you got the best deal in town. Well fear no more, because this website tracks the price of items you bought online and notifies you in case of a price reduction.

5

The freedome to work where ever you might be. This nifty little app. lets you access your PC remotely, by using your cell phone or any other PC.

6

One of those amazing websites that allows you to bypass any blocked websites on the server. Great for work or school.

7

This great website lets you go around the registration harassment which a lot of websites tend to have. It instantly gives you a disposable login for any popular website that forces you to register.

8

Just from the name you can tell that it helps you send large files over the internet. Unlike your email, which only has a 5mb maximum capacity, this allows you to send up to 100 mb to any email address.

9

For all those bargain hunters out there, this website gives you a complete list of all the coupons out for major realtors and web merchants. All you have to do is cash in on the savings.

10

One of those interesting websites, which I am sure you are going to be using a lot is Flash Earth. It is more of an experimental application that uses the satellite imagery from many different sources, in order to give you a feel for the differences between all of them.

11

This is the best place to find the cheapest tickets available on the web, because it is the only website that provides special rates for South West Airlines and includes the special deals that are only found on the airline's website.

12

This website allows you to create secret blogs with your friends, just by using your cell phone. You can stay up to date with sms notification, follow up on your emails, and receive latest articles from favorite blogs/websites on your cell phone.

13

This is a web based photo editing tool. You have all the tools that the professionals have at their disposal, without having to run the application on your computer. A very nice program.

14

For those that need to have their emails on the go, this website auto-forwards your emails to your cell phone as text messages.

15

This website provides you with a temporary email addresses that expire within 10 minutes. For those nasty websites that ask for your email for verification, but just end up sending you a bunch of junk in the process.

16

This website has a ton of free games for your cell phone. Free registration.

17

Now if you have some extra money just laying around, I suggest that you put it to good use in the lending club. Basically it's a social lending website, where you borrow money from individuals and you end up paying them back with interest. In a savings account you could be lucky to make 2% off of your savings, but here you are likely to make up to 12% interest per loan. Crazy!

18

This website allows you to find the lowest online prices for any in store item in just seconds. Instantly check up on the deals for any product right from your cell phone.

19

This very helpful website lets you convert the pictures you have taken form you cell phone and turn them into well formatted PDFs.

20

Everyday, SoLow auctions off four different items. Anyone with a cell phone or a computer can be involved in the auctions by placing their bids. The user with the lowest unique bidwins the auction.

21

Use Telepixie to quickly schedule and receive daily wake up phone calls on your cell phone along with reminders and weather forecasts.

22

Using this website you can send free postal letters to anywhere in the US right from your computer.

23

With Froonz you would be able to place group calls and send messages to multiple people for free.

24

With Google STP you can forward anything you find on the internet to any mobile phone for free.

25

Very cool website where you can find definitions to slang words. A user based rating system makes this website the ultimate slang reference.

26

IQzone is very helpful in posting classified ads. You post your ad to a number of online and print classifieds directly from your cell phone.

27

With PodioBooks you can search and browse through a variety of totally free audio books that you can put on your iPod.

28

Jott is a simple way for leaving yourself notes and To Do's using your cell phones.

29

A very convenient phone directory system that lists direct human access numbers to support employees in hundreds of companies.

30

This website is great for those individuals that want to catch up on the current buzz on the web. The way it works is that it collects the most talked about URLs of the day and just puts them in one easy place to find. Now that's what I'm talking about.

31

For those curious souls that like to learn new things and have the urge to know everything there is, this is the place to go.

32

This website is for all of those iPhone users that are dying to know the latest news and updates for their super cool phone. This website provides the best information regarding any updates and hacks for the iPhone.

1. StumbleUpon

   The StumbleUpon add-on is basically the same as the tool bar you will download on the StumbleUpon homepage. One advantage of downloading the Fire Fox version is you will receive update screens from Fire Fox like you do on every add-on. The StumbleUpon tool bar will do two things for a blogger or freelance writer. The first is, when you sign up for an account you can start submitting your content to the StumbleUpon database which will effectively bring large streams of traffic to your site if used correctly. Another benefit is if you specialize in a certain niche you can select to “Stumble” through content in that niche to get ideas for new content.

2. SeoQuake

   SeoQuake is an add-on more specifically meant for people with their own blog; however it is of some use to freelance writers as well. SeoQuake can be placed in a few ways. You can have it as a tool bar, or a bar that will open just beneath the tabs. This bar can tell you the Google Page Rank of a page, how many times Google has indexed the page, Yahoo Links, Alexa Rating, the Web Archive age of the site, the number of internal links, external links, and the density of keywords. There are a few more options you can select if you want them, but it makes the tool bar a little too big. If you click on any of the above options it will bring you to the page that is feeding it the information. So it will bring you to the Alexa site, or Google search engine showing all the indexed pages. It is very helpful for bloggers to see this information.

3. QuickNote

   QuickNote is a simple note taking pad. What makes this more effective than the wordpad installed on your computer? You can easily pull this up from your browser, and it's easier to take notes with this than a wordpad on your computer. When you would like to take a note you go to Tools > QuickNote and you will have three options depending upon your needs. You can have the QuickNote open in a new tab, open in a side bar (similar to opening favorites in a side bar), or have it open and float above the page like a normal wordpad would. It will automatically open every page you've saved on the QuickNote, so if you close it you can open it just as quickly and continue you where you left off. Great for taking notes on potential ideas, saving links, or just starting your articles.

4. Split Browser

   Split Browser is a very handy add-on for those of you doing research on products. When listing details on products such as specific numbers, or if you're writing an article with another screen open giving you information this is the tool for you. You can effectively combine this add-on with QuickNote if you're a freelance writer by opening QuickNote in a new tab. If you are a blogger simply open your blogs posting area. Then you can split your browser screen so that your typing area is on half the screen while your information is on the other side. Now you can easily write segments and then read on without having to switch screens.

5. Zotero

   Zotero is a quick and automated way to cite your resources accurately. Before you may have used an automated site where you fill out information such as date accessed, website name, author, ect and it gave you correct citation, or you credited the author incorrectly with a simple link to the “original article”. It integrates very easily with Microsoft Word which is what most freelance writers are using anyways. Never again be emailed by an author who thinks you've incorrectly cited their articles.

All of these add-ons are best used by freelance writers and bloggers. They can help you reduce the time you spend writing every day. With the time you save by using these tools you can write more, or be done sooner. I have all of these downloaded and they are spyware free to my knowledge. I'm not responsible for any problems occurring from the result of downloading these.

Take a Look at the Release Note Highlight:

• New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files, and you can see and search on the name of the website where a file came from. Your active downloads and time remaining are always shown in the status bar as your files download.
• Full Page Zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site.
• Integration with Vista: Firefox now has Vista-specific icons, and uses native user interface widgets in the browser and in web forms.
• Integration with the Mac: the new Firefox theme makes toolbars, icons, and other user interface elements look like a native OS X application. Firefox also uses OS X widgets and spell-checker in web forms and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates. A combined back and forward control make it even easier to move between web pages.
• Integration with Linux: Firefox's default icons, buttons, and menu styles now use the native GTK theme.
• Location Bar & Auto-Complete: type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you're looking for. Results are returned according to their frecency (a combination of frequency and recency of visits to that page) ensuring that you're seeing the most relevant matches. An adaptive learning algorithm further tunes the results to your patterns!
• Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in significant improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3 Beta 4, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
  
• Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 Beta 4 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.
  
  The download is free as always, you can take it here. For non-tech-savies I recommend you to wait for the final release. But if you really want to try out this shiny new Firefox, this is a little advice so you may use your favorite add-ons with it.

How to Enable Add-ons on Firefox Betas:

When you first install the cutting edge Firefox 3 beta 4, you will notice that all your add-ons are disabled by default. If you really (I mean really) want your beloved extensions, try this. This is not guaranteed to work with every add-on and may cause bugs or weird behaviors.
Type about:config into Firefox's address bar and click the "I'll be careful, I promise!" button.

Right-click anywhere. Choose New>Boolean. Make the name of your new config value extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.

Make another new boolean pair called extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set the value to false.

Restart Firefox.

Your add-ons will be enabled.

This event sparked a thought in my mind. Do people not know how much better this holy internet browser is compared to all the others?

Firefox 2.0 is the pinnacle of human existence. Sometimes people ask me why I know so much about computers. I tell them Google, but the real reason I love knowing more about computers and am intrigued to know more, is because ofcompanies and designers like Mozilla. They stepped up against the atrocity that is Internet Explorer. I get so pissed off when websites FORCE me to use IE instead of Firefox. Sometimes when I find something I really like, such as a video or a game I want to play online, and it tells me I need be using IE instead of my current browser, I click the "Contact us" Button at the bottom of their page, and send them an email of how fucking retarded they are. You think I am kidding, but I am NOT.

You are probably wondering, "But what makes Firefox so good? Isn't a browser a browser?". That is completely wrong and stupid. Here is a list of reasons why Firefox owns your face:

1. Tabbed Browsing

   You can be looking at a page and decide that the page that you are on is going to take a little bit to load. All you have to do is Middle-Click on a link or bookmark and open a new tab that you can go back and forth from your page that is loading while you check your Facebook or something. This allows extremely fast and efficient multi-tasking while browsing the internet. IE may have this, but the idea was taken from Firefox.

2. Portable Bookmarks

   Have you ever been on a computer at school and wanted to show someone that cool link you found last night, well you can get all your bookmarks from home at any computer with Foxmarks. It may sound dumb, but it is incredibly useful. Especially if you browse the internet a lot.

3. Way Faster

   Firefox is way faster than IE. That means you can load and upload your pictures on Facebook faster. :P

4. Addons
   

   There are hundreds of addons that you can use to implement into your browser to help you with things such as watching videos, knowing the weather, or listening to music.

5. Dictionary

   There is an automatic dictionary that you can download to use if you are a really bad speller/typist. How do you think I wrote this article with minimal errors?

6. No Or Minimal Pop-Ups

   Have you ever been annoyed/scared of the ads on webpages that are just pictures that tell you to go to this website and win a free Xbox 360 or something? Not anymore. With ADP (Ad-Block Plus) you will not have anymore ads again. EVER. Try going to this site and see if your browser does that. http://serials.ws

7. Themes

   Find a theme or color scheme that fits your personality or hobbies and use it. Simple as that.

Take that, Microsoft.

A friend of mine later added:

IE7 now resembles firefox, but it will never match the outstanding capabilities of the open source master piece built by the most brillliant that the Internet has to offer.

I do like opera, but it isn't supported much.

But enough, the following statement sums up the entire argument, suck it Microsoft, you have been beat this time.

Bill Gates will never match up to the internet population of genius, which is an unlimited number of future bill gates. Bill Gates is the gate keeper to a new world of brilliant.

But it could be worse, we could be stuck with Safari....

(AAAAHHHHH Apple! AAHH)

How To Make It Even Better (The Easy Ways)

The first thing you should do after downloading and installing Firefox is go to the Adds-on section. Click on this link, or on the Adds-on button from the Firefox homepage. There you will find adds-on that:

• Blocks those annoying ads that eat your bandwidth for breakfast - Adblock Plus
  
• Makes your downloads much easier to manage - Download Status Bar
• Adds the option to download by Flashget or other download managers - Flashgot
• Recommends new cool sites based on your interests - StumbleUpon
• Delivers international forecast at your fingertips - Forecastfox
• Saves the best for later reading - Clipmarks

And many more that allow you to customize your internet experience the way you want.
To install those juicy adds-on directly to your Firefox, simply click the links. You will find more green buttons (smaller though). Click those, wait a few seconds, click on Install, and they will hop in your browser powerhouse the next time you use it. If you can't wait to test them out, click Restart Firefox. Don't worry about remembering those sites you're visiting, they will come back exactly like you left them.

How To Make It Even Better? (A Little More Tinkering)

After installing those adds-on, what should you do next to make Firefox really your own? A few tips here to help you.

Organizing bookmarks: Click on Bookmarks (Ctrl + B) > Organize Bookmarks. There you will find options to import your old bookmarks from Internet Explorer (File>Import), or export your current bookmarks to a HTML file in case you have to reinstall your computer. A really cool thing about Firefox that I really like is the Bookmarks Toolbar, which is basically a toolbar filled with your favorite sites that you can access simply by clicking on the icons. Fill it up by drag-and-drop links directly on it.

The Sidebar

 Unlike Internet Explorer, the Firefox's sidebar actually is useful. Choose your sidebar (View>Sidebar) and enjoy. There are more you can display with the sidebar, but those are for another guide.

Options

By changing some basic things in Options (Tools>Options), Firefox will be yours. Some options are quite obvious, but overlooking them may cause you some annoyance. In Main>Downloads, the default setting is always Saves files to Desktop, which destroys my beautiful wallpaper, I changed it to Always ask me where to save files. In Startup, When Firefox starts should be Show a blank page if you prefer a clean start (it actually makes loading a bit faster).

The Opera browser is very customizable and is based towards the person who wants more security. It has no holes in its security compared to 7 for IE, 4 for Firefox, 3 for Safari, and 2 for Konqueror, as of 2/19/2007. Opera also has many widgets that are like the add-ons for Firefox with the exception that anyone can make these widgets. Safari is customizable and doesn't have as many security issues as IE, but is only for Mac and PC, meaning no for Linux. And last but not least is Konqueror, which is like a mix between Firefox and Internet Explorer. It is very customizable and presents few security concerns for the average user. These are the main browsers that people use nowadays and by far the best. It is up to you to decide which one you should use.

Bottom line: There is practically no difference.

But if you want a fast browser, then you should look at the following options.

K-Meleon

SeaMonkey

And always remember about skins and themes. K-Meleon skins are avaliable here while here is a link to Seamonkey.