Hacksar

Does the clutter of the taskbar below look familiar to you?

If you’re anything like me, your taskbar probably is constantly cluttered. I find that whenever I’m working on some intense project (whether it’s making a website or just some research paper), my taskbar seems to just explode with various programs. They’re all different programs, so I can’t even group them; eventually, it becomes difficult to even read what file is open where, so sometimes even just alt-tabbing to the right program becomes difficult. Many times, you don’t need all of the programs at the same time, but they still need to be running. (The classic example is iTunes, or whatever music player you use. You don’t actually look at the program if it’s on random shuffle all, but it still needs to be running.)

Thankfully, there’s an incredibly light program called TrayIt! that lets you minimize any program to the system tray. (That’s the little set of icons found next to the clock in the bottom right of Windows.) Keep reading for the step-by-step guide on how to set up and use this cool program.

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If you’ve always wanted to use torrents, but are absolutely TERRIFIED by the prospect of opening your mailbox to find a Cease & Desist, or worse yet, the FBI (they can mail anything nowadays), then you should check out PeerGuardian2.

PeerGuardian2 is a free, open-source program that runs in the background of your system and blocks IP addresses based on an IP blacklist. Generally, this IP blacklist is automatically downloaded and contains multitudes of government IPs. So, you can torrent with the safety of not accidentally connecting to a government facility and possibly incriminating yourself. It self updates, and runs with minimal system performance impact, so it’s easily the best choice for an additional layer for you security-conscious folks. Keep reading for a simple step-by-step guide on how to get PeerGuardian2 up and running.
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If you always seem to miss your favorite TV show, forget to set your DVR, or simply want to watch it on your computer rather than on TV, then here’s the solution.

This program called Torrent Episode Downloader (or TED for short, pretty straightforward name) is easily the best auto-torrent downloader out there. You just add what shows you want, and it will automatically know when the next episode is airing, and scan all the popular torrent sites that day until it finds the torrent. Upon finding it, it’ll send it straight to your BitTorrent client (see our previous post of How To Use BitTorrent if you don’t have BitTorrent set up on your computer or you don’t know what it is).

Best of all, TED has been so reliable that for the past 3 months that I’ve used it, every episode had started downloading 15 minutes after it finished airing realtime. I always get the correct episode (no fakes, etc) and it automatically updates itself to look for the next episode once it finds the current one. That way, you just put in what shows you want once, and let TED be.

Keep reading for the Step-by-step guide.
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So, you’ve heard about this thing called “BitTorrent”, and have no idea what it is. You want to download various things, such as songs, software, movies, tv shows, etc, but don’t know how to get started. Here’s a detailed guide on how to get BitTorrent savvy in just a few minutes.

BitTorrent is a file sharing protocol, but you don’t need to concern yourself with how it works. What you do need to know, however, is how to use BitTorrent. To use it, you need a BitTorrent client. This guide will be using the client uTorrent (v 1.8.2), a free, open-source client that many people say is the most secure, lightest, and easiest client out there.

Keep reading for the Step-by-step guide.
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