Downloadaholics

Hello everyone, my name is JellyBrain and I’m a downloadaholic. Last year I owned an Acer laptop where the wifi indicator light blink rate was proportional to the data transfer rate. I used the laptop to download movies and TV series during the night in my bed room. If the light was not blinking fast enough, I couldn’t sleep! After extensively using the laptop it died out after 2 and a half years.

Doesn’t downloading totally divert your attention? Say you are editing your CV after 4 years and suddenly utorrent pops up say ‘download complete’ on your favourite show. Will you or will you not watch that 22 minutes of happiness right away? I would. And when you get back to your CV, all the attention will be gone and your CV would represent a 19 year old sexless person (typo) who was hibernated for 4 years (born in 1987, but age is still 19).
This is an addiction. I’m having a very bad one these days because I got all aired seasons of How I Met Your Mother. Once you watch 3-4 episodes you get attached to the characters. You watch the proceeding episodes mostly to know what happened rather than to enjoy the jokes. I realized this yesterday. When my brother was watching season 3, I was still on season 2. If I didn’t care about the story, it wouldn’t matter to me what season it is. But it did!
I hate myself. You should hate yourself too if you are in this position or worse.

BitTorrent Router

Since I was talking about energy efficient downloading, I found right now that Asus has a product. The product is called 'ASUS WL-700GE WIRELESS STORAGE ROUTER'. Other than being a wireless router, it has a 160GB hard disk and a GUI through a web browser where you can make it download files using torrents or regular http (or ftp) while your PC is off. Says it consumes only 15W when downloading. You can buy it from ebay (from here) for approximately $176.
Seems it's not the most popular product. This review tells that it's not very stable. It says if you try to pause torrents they get lost and download speeds aren't great. The same reveiw says it doesn't completely replace the PC when it comes to torrent downloading.
I hope something bettter will come in future.
I also have a few suggestions if some one who's going to develop this by any chance reads this blog ;)

• Have a capacity of around 16-32 GB of flash memory. They consume less power and it will reduce the price of the gadget. For massive downloaders let their be a connection for an external HDD
• As the torrent download manager on the device use utorrent
• There's no need for a router. Just make it connect with the router you already have through LAN and let the device be accessible throught the web browser to manage torrents etc.
• have a small LCD display to show progress, start, stop pause etc. (some basic functions)

I really think this could save the world a lot of energy.

[I published this through e mail. If you guys didn't know, you can e mail posts to blogger (to your respective address) and they get published instantaneously. Very useful to update your blog on the move.]

Energy efficient torrent downloading cntd...

Finally had some time to get me hands on the phone and install wmtorrent trial version on the new ROM. It seems with a comparatively less number of seeds, even though the computer downloads at maximum speed (50kbps), the phone downloads at a variable speed which is around 25kbps. However, by morning it still couldn't finish downloading a 174MB file. The phones become sort of slow when the software is running.

Unfortunately, cprog error which it had been having ever since I got the phone, still presumes. And it emerges more often when you try to play with it.

The phones gets heated up heavily during downloading and battery is used quite fast, so you gotta keep it plugged in. You also will have to prevent it from going to standby or else the wifi gets disabled. That means the back light will be lit all night long.

However I'm unable to complete my initial experiment (which was to test how much downloading can a mobile wifi unit handle) because the phone keeps crapping on me.

Energy efficient torrent downloading cntd...

The good news is the torrent was completely downloaded by morning and it was seeding.
The bad news is windows mobile was freezed.
This is probably because of the unstable ROM version of the PDA. Therefore the test could not be continued. Planning to flash and install a proper ROM and continue the experiment. Be patient!

Energy efficient torrent downloading

It feels good to be back on the blogsphere again.

I know most of you download stuff off the internet. If you consider size wise, I'm sure torrents take the first place. We let huge files download over night. It's a complete waste of resources. When a computer is switched on, all the peripherals consume power. Do we really need all of those components powered up just to download a torrent? The first thing I wish we had was an Operating System for downloading torrents where only the necessary components of the computer is running for the torrent download. It is not available. So the second options is to download using your wifi enabled mobile phone. It consumes very much less power. However the problem is, how much of downloading can a mobile phone handle before it's miniaturized wifi circuit burns out? Well I'm about to find that..............with my fathers phone of course. :D

After some internet research I found out that the most convenient torrent client is WM torrent. It costs $20. The trial version expires in 14 days. Right now it's downloading the movie 'Gamer'. I changed settings in the phone so that it never goes to sleep. The screen is permanently on and the phone is plugged in to AC power.

I will keep you guys posted on what happens in the long run.