My latest music CDs (of course already ripped to my Ogg Vorbis player... CDs suck usability-wise, actually...):

Sing when you're Swinging

Two CDs - the second is titled "(If you can't sing it) You'll have to swing it" - with recordings of the swing era. Some slow, some better for dancing. Rather cheap, and well worth the money unless you have many songs of that era already.

Pop swings

This CD is a mixed bag. It's swing covers of well-known songs of the 70s-90s. Some work great, others don't. A lot is personal taste, depending on the memories you have of the originals or how you liked them. If you didn't like the original, you might like the swing cover. If you loved the original, you'll likely hate the cover, just like any cover. The funniest thing is that one artist, Paul Anka, is on the CD in both roles, as cover artist (Smells like teen spirit) and as original artist (Diana). This is a CD you can't really listen to on-block (thats why CDs suck) or play on a party. You'll usually pick some specific songs.

Perfect for parties

The full title is

Bear Family
"Perfect for parties
Highlight Album

This CD was the surprise CD. Very cheap, but very convincing. It's odd and fun at the same time. Actually it's probably as much country as it's rockability and swing. But who cares when you can have lots of fun with it? The song I like currently like best is "Burn that candle" by Charline Arthur.

Note: above amazon.de links will earn me a tiny commission. It would be nice if you'd use them if you plan to order some of these CDs. Thanks. It will certainly never pay off, but when I set links I can as well set some that might allow me to buy myself a CD from it sometime later, too. ;-)

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I've recently used bittorrent a bit. For example, I loaded the Ubuntu installer CD with it. For power users, I think rtorrent is a good client.

I tried freeloader, but apart from some obvious bugs (it doesn't save the maximum bandwidth settings value), i'm lacking interesting information such as the number of peers or of distributed copies.

When toying around with rtorrent and it's options I noticed a couple of interesting things.

First of all, if you're firewalled, you'll be much slower. Allowing incoming connetions (and having a port forwarding in your router) makes a huge difference in the number of peers. My estimates are that 70% of peers are firewalled; if both of you are, you can't transfer data!

The other thing is that apparently BitTorrent clients use some kind of "Tit for Tat" strategy. They request a packet, you request a packet. If you don't send them data, they'll stop sending you any. They'll still eventually retry (maybe you were overloaded), but largely your download speed will be related to your upload speed. I don't know how much peers (and seeds) trade information on who has which parts or is sharing how much upload speed. I guess they do somehow to deflect cheaters.

Assuming that the illegal file sharing tools work similarly, this gives some interesting (theoretical?) ways to recude illegal file sharing:

• Give people free routers - which don't have an easy-to-use port forwarding option (especially not UPnP, which software could auto-configure...)
• Tell them that downloading isn't that dangerous for being sued, but uploading is, so they should set their upload speed limit to the minimum.

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