Hasta La Gadget!

This week, I asked you to send me in photos of your disastrous workspaces. And man, you people are much, much more disgusting than I thought. And I assumed you were pretty disgusting.

First Place — David Schaefer
Second Place — Grossi Roberta
Third Place — Dudesque

You probably haven’t thought about it before, but the gadgets you own can provide deep insights into who you are as a person. That is especially true if you own one of these gadgets.

Even if you’ve been casually Torrenting for years, BitTorrent tools keep getting better. Here’s our guide for getting the most out of what is, slowly but surely, changing forever how people acquire and consume entertainments.

This guide is intended for folks who understand the basics but may have only just started to scratch the surface of what BitTorrent clients are capable of. If you’re even more hardcore than the tips here, feel free to drop some knowledge (and links!) in the comments for everyone’s use. Spread the love.

Throughout this guide we’ll be using two of the most popular multi-platform BitTorrent clients, Vuze (formerly called Azureus) and µTorrent. Both apps take two fundamentally different approaches: Vuze packs in just about every feature you could imagine, including a search tool, social-networking-like sharing among friends, a content guide, and much more. µTorrent on the other hand is the opposite: sleek, simple and barebones. The choice is yours.

Lots of our pointers here will take advantages of some of Vuze’s newest features, but we love µTorrent too. Where applicable, we’ll highlight standalone applications that can help bring some of Vuze’s integrated functionality to µTorrent fans.

Set up Your Router’s NAT and Transfer Limits
This is, without a doubt, the single most important thing you can do to ensure the highest possible BitTorrent performance. And it’s also something often overlooked by casual and even intermediate Torrenters.

BitTorrent clients pipe all of their network traffic through a single “port” on your network. But your router likes to partially or fully block traffic that doesn’t come through on all the “standard” ports (like port 80 for web traffic, for instance). So you want to make sure your computer has a clear and open channel to all that data you’re going to be sucking down by setting up “port forwarding,” which lets your router know to which computer on the network it should send traffic on certain ports instead of blocking it. Make sense?

1. In your Torrent client’s preferences under the “network” or “connection” heading, find out which TCP/UDP port it’s using. Keep the default, but for the record, you can choose basically any number you want (but read Vuze’s “Good Port Choices” article first) and if you have multiple machines on the same network using BitTorrent you’ll want to choose unique port numbers for all of them.

2. Now, open up your router’s admin page. This is pulled up by going to your router’s IP address in a web browser (commonly 192.168.0.1, 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.2.1). Sometimes you’ll have to enter a username and password; Google around for your model’s default name/password if you can’t remember it. Users of Apple’s AirPort routers should use the AirPort Utility app.

3. Now, the terminology for what you’re looking for is called different things by all the router companies. Some call it “port forwarding,” others call it “virtual servers” or “port mapping”—the terminology is surprisingly varied, but it’s usually listed under an “advanced settings” tab if there is one. The site Portforwarding.com can help you locate yours if you’re having trouble.

4. Once you’ve found where this all goes down, enter the port number from your client in step 1 for BOTH UDP and TCP fields (you’ll enter the same port number for the “private” or “local” UDP/TCP fields). You’ll also enter your current machine’s IP address (found in Network preferences on both OS X and Windows).

Note: If your machine is a laptop and you’re frequently connecting and disconnecting from the network, you’ll want to set up a static local IP address so you don’t have to switch your router’s settings every time you Torrent.

5. Hit save, and you should be good to go. Your BitTorrent client will have a network test built in somewhere in the preferences—use that to make sure your connection is clear.

6. Now, the final step, is setting a limit to your uploading speeds. As you know, BitTorrent simultaneously uploads to other peers while you’re downloading, and to ensure solid download speeds you must upload. But you don’t want these uploads to take over your limited upload bandwidth, especially if you’re on a cable connection. To be safe, cap your uploads around 20 kb/s. This is a good general ballpark that’ll ensure good download speeds and won’t clog your pipe. If you’re on FIOS you may want to kick that up a bit, but play around.

Vuze has a tool that can help you auto-configure your speeds too—probably worth experimenting with in the prefs.

Cover Your Ass
All the regular disclaimers apply: don’t be an idiot when you’re downloading stuff you probably shouldn’t. Here are some tools and strategies to make sure you keep yourself virus- and subpoena-free. But like always, no guarantees! Proceed at your own risk! Etc.

1. Don’t seed more than is absolutely necessary. The RIAA/MPAA/NARC’s number one priority are heavy uploaders. Not to say that the downloading part is any less illegal, but if you stop seeding and delete your .torrent file after it’s done downloading, your odds of staying safe are significantly higher.

Note: If your carefully crafted code of online morals compels you to continue uploading beyond the amount you shared during the download, feel free, knowing that it increases your odds of getting a friendly note from your ISP. And, please, do seed any files that are intentionally being distributed via BitTorrent, like a Linux distribution or Creative Commons licensed stuff from friends like Nine Inch Nails. You can’t get hurt by that.

You could make an argument that Torrenting is mainstream enough to survive on many thousands of people seeding very small amounts (ie: the amount uploaded while they’re downloading), or you could make an argument about the double (triple? quadruple?) paradoxes that surface when contemplating the morals of consuming vis a vis sharing in the gray to grayish-black Torrent market. But I’m not your dad—what you do is up to you.

2. Go for torrents with a lot of seeds and good comments. If hundreds of people are seeding a file, the odds of it being of good quality and virus free are higher. I know this may seem contradictory to point #1, but you’re not in this for the geek cred. You’re in this for you. So go with the herd. Also, comments on torrent sites will often have some shreds of useful info—if a lot of people report strange behavior with the downloaded file or a mysterious password lock, skip it.

Also, seeking out the geek legends of the Torrent community will go a long way to ensure good downloads. Choose people like aXXo‘s Torrents where possible.

3. Use the Bluetack IP filter to keep known baddies out of your life. The folks at Bluetack maintain a list of IP ranges of known spammers, virus seeders, and undercover snoops like Media Defender who might bust your ass. To add the list to Vuze, go to Preferences -> IP Filgers and type in the following URL into the auto-fill field: http://www.bluetack.co.uk/config/level1.zip

Update: Someone who should know has advised us against using Bluetack for a whole litany of reasons, most shocking of which is that Bluetack is some elaborate ploy to mess with P2P networks from the inside. Over my head, but for what it’s worth, maybe don’t use Bluetack.

4. Look at private torrent sites. Even though Oink’s hallowed days are over, there are still a number of good, private BitTorrent sites, where your odds of getting hit with random malware or a federal subpoena are lessened. But they may take some conniving to get invited to, and you’ll likely be forced to upload a certain amount to keep your membership.

5. Moderation, moderation. When you can, watch on Hulu, or heaven forbid, buy from your favorite artists. And the less massive your bandwidth usage, the less likely you are to draw the ire of your ISP (or their monthly bandwidth cap).

Autodownload Your Favorite Shows via RSS
For serialized stuff like TV shows, you can easily set up Vuze to subscribe to popular series via RSS and auto-download them every week. It’s nice. µTorrent lovers should check out TED, a cross-platform standalone app that does the same thing.

1. In Vuze, search for your favorite show. Once you’ve found the newest episode and added it to your download list, click the orange RSS button under “Subscribe.” The subscribe window can also look at other files in your library and subscribe to those too.

2. You’ll see a lot of different options, all seemingly the same. Choose HD where possible, and if there’s an EZTV option, choose that—it’s a reliably source of good torrents. Then, new episodes will appear in your Subscriptions area automatically, and you can pull them down.

Stream to Your Game Console or Transcode For Your iPod/PMP/Phone with Vuze
The newest version of Vuze added a seriously useful transcoding and streaming tool—just when you thought there couldn’t be anything else crammed into this app. But it’s great, and works perfectly to auto-detect a PS3 or Xbox 360 on your network and stream your downloads to your TV without any annoying configurations.

1. Enable the streaming add-on under the “Devices” option in the left pane.

2. If your PS3 or Xbox 360 is on and connected to your network, it will automatically show up as a device. Simply drag a file from your library to the icon for your console, and it will be available in the expected area (in the Video menu of the PS3’s XMB and the My Video Library, as another PC, on the Xbox 360).

3. The tool will also transcode to iTunes in sizes optimized for iPods, iPhones and Apple TV using the same process. Just drag the file from your Vuze library to the iTunes icon, and after a somewhat slow conversion time, it will be copied to your iTunes library. Pretty sweet.

Next Steps
There are plenty of places you can take it from there. Like setting up a dedicated, always-on torrrent machine, either with a spare PC or a standalone NAS box with a built-in Torrent client. Then you can take advantage of web-only interfaces to access and manage your downloads from the road.

Sounds like pretty good fodder for a future how to, doesn’t it? Keep your eyes peeled.

So that’s about it! Like we said before, if you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments—your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Have a good weekend Torrenting, everyone!

Image courtesy of, you guessed it, Jason Chen.

There are plenty of robot builders, but none bring as much elegance to engineering as Shigeo Hirose. His creatures are Star Wars, Iron Giant and Dean Kamen rolled into one cybernetic maki.

Truth is, I’d never heard of Shigeo Hirose or the Hirose-Fukushima Robotics Lab at Tokyo Tech until I read Wired for War—author PW Singer, featured in our interview here, sings the praises of the robot master, possibly the world’s foremost.

As you can see in the montage and the rundown, below, the dude has been building stuff for years, and things he designed 30 years ago, still seem startling compared to the commercial robotics we’ve grown used to. Swimming snakes, tiny velociraptors, and giant hands that close around women’s waists—this guy seems to know that the real fuel of robotic development is a careful combination of humor and fear.

Make sure you watch all three minutes of the video—the last 30 seconds feature a rollerskating robot that quite frankly blew my mind. Here’s a rundown of the featured models, in the order in which they appear in the video:

Active Code Mechanism R5 (2005) – This swimming snake scared the hell out of me. I used to be afraid of sharks, now sharks should be afraid of ACM.

Elastor (????) – What’s cool about this slinky with a claw is that it can easily reach things a human arm can’t. That and it looks like the prototype for the Lost In Space robot. Danger!

Genbu (1995) – This “articulated multi-wheeled mobile robot” is one of many robots Hirose has designed that can navigate over debris. What makes this one special is it’s shiny silver spiky look—like it’s also a lot of fun at S&M parties.

Soft Gripper II (1978) – We have all seen this in movies: The robot hand reaches out and grabs someone, King Kong style, around the waste. But when you see it demonstrated in real life, with a giggling woman, it’s frankly chilling. Where’s the rest of your gargantuan killer robot, Hirose? Wait, don’t answer that.

VmaxCarrier (2000) – This “holonomic omni-directional vehicle” at first reminded me of Eddie Murphy’s Billy Ray Valentine, panhandling the beginning of Trading Places. Then I glimpsed the underside of this lightweight device—with its four omni-discs, each with eight motorized wheels (for a total of 32 wheels)—and realized this was no movie prop.

Titrus III (????) – I think the lack of a page describing this robot confirms that Hirose only did it to show that he could. The shuffling little dinobot may be more cute than practical, but damn if I don’t want six of them.

SMC Rover (1997) – This planetary exploration robot can send its wheeled legs off on autonomous missions, owing to motors and batteries housed in the wheels themselves. It’s brilliant and whimsical, but it also reminds me of John Carpenter’s The Thing for some reason.

TAQT Carrier (1991) – This mechanical wheelchair is no match for Dean Kamen’s pre-Segway one, but it was built many years earlier, and has a rounded styling that reminds me of Star Wars, like it could be found on Tatooine.

Soryu V (1997) – One set of treads, and a robot can fall on its back as it climbs vertical terrain. Two or three, as in this case, and it’s suddenly more adaptable. Here, to prove the point, Hirose shows it on grass and snow.

Roller-Walker (1994) – It’s a rollerskating robot. A rollerskating robot. It’s like Xanadu meets Short Circuit. Somebody call Steve Guttenberg, Olivia Newton-John and Jeff Lynne, pronto.

More fun with Shigeo Hirose:

• BBC gallery of his “robot menagerie,” including the wall climbing “Ninja” not included in the video.

• Hirose-Fukushima Robotics Lab, website in English

• Wired for War book on Amazon and author site

Video montage expertly assembled and edited by our own Mike Byhoff; “Music for a Found Harmonium” and other yodels, airs and preludes by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra available for MP3 download at Amazon.com.

If you are a thrifty consumer, you probably already know that using price comparison sites are a great way to save money on gadgets. But I am tired of shopping around for shopping sites.

When it comes right down to it, I want to visit one site with a simple selection of core features that are focused on one thing and one thing only—helping me save money.

Vendors: Naturally, every good comparison engine needs to establish relationships with as many reputable vendors as possible. Giants like PriceGrabber, Shopzilla, Shopping.com, and Yahoo Shopping generally meet this requirement.

Coupons: Sites like RetailMeNot and MyCoupons.com are great, but that data should not be singled out in a standalone site. It should be integrated into standard search results (like Yahoo Shopping).

Price Alerts: Obviously, if I am truly searching for the best deal, I want to be informed when it happens. The tool to set up price alerts should be prominently displayed. PriceSpider does a good job of this. Sites like Become.com even offer price drops via email without registration. On the other hand, sites like Shopzilla don’t even appear to have the feature—or they hide it behind a registration form. Of course, there are numerous sites out there like ZooAlerts, PricePinx and Camel Camel Camel that specialize in price alerts, but I don’t see much value in those—especially when they are focused entirely on one shopping site like Amazon.

Price Trending: This is one of the new features on the block. Some comparison engines like NexTag and PriceSpider have already done a good job of integrating this feature in with search results, and it could help consumers rate the quality of the current deal by comparing it to prices in the past. Again, there are standalone sites like Gazaro that specialize in this feature, but as comparison site expert Brian A. Smith from comparisonengines.com points out, focusing entirely on price alerts and/or price trending is not an ideal strategy:

In this economy, any site that can help a consumer find a great deal is going to get some attention, and I think price tracking is a smart concept, but it’s nothing new. While the sites you mentioned: Gazaro, Zoolert, and PriceSpider have jazzed things up a bit with a web 2.0 look, price tracking has been available on shopping comparison engines (aka price comparison engines) like NexTag and PriceGrabber for a long time. I think that price alerts are a simple feature. I don’t think there is enough meat there to make a real product or business. If you look at Gazaro and Zoolert versus PriceSpider, you’ll see that PriceSpider is generating much more traffic. I think this is partly because PriceSpider has ventured beyond just price alerts to shopping comparison engine listings.

He also offers a warning:

Just because a price tracking site shows you a seemingly great new alert, the buyer should always beware. Most price tracking sites that I’ve looked at do not have a deep depth of merchants, but are rather just joining some select affiliate programs through Commission Junction or Linkshare. Because of this, a price drop from one merchant might look impressive, but in the end might not actually provide a consumer with a great deal.

A Clean, Usable UI: With so many details to keep track of, it’s not easy to keep things clean. Personally, I have never been a fan of NexTag’s layout—it seems kind of text heavy and convoluted to me. On the other hand Shopzilla has taken a more Web 2.0 approach while Google Product Search stays true to the Google design mantra. In the end, this is really a matter of preference.

User and Expert Reviews: Another no-brainer. Again, these should be prominently displayed with the product.

The bottom line is that on their own, the tools listed above give you only part of the picture—but when used together they can be extremely valuable to consumers. None of the websites I have come across are doing everything right—but I feel that sites like NexTag and PriceSpider are headed in the right direction as far as features are concerned while sites like PriceGrabber, Shopzilla and Yahoo Shopping are still tops in terms of overall effectiveness—a sentiment echoed by our expert from comparisonengines:

Consumers should make sure to take a look at a shopping behemoth like Shopzilla or Yahoo! Shopping before making a purchase. Yahoo! Shopping has an extremely comprehensive deal section, and even better, the site integrates coupons right into shopping comparison engine listings so consumers will have greater transparency into the deal (see the listings for Crutchfield, Tiger Direct, and ABT). So using a site like Yahoo! Shopping provides the consumer with a greater number of merchants, a shopping comparison engine experience (sort by price, rating, etc.), and integrates coupons.

Until one site puts all of the pieces together, it will still be necessary to check multiple websites to ensure that you are getting the best deal online. Hopefully, my rant on comparison engines will, at the very least, help you narrow down the search to save both time and money.

Prof. Dealzmodo is a regular section dedicated to helping budget-minded consumers learn how to shop smarter and get the best deals on their favorite gadgets. If you have any topics you would like to see covered, send your idea to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Professor Dealzmodo” in the subject line.