Cork'd
), it's a great site that lets you read
and write reviews, take personal notes, or just keep track of wines
you've tried or want to try.
Cork'd can also log all the wines in your cellar for you with
vintages, varietals, scores, average prices, reviews, and quick
easy to use tasting tags (for example: cherry, honeydew melon,
raspberry, apple, et cetera). Once you have an account, get some
drinking buddies and recommend wines to each other! It's a great
way to find the best wines at reasonable prices, let someone else
try them first... 
Facebook Chat
You could always see who was on Facebook right now by going to "Friends > Who's Online" but now you can go one step further and talk to those that are online right away. The chats are instant messages just like AOL Instant Messenger so there's no need to wait for a reply like in a personal message or wall post. Want to check it out? Go to Facebook right now, look on the bottom right corner of your window and you'll see the new chat box. Neat huh?
Flickr Pro
With the Flickr 
account you are given unlimited storage, unlimited photo sets, a
permanent online archive for your photos, ad free browsing and
sharing, account and photo statistics, and the photo quality has
essentially no resolution limit.
Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!
Bit Torrent Clients
If you use a client such as
Azureus,
Transmission,
Xtorrent,
or even the torrent downloader built right into
Opera(my
current favorite 'cause it works well and it's wicked easy) you
most likely won't even notice a difference on your network because
they are set up to work optimally right out of the box. These
modern clients don't aggravate your network with constant tracker
updates and they have the options to limit upload speeds. Check out
the difference in ping times from when I had Bit Torrent running
downloading a file without an upload limit and when I quit the
application, which is necessary to making sure the client isn't
still running. When you hit "pause" it doesn't stop the client from
slowing the network at all, you need to actually quit to be
sure.
Network Ping times (the time it takes for information to get from
your computer to a site, in this case Google, and back, in
milliseconds:
64
bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=855 ttl=115 time=4053.799
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=856 ttl=115 time=4099.037
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=857 ttl=115 time=4055.384
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=858 ttl=115 time=4033.114
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=859 ttl=115 time=4195.999
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=860 ttl=115 time=4137.639
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=861 ttl=115 time=4139.862
ms
Here is what happened when Bit Torrent is quit... we magically get
normal ping times again:
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=862
ttl=115 time=19.645 ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=863 ttl=115 time=13.137
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=864 ttl=115 time=15.742
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=865 ttl=115 time=14.918
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=866 ttl=115 time=17.739
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=867 ttl=115 time=16.239
ms
Moral of the story, make sure your bit torrent client (and your
room mates!) is set up to work optimally to keep your internet
running like normal, not to mention so as not to piss off your
friends on the network.
Missed an article? Try looking on the Archive page!
