An Introduction to Usenet
While BitTorrent might be all the rage, I’m a Usenet guy.
I am honestly not very patient when it comes to obtaining things I want, so waiting hours or days for downloads to complete has never been my strong suit. Aside from the original Napster, BitTorrent and similar P2P apps have never been something I have enjoyed using. Usenet however, is a completely different experience – one which I highly recommend.
You may or may not have heard of Usenet before, but it has likely been around longer than you have. In fact, the first spam message ever delivered was done so via Usenet. It’s the Internet’s oldest and best-kept “secret”. This is partly because Usenet is kind of like “Fight Club” in that the only real, yet unofficial rule is, “You do not talk about Usenet.”
I on the other hand do tell people about Usenet. However, I only do so provided I have deemed them technically capable enough to handle the task. This is really one of the main reasons why I think Usenet remains a little more obscure than most other online technology. While Usenet is not as complex as say, compiling your own Linux distro from scratch, there is definitely a learning curve that stretches beyond the patience and understanding of most people. I find that the benefits of Usenet far outweigh the cost and effort associated with using it.
The major highlight of Usenet is that there is virtually no waiting. You don’t have to wait hours for a slow download to complete. You don’t have to sit and hope that there are enough peers available to grab that old file you are looking for. When something is posted to Usenet, it’s there for good (almost). When you select a file that you want, you are able to download it as fast as your broadband connection can handle, provided you selected a good Usenet provider. Everything is “just there” – no waiting, no fuss…you just grab and go.
That said, if you are contemplating leaving the world of trackers and leechers behind, I will be more than happy to lead you to the path of enlightenment…
MailBin – Remotely Queue up NZB Files Using Gmail
Written from the ground up in C#, MailBin is a small application that checks your Gmail account for NZB, Zip, and .Torrent files, allowing you to remotely queue up Usenet and BitTorrent downloads at any remote location. It’s a great tool for when you find something you want to download while away from home, but you want it to be ready by the time you get there.
If you are an avid fan of Usenet or BitTorrent, and happen to use a newsreader/torrent client that will auto queue files (Like Newsbin or uTorrent), give it a try!
Suction, A Lightweight Directory Consolidator
I have put together a little program that will accept any number of directories as input and “Suction” the contents of any subdirectory to the top folder, deleting all empty subfolders left behind after the operation.
Morehpperliter was quite fond of the “Unify” function in DirUtils, which does not run on 64-bit machines and as far as I know is no longer developed, so he asked if I knew of an alternative. I did not, so I created one.
The program is simple, lightweight, and very handy if you have to wrangle a lot of files (this means you Usenet and BitTorrent users), so give it a try!
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