One of the best ways of accessing these services from outside the supported countries is to use a VPN, a virtual private network. This is helpful for citizens on holidays who want to access the services abroad but also – obviously – for users from other countries who want to access the services.

UltraVPN was discovered by Nakodari from Addictive Tips and we have to say that it is one of the easiest solutions right now. It works great currently and gives access to Hulu, Pandora and all the other US-only websites and services out there. The streaming quality is excellent unlike that of other free competitors (like Hotspot Shield). Our guess however is that it is only a matter of time – thanks to popularity – before the performance of UltraVPN will get a dent or two as well.

Installation is a breeze. All the user needs is to create an account at the UltraVPN website (only username and password required). The VPN setup is available for Windows and Mac OS. The username and password have to be supplied on startup. The vpn service will notify the user that the computer has been connected to it. What’s left is to access the websites and services to test the speed and quality of the service.

Head over to the Ultra VPN website to download the client, create an account and access additional information about the virtual private network. The vpn service has been successfully tested with Hulu, ABC and Pandora.

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“Following the acquisition, patented content delivery innovations made by BitTorrent, Inc. will be integrated in the µTorrent client in a manner that will remain seamless to the community of users. Ultimately, the integration of best-of-breed BitTorrent technology will result in an improved client and an enhanced user experience. It will also accelerate BitTorrent’s plans to provide high-performance content delivery services that power websites seeking the most efficient platform for distributing large, high-quality files. Lastly, the incorporation of µTorrent’s lightweight codebase strengthens the adoption of BitTorrent technology in embedded systems, including televisions, mobile phones and other non-PC platforms.”

Utorrent on the other hand does not seem to be the only bittorent client which seems to be affliated with the content industry. There are at least rumors that Azureus was sending stats of your sessions over the network as well. And finally a photo appeared on Flickr that shows the author of Bitcomet and Aswhin Navin of Bittorrent.

Alternatives:

Some users prefer to switch clients based on those rumors which is totally understandable. But which clients can be used except the most popular ones ? Here is a list of alternatives.

• ABC (Open source)
• BitBuddy (freeware)
• BitSpirit (down atm)
• BitTornado (Open Source, one torrent per window)
• gTorrent (Open Source, Linux)
• Halite (still in early development, Open Source)
• XBT (Open Source)

It will be hard for every client in that list and possible future clients to come close to the excellent functionality and performance of uTorrent.

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This is basically a collection of free streams that are available on the internet and can’t be compared to programs like tvu player that stream popular tv channels like ABC, Comedy Central and FOX. The only advantage you get with streamick is that it displays the streams directly from within their website.

To be honest, many channels that are offered at their website are crap. Local channels about Miami or New Orleans don’t appeal to a world wide audience. Neither do many of the other channels offered there Boardriders TV and High TV for example.

My suggestion would be to give it a try, take a look at the offered streams and see if they offer any that might be of interest to you.

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I did write about some of them here at ghacks already but I guess only the die hard ghacks readers will know about this. I would like to start with a tool that I have been using for some time now. It is called Hamachi and the main benefit is that it is able to simulate a lan over internet. This is great if a game only offers lan play for instance. I do not suggest you use it for the following purpose but it is possible. Many games require serial numbers and those numbers are checked when you connect to a game server on the internet. They are not checked if you create a lan game.

System Tools:

Please insert the CD into the drive and restart the application. I hate this message. Forcing legit users to have the CD / DVD in drive to execute the program is something I never understood. Pirates crack those protections in seconds and legit users have the problems with methods that are supposed to make it harder for pirates. Something is wrong here. I do like Daemon Tools which emulates CDs on your hard drive. Create an image of the CD, mount it in Daemon Tools and you may use the software without the Cd.

That shitty movie is not playing. I don’t see a picture, I hear no sound. Have you ever witnessed something like that ? This could be due to a missing codec on your system. Gspot analyzed a movie file and displays the codecs it is using. Did I say that I hate the fact that there are billions of codecs out there ? Waste of time and energy.

Notepad 2 replaces Notepad which ships with every windows installation. It offers more features than Notepad like syntax highlighting.

Rbtray makes it possible to minimize every window into the system tray instead of the task bar. If you are like me and dislike crowded task bars this tool is for you.

I like my computers as silent as they can be. One method to achieve this is to use a software that is able to control the speed of the fans in your pc. Speedfan is my choice. It displays temperatures for important system components such as processor, motherboard and hard drives and lets you change the fan speed if that is supported on your system.

Vippy the writer friendly cursor changes the cursor into a eye-friendly one. This is great if you have troubles finding the cursor in a text document. Vippy changes the color of the cursor to red for instance.

Internet:

Ghacks is running on a dedicated server and I have to make the connection using a terminal program. I do use Putty for this, it is fast and clean and does exactly the things that I need it to do. I do use WinSCP to connect download backups that I made from the dedicated server. SFTP means secure file transfer.

I have a Skype account to talk to my friends and see who is online at the moment. There is no charge if both users are connected to the Skype network. I do prefer Teamspeak while gaming. Teamspeak has the advantage that more users may chat and talk at the same time while Skype has that limited I think. When I was playing WOW we were using Teamspeak with more than 40 people in one channel. Don’t worry, you can moderate everything.

If you want to view tv on the internet you should take a look at tvu player which offers some interesting channels to choose from. To name a few: ABC, ESPN, Comedy Channel, CBC, Fox and more. All free, with relative good quality. You need a broadband connection for good results.

You need some additional tools if you want to save video streams. Most providers hide the real url to the stream making it impossible to detect it by normal means. Url Snooper comes into play and detects the real address by analyzing all network traffic.

I need a local test installation of ghacks to test new features before I make the upgrade on the running site. XAMPP offers everything I need to have a local Apache installation with PHP and MYSQL support. It is great for learning and testing upgrades.

Security:

You might remember the Sony rootkit incident. They planted a rootkit on some of their CDs and users had a hard time getting rid of it. Rootkit Revealer is one of those tools that helps detecting and removing rootkits.

Other:

I do not buy lots of new CDs but sometimes I buy some used ones on Ebay or Amazon. I don’t have a CD player at all so I have to get the songs from the CD on my computer to be able to play them and transfer them to my Ipod. CDex is the tool I use for that purpose. It is fast, pulls all relevant information from the internet (author, title, songs..) and adds them automatically to the songs.

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