Previously Pinned: March 2005 Archives

My old bog has been getting a bunch of hits from people looking to find Mininova.org, so I thought it's about time I provided a list of good current torrent sites:

Open Sites (No Registration):

My favorite is ISOHunt - probably the broadest search and aggregation site I know of, and the RSS feed allows you to view by category. If you want the search bar in your Opera Personal Bar, look here. It's best for searching and monitoring via RSS, the listing UI isn't great, for which you might want to try MiniNova, which is sort of subsidiary of ISOHunt, or:

TorrentSpy, another very good indexing site which I tend not to use because it's main "torrents for today" page is split into different pages, but otherwise it's very "Suprnova-Like". Didn't have RSS last I checked but that might have changed.

For TV, there are 2 main sites, which amongst others are also indexed by the above sites - TVTorrents, and BTEfnet. I prefer TVTorrents because it has an autodownloading application via RSS (TVTAD). Also TVTorrents tends to only post proper files, and well seeded, whereas BTEfnet tends to just go for prompt releases. I monitor both though, since sometimes one has something the other doesn't.

Registration Required:

The big ommission above regarding TV is UKNova - it requires registration, which means that if they're not taking new members you're sunk, and your ratio actually matters. But it has what the other TV sites lack: UK TV in spades.

Filelist.org does very high quality releases. They only release "scene" stuff, so mostly it'll be things in 15mb rar files - but they'll be the proper stuff. I go there to get good quality games and movies, especially movies that otherwise aren't available in WideScreen. Oh, and pr0n. The download rates, as long as you're a member in good standing, are off the charts fast, because of their very sensible ratio system.

Notes:

There are plenty of other sites, but these are the ones I use most often, and are most familiar with. There are many many more sites, especially niche sites and wannabe sites - feel free to add them as comments and I'll be updating this post as and when anyway. In particular there are a lot of new registration sites - but it doesn't make sense to join too many of those if they aren't comprehensive though. These are only BT sites, I'll do a seperate post on post-Sharereactor/Shareconnector sites later. I personally use Azureus as my client - be sure to do a clean install of the latest Java before you use it. If you're looking for NFO's, this is the place to go. When I have time, I'll hunt down the RSS links for you guys, especially since some of them aren't very prominent.

I've uploaded a copy of my customised search.ini for all to use. It will give you more searches via the drop down search box, and you can add more searches to the address bar. Furthermore, if you enable your personal bar (right click on the address bar - customise), you can put a whole bunch of searches there.

In the interests of full disclosure, the search box of Google sends you to my customised Google search page, so that I recieve the advertising from the paid links in your searches - normally Opera would be the one recieving them (no longer true, but it now defaults to Yahoo Search). Similarly for Amazon.com and .co.uk searches. I personally don't use Google any more, since Yahoo seems to have more accurate results. Also, you won't be able to set the number of searches per page through the Opera preferences.

Instructions:

Just download this (Updated for Opera 8.01). UnRar to your Opera Profile Folder (*not* the root Opera folder that has opera.exe in it) the exact location of which is explained here, or you can also refer to this. This will ask you to overwrite the existing search.ini - say yes. If you have problems, the default search.ini can be copied over from the root Opera folder.

Start Opera.

Simple huh?

Suggestions/Shortcuts:

If you updated Opera to either 8.0 or 8.01, they might have overwritten your old customised search.ini - but it'll have been backed up to something like search.001 or something in your profile folder - if that happens just close Opera, delete the current (new) search.ini and rename the old one, editing the new search.ini to change the version number to the current version - currently 6, as of 8.01. Or just download the file again from above.

If you want to know how to enable the personal bar look here. If you want more screen real-estate as a result, you can turn off the menu bar by pressing ctrl-F11 (this might change in Opera 8). And so it has, you now have to customise your keyboard shortcuts in advanced settings - use the Unix shortcut of Alt-F11, if you ask I might bother to post a download you can put in your profile folder.

To add more searches to the personal bar, right click on it and hover over "show searches". To move the search boxes around, press and hold the "shift" key while dragging and dropping. That's also the easiest way to move search boxes to the address bar to complement the drop down box. The other way is to right click and customise - the searches are under "buttons" category "search".

Press shift-F8 to highlight the drop down search box, shift-F7 to go to the first personal bar search.

Your right click menu is also enhanced so now when you right click after highlighting a word or phrase, your "dictionary" will be dictionary.com and "encyclopedia" will be wikipedia. All the available searches are also available under "search with". The default "search" will send you to Google, or the last thing you "searched with".

If you want to find out the various keywords to search in the address bar with, go to Preferences (Alt-P) - "search". There are examples in the preference menu to explain further.

When pasting something from your clipboard into a search/address field, you don't have to press ctrl-v and then enter, just press ctrl-d.

List of Searches:

Google, Yahoo, IMDB, Dictionary.com (ad-blocker advised), Wikipedia, TVTome, Isohunt, Shareprovider, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Google News, Neoseeker, Urban dictionary.com, Chicago Reader Short Reviews, Allmusic.com for Artist/Song/Album, Pricegrabber, Pricewatch, Ebay, Cracks.am, Astalavista, Yahoo Bizfinder in Singapore. (there, have been changes, have a look at the trackbacks)

Further Reference:

All this was done with the Opera Search.ini Editor.

To move between different browsers, try Optool.

Also feel free to download the companion Customised default bookmarks, and Customised Toolbar Setup. Or all of these together as one file, together with the Opera Not So Compact skin, to unRar into the profile folder. These are also for me to customise peoples' setups when I install Opera for them. (This is too old now, you'll probably just want to get the search.ini provided above)

Note: if you want to keep up to date with this, you can comment, and then check the box to subscribe to changes to this post. I'll be tidying up the search.ini as I find the effort. It is now tidy - most hotclicked items are near the top etc.

I'm uploading a copy of Proxomitron for you to download - it's my own setup, based on JD's filters. But what that means for you is that it'll cut out ads - so aggressively your head will spin.

Just download, unRar, preferably into Program Files or something. Then run Proxomitron.exe when you want it to be on - remember to set up your proxy settings in your browser to point to "localhost", port 8080.

In Opera this means Alt-P, Network, Proxy Servers, under "http", add those values. It also works with FF and IE.

If you need more details, the help/installation files are included as a directory of html files. If you want proxo to startup with windows, just create a shortcut to it in your "startup" folder in your start menu.

I'm doing this, at least in part, because proxo can be difficult to set up properly and tweak till it's useful - this way you just unpack it and you're ready to go. The best thing about these filters is that the pages still end up looking nice and nicely formatted, and you'll start to realise how much ads can mess up site layouts. I had problems with a couple of sites, but I just added them to my blocklist and they work fine.

Again full disclosure prompts me to say that I've added my own domain to the blocklist, which means ads will show on my site. I put a lot of effort into making my ads fit the look and feel of the site, so I set it up so that I can monitor them when I browse myself. If you want to delete the entry, the file is in the directory called "Lists", "Bypass Lists.txt". The entry is [^/]++.fallingbeam.org/ - just delete it.

I'll probably make this post definitive. Hopefully it'll be part of my series on advanced Opera techniques. There are a bunch of files in the directory that don't actually need to be there, but I can't be bothered to figure out which those are, so there.