One Thing Well

diana

a CLI interface to the aria2 daemon

I tend to use aria2c as a speedy replacement for wget for one-off file downloads, but diana makes it easier to manage multiple downloads and torrents.

Automatic

Automatic allows you to set up subscriptions for virtually any content linked in RSS feeds: podcasts, videocasts, torrentcasts… Rule of thumb: if it ends in ‘-cast’, you can get it with Automatic.

auto_torrent

This is a script to automatically download torrents from thepiratebay.org via rss.

Give it a list of stuff to look out for, set your bittorrent client’s ‘watch’ directory to match auto_torrent’s download directory, infringe copyright without lifting a finger.

torss

torss is a script which scrapes RSS feeds from torrent trackers, then downloads the torrent files that match user defined rules.

OneSwarm

OneSwarm is a new peer-to-peer tool that provides users with explicit control over their privacy by letting them determine how data is shared. Instead of sharing data indiscriminately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made public, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not others, and so forth. We call this friend-to-friend (F2F) data sharing.

It also obscures your identity when used as a straightforward Bittorrent client.

Glasnost

The goal of the Glasnost project is to make ISPs’ traffic shaping policies transparent to their customers. To this end, we designed Glasnost tests that enable you to check whether traffic from your applications is being rate-limited (i.e., throttled) or blocked.

Downpour

Downpour is a web-based BitTorrent client. It supports auto-downloading from RSS feeds and automatic importing and renaming of downloads into a media library, making it ideal for use on a home media server.

zButterfly

A Bittorrent client, but you wouldn’t know that from the homepage. Instead, zButterfly is offered as a film downloader—users just have to search for the latest blockbuster, pick a format and click ‘download’.

I imagine film industry laywers will shut zButterfly down faster than you can say ‘copyright infringement’, but for now it’s an interesting example of an app that takes a complex, fiddly process and winnows it down to a few keypresses.

Via TorrentFreak

Torrific

Effectively a seedbox for the masses, Torrific will download a torrent on your behalf, so that you can then download it via HTTP.

Update: I’ve tested Torrific out with a couple of Linux distro torrents, and it works well. One concern: there’s no way of knowing whether Torrific is a leech or if it seeds the files it downloads to a certain ratio.

Burnbit

Turn any file hosted on the web into a torrent.

Via TorrentFreak

Bitflu

Bitflu is a free BitTorrent client. The client was written in Perl and is designed to run as a daemon on Linux, *BSD and maybe even OSX.

Downloads are managed through a web interface, or via telnet.