Metal Torrents

Following are my favourite sites to get Metal via torrents

http://www.demonoid.com : There are huge number of active torrents on this site. The best thing I like about demonoid is that you can easily filter out non-metal stuff and choose the quality you want. So if you want only lossless albums you can easily tweak the search options to get them. 

http://rockbox.psychocydd.co.uk/  : This is a metal only torrent site with all possible metal genres as sub category allowing you to easily drill down to the music of my choice eg Thrash metal, Death metal etc. As it stands now you can download without requiring a login.

Enjoy !!

Best Metal Albums Review Site

I am been into metal for the last 19 year and have enjoyed all its flavours ranging from traditional metal to thrash, death to doom, black to nu-metal, hardcore to hair metal. During the early days I used to buy albums mainly on hearsay as a result I have ended up buying many albums I would not have bought. Then came internet to rescue, a world of metal sites which introduced me to all possible genres and all possible album recommendation.However with limited budget I could not buy all the albums and started cross checking reviews and asking friends before buying albums. Even though this helped me buy quality albums I still had to spend a lot of time cross checking reviews on various sites.

Following are some of the problems with metal review sites.

Some of the sites were biased to particular style

eg :

http://www.teufelstomb.com : Prefers it metal really heavy and biased towards Death, Grindcore etc. Apart from its bias this site is quite consistent with its review given that album belongs to the genre they like.

http://www.anus.com : Biased towards Black metal

Some of sites were not consistent with its reviews and rating. When I say consistent I mean that reviews end up being personal opinions of individual authors which is not much help because it does not tell if the album is really good in comparision to other albums on the same site. If some other author was to judge the album then he would give a very different review. I believe the site needs establish a set parameters and be neutral across genres while performing its assessment. Some examples of sites which suffer this problem.

http://www.metal-observer.com : ( though I like this site )

http://www.chroniclesofchaos.com/ : ( reviews here have definitely lost their consistency )

http://www.metalreviews.com

Some of the sites meet the above criteria, however their reviews and rating are not consistant with my liking. This means that I might like the album they don't and vice-versa or I just can't establish a pattern. Some examples of this are 

http://www.seaoftranquility.org/ : Again I do refer this site from time to time.

http://www.rockeyez.com/ : Consistent but mainly features Rock / Hard rock  ( not much metal )

So after all my search I have finally ended up with a metal review site which seems to satisfy all the above. The reviews are not biased towards a particular genre, they are consistent across all albums their site, they are consistent with my liking

So here you have it. The best metal albums review site is...

http://www.metaleater.com

Swim underwater to increase your intelligence

Mr. Win Wenger has published his research which claims that by developing an ability to stay underwater for long periods you can increase your intelligence.This is related to the fact that the act of holding your breath is linked to your attention span and awareness which in turn affects your overall intelligence.

You can read about it more at 

http://www.winwenger.com/ebooks/guaran3.htm

I have not practiced this myself but will certainly try out another similar technique called Sip Breathing which is mentioned above and here

http://www.tao-network.com/net/classifieds/week6/http://www.tao-network.com/net/classifieds/week6/

I will update my findings on the blog after a month. 

Reading technical books

I am a software engineer and need to keep up ever expanding and changing technologies. This results in a stack of books that I have to read. I was looking for a way to make this ordeal a little easier and I found this very practical tip.

http://blog.jayfields.com/2007/06/reading-technical-books.html

I have read few books on speed reading  but Jay's tip summarizes them in 1 sentence and provides the most practical advice.

Nutritional content of foods

If you are looking for a site which provides detailed nutritional analysis and health benefits of fruits, vegetables, nuts, dairy and this is the place to go 

http://www.whfoods.com/foodstoc.php

I like this site because nutritional analysis is detailed but easy to follow and seems be backed by scientific research. 

Delete recent documents in XP

To clear the list of Recent Documents' is quite simple even though its not very intuitional.

These are the steps.

1. Click Start - > Run

2. Type 'recent' and hit enter key

3. This will open the Recent folder.

4. Press Ctrl + A or select Edit -> Select All

5. Hit 'Delete' key

This folder only contains the shortcuts to your documents and not the actual documents.