Musings

Perhaps a couple instructions for bittorrent unix users.

Of course, get bittorrent. apt-get install bittorrent; apt-get install bittorrent-gui, etc…

get the two .torrent files from Joanna. Put them in some directory. Open a terminal. Then you have two options:

For single .torrent download
btdownloadcurses this.torrent

For multiple torrents:
btlaunchmanycurses .
(note the dot, that tells the interface to look for .torrent data in the current directory)

Now I see it, Joanna has also some instructions for unix

She suggests as a first test to try btdownloadheadless.py –url http://cartan.harvard.edu/index.torrent –saveas /home/myusername/hep-th/index.txt

It is a regret that IPod can not still to do ebooks. If you are evil enough with the electronics, you can be interested on the Gumstix. You will need a basic module ($109) plus a LCD module ($27) plus a Compact Flash module ($25) plus your preferred LCD display :-D…

I have whished for something like that for a while now, but was too afraid of Paul Ginsparg’s wrath to try to wget it all :-)

Now we would only need a rsync-kind of way to get updates. It would be good enough if the updated torrent file would only pull the changed PDFs (those with a different checksum). At least some Bittorrent clients can do this, but one needs to seed the individual files and not tar archives.

That is a wonderful idea! one useful feature is better search abilities if you have the files locally. For example Acrobat will let you search for specifc word combination within the paper. One can envision some software that shows you all the hyperlink tree emanating from a specific paper, or many other useful features to automate the way you use this database.