Ubuntu has been the “Flagship Linux” distro for quite a while now. This is the distro most people judge Linux by (and the only one I personally work with). However, its visual style remained constant for a long time, and has been starting to look a bit stale. It’s difficult to convey “innovation” to end users when your product keeps the same look, version to version.

There’s been a lot of talk of changing this, and yesterday Ubuntu finally announced their new look for Lucid Lynx, dubbed “Light”. It includes a new logo (both light and dark), new theme (light and dark), bootsplash, and even logos for the Ubuntu forums, Xubuntu and other related projects. I’ve put up the theme and splash screen after the jump, and you can see more eye-candy on the announcement page itself.

More information [downloadsquad]

This man is tightening a mold in a Samsung factory in Kaluga, Russia. Inside that mold is a portion of what will soon be a television. Let’s take a tour of the rest of the factory.

Samsung opened this particular factory in 2008 and its been putting out products ever since. Aside from quality inspections, it appears that from the moment components arrive in gigantic sacks from Korea nearly everything is automated in this factory—from hot plastic being piped into molds to microcircuits being produced to the little logos being stamped onto panels. Humans mostly oversee the production and yes, occasionally tighten molds.

More information [Gizmodo]

It almost seems like history is repeating itself. Early 2005, just a few weeks after that period’s leading torrent site, Suprnova.org, closed its doors, Mininova was founded. In the years that followed the site grew out to become the most visited torrent site. That growth was stunted in November 2009, when a negative verdict in a court battle against the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN forced the operators of the site to remove over a million torrents.

Below you’ll find a list of the 10 most-visited torrent sites as of today. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank. The number of daily visitors and page views are estimates.

#1 THEPIRATEBAY.ORG
#2 TORRENTZ.COM (RECOMMENDED!)
#3 ISOHUNT.COM
#4 BTJUNKIE.ORG
#5 TORRENTREACTOR.NET
#6 DEMONOID.COM
#7 TORRENTDOWNLOADS.NET
#8 MONOVA.ORG
#9 KICKASSTORRENTS.COM
#10 MININOVA.ORG

As expected Mininova’s decision resulted in a disastrous drop in traffic, as its users spread out over other torrent sites including some promising newcomers. Today, three months after Mininova’s downfall, the site is about to disappear from the top 10 list of most visited torrent sites. The Pirate Bay is currently leading the list closely followed by the meta-search engine Torrentz and isoHunt. KickassTorrents is currently in 9th place, which is a remarkable achievement consdering the site is only a few months old.

More information [Torrent Freak]

In this file will be information about the files being seeded on this tracker.

Next use DeHackEd’s nice little online tool called DumpTorrentCGI. Browse to the ’scrape’ file on your hard drive, change output type to ‘/scrape’ and click the ‘decode’ button. You should get this report;

Immediately you can see that all the files are apparently hugely popular, but of course, all of these stats are faked. To prove that, one can use a site like Torrentz.com, which creates its torrent URLs by using a torrent’s hash value. Simply test each torrent by using http://www.torrentz.com/ followed by the hash value, as shown below, and check the comments.

http://www.torrentz.com/0366eb6bdbab88f2ccd9397a0b421b3947c82e06

The torrents TorrentQ tracks are for Wolfman, Legion, My Name is Khan, The Book of Eli, From Paris With Love, Ninja Assassin, Edge of Darkness, Shutter Island and Dear John.

Every single one is flagged as a fake by commenters on Torrentz.com.

More information [TorrentFreak]

1) Big, Ugly Bezel.
2) No Multitasking.
3) No Cameras.
4) Touch Keyboard.
5) No HDMI Out.
6) The Name iPad.
7) No Flash.
and) Adapters, Adapters, Adapters?.

Update: Why stop at 8? Here are more things we are discovering that suck about the iPad.
9) It’s Not Widescreen.
10) Doesn’t Support T-Mobile 3G.
11) A Closed App Ecosystem.
12) And more…

More information [Gizmodo]

Forget PowerMats and wireless charging and the like, because the Airnergy wi-fi signal harvester is my new front runner for the future of gadget charging.

It’s not exactly new tech, as ohGizmo notes, but it’s the first application that’s of any real use to consumers. Put simply, Airnergy takes the energy created by wi-fi signals and stores it in a rechargeable battery. At CES, the device’s battery, which I believe was precharged with Wi-Fi power, was able to charge a BlackBerry from 30% power to full power in about 90 minutes.

Pretty handy, and supposedly available this summer for $40. Not too shabby, and very appealing considering how ubiquitous wi-fi hotspots are these days. Very simple, somewhat cheap and incredibly useful if it works are advertised—by far one of the coolest things I’ve seen come out of CES this year.

More information [OhGizmo!]

Pong is such a classic game, what could possibly be done to make it feel fresh and creative? How about using browser windows as game elements? This version of Pong by Stewdio launches three pop-up windows when you press the P (for play) button — two paddles and a “ball”.

You can play against the computer using the arrow keys to move your paddle up and down, or you can choose to play against another human who can use the A and Z keys to move their paddle up and down.

Given the unorthodox way the game was implemented, the gameplay is quite faithful, and the graphics refresh fast enough for it to feel snappy. Rather than the typical smooth movement of the paddles you might expect, this version of Pong uses 5 positions from top to bottom on the screen, and each tap of a direction key moves one space in the chosen direction. This allows you to move very quickly when necessary using multiple taps.

While Stewdio’s Pong was obviously done as a sort of proof of concept, it’s a completely playable version of the game. For some reason the game doesn’t seem to keep score, but that’s really the only thing that is missing.

More information [uneasysilence]

Got some web space you rent for a personal site? Good, then you can likely get around any restrictions your employer, school, or other eye-shielding authority have wrongly put in your way with a quick PHProxy installation.

There are, of course, plenty of newer and more tech-savvy—and likely more private and secure—means of working your way around a web filter that seems unfair. PHProxy just happens to be one that is darned easy to install on any web space that can run PHP scripts, which these days is most of them.

Grab the ZIP download from SourceForge, extract the folder inside, then copy it into a folder on YourPersonalSite.com, filling in your actual site name. Head to, for example, YourPersonalSite.com/phproxy, and you’re greeted with a little address bar, and lots of data retention and privacy-enhancing options to determine what kind of traffic you’ll generate when you head to your chosen site.

Should you use this to look at very bad stuff that your boss would instantly fire you for glimpsing, should he discover your tracks? No, you should not, for many reasons. Can it be a quick little experiment in anonymizing your browsing records and getting past lockdown for the occasional sports score or Facebook check? You make the call.

PHProxy is a free download, works on any hosted storage space (or home server) that can run PHP scripts. We’ve previously rounded up our readers’ recommendations for cheap and reliable web hosts, if you’re looking for one. Need to password protect your PHProxy directory so the whole world isn’t trying to fit through your privacy gate? Try the previously mentioned Htaccess Editor, or try out Webmonkey’s resources for htaccess editing.

More information [PHProxy]