Applying heat through the use of curlers and straighteners is a great way to get your hair to take the shape you want it to. However, flat ironing, blow-drying and curling are all easy ways to damage your hair unless you take some precautions and follow the correct procedure.

By using correct techniques and taking some precautionary measures, you can successfully use heat to give your hair shape without doing any major damage.

Use a high-quality curling or straitening iron

The material of the iron you choose to use can have a profound effect on the health of your hair. Cheaper irons are often made with cheap metal that don’t heat up evenly and can actually burn your hair. Always go with a high-quality curling or straightening iron that is made from either titanium, tourmaline or ceramic.

Choose the right sized iron for your hair

As a general rule, a 2.5cm iron will be the most versatile selection for hair that has a medium thickness and length. If you have short hair, go with a smaller iron. If you have long and very thick hair, then the process will go much faster if you choose a larger iron.

For ringlet curls, use a smaller iron. For loose waves, use a larger iron.

Use a heat protection product before using heating devices

Invest in a heat protectant that uses humectants and silicones in tandem. These ingredients work together to lock the moisture and protect your hair from the harsh heat. If your hair is thin then a heat protectant spray will work fine. If your hair is especially thick, use a heat protectant oil, lotion or cream.

Dry hair on low setting until it totally dry

Put your blow dryer on its minimum setting and completely dry your hair before attempting to curl or straighten it. If you have extremely thick hair then you will need to separate this into sections.

Adjust temperature to match the thickness of your hair

Use the lowest possible setting to dry your hair to avoid damaging it. If at all possible, go with an iron that has digital temperature control as this will give you higher accuracy than one with low, medium and high options.

Only apply heat on small sections at a time

In order to reduce possible damage, you should only use your curler or straightener on small sections each time. This allows you to maintain contact with the hot iron for shorter intervals while achieving the same result. As a general rule, you should never use the heating tool for more than 3 to 5 seconds at a time.

You only need to make one pass with the iron

Contrary to popular belief, you should only ever need to use the iron against a section of hair once, as long as you are using the right technique and heat setting. Going back over the same section of hair with an iron will surely cause further damage.

Torrenting is an Internet phenomenon and method which has been utilized for a significant amount of time now. Since the dawn of the Internet, people have looked for ways to steal free and full versions of movies, music and other forms of media which are traditionally protected behind a paywall. However, the power of the people has never swayed before, and it would not here either.

Torrenting software quickly popped up during the past times of the Internet, allowing people to download forms of media without paying. Torrenting had become so popular that huge websites were set up for the sole purpose of hosting torrents of everything you could ever imagine. Millions of users across the world downloaded this media for their own personal gain, while companies lost huge amounts of money in the process.

The most popular of these sites would be The Pirate Bay, which garnered massive success in its hosting. However, throughout recent times, torrenting has been cracked down on by Internet providers across the world, and the law came down hard on The Pirate Bay, forcing the website underground, now survived by copies of itself on different proxy websites. Amongst the sea of torrent sites, there are a few which stand out. These include Kickass Torrents, which is still running to this day, albeit on different website hosting services which change regularly to avoid prosecution.

This article will focus on the history of Kickass Torrents, as well as how people utilize torrent sites such as the previously mentioned, and how people actually torrent.

The history of Kickass Torrents

Kickass Torrents (KAT) was founded in 2008 as a peer to peer file facilitation website using the BitTorrent protocol. It quickly became one of the most visited torrent websites in the world. With tens of millions of users on the website, the amount of files grew immensely, featuring all kinds of media. The owner raked in millions of dollars a month based solely on ad revenue.

However, with government becoming more and more aware of torrenting and online piracy in general, the website quickly caught the attention of federal police in the United States. In 2016, the website was seized by federal agents. After this, it consistently moved domains to keep its uptime for its users, with the operators planning to move domains every 6 months. Overseas in Poland, the alleged owner “Artem Vaulin” was arrested in Poland indicted on four charges related to the website.

As of today, the website continues to operate under different domains, and the owner is free in Poland, unable to leave the country and awaiting extradition requests to the United States.

What is a torrent and how does it work?

A torrent is a file which can be downloaded and opened within a torrenting platform. This platform will download the files from other peers who have already ‘seeded’ or uploaded the file before. By using these peers, you are downloading the file from them and in doing so, downloading the file to your own computer.

How to download torrents from kickass?

First, you must decide what form of media you want to download. Then, you must find your favourite available torrenting site. Once there, you must search for the torrent. A list of torrents should appear, and there you will see labels of ‘seeders’ and ‘leechers’. Seeders tell you how many people have downloaded and reuploaded the file. The more seeders there are, the faster the file will download to your computer. The higher the leechers are, the slower the file will download. Ideally, you will want to find a torrent which has a high number of seeders and a lowered number of leechers, as this will ensure an optimal download speed.

From this point, you must click ‘download magnet link’. This means that you are downloading a file which will automatically open in your installed torrenting software. The best software would be BitTorrent, uTorrent or BitComet. After the download, the file should open automatically in your chosen torrenting platform, and from here you choose your file location and hit download.

The torrent will appear in the torrenting platform, and a progress bar should appear. From this point, you just have to sit back, relax and open the file location once the download is complete, and enjoy!

The legality of torrenting

It wouldn’t be an appropriate torrenting article without us mentioning the legality surrounding torrenting, why it is so complex to prosecute as well as the consequences of torrenting.

Torrenting itself falls under a grey area of the law, which can make it difficult to argue in a court of law. Torrenting itself is not illegal, however using it to download copyrighted material for free is. Throughout the huge sea of torrents available on the Internet, it is not apparent or conveyed clearly which torrents are legal to torrent and which ones are not, which can create plausible deniability for a lot of users. Some of these torrents fall into a grey area, and users can often find themselves on the illegal side of torrenting unknowingly.

How do you get caught torrenting?

Internet service providers, the ones who provide the networks for you to connect to the Internet, constantly patrol through their networks checking for users who are illegally torrenting. If caught, they can choose to take action against you. The consequences can range from mild to severe, from a sternly written love letter to the throttling of your Internet speed to even legal action. It is unlikely that they will take legal action unless the illegal torrenting is of a large scale, however for many users it is still important to stay hidden from their Internet provider.

How do users hide from their Internet provider?

Users will do anything to stay hidden when illegally torrenting in order to avoid consequences. The majority of users will utilize a virtual private network, also known as a VPN, in order to hide their identity from their Internet provider, masking their actions online. A virtual private network works by creating a ‘tunnel’ to another server in a different geographic location. Your traffic is rerouted through this tunnel, effectively masking your actions online.

Your IP address will show up as the server you are connected to, making your identity essentially hidden. Using a VPN is a very simple process, consisting of downloading the software and pressing a button. This means the majority of users, regardless of if they are tech savvy or not, are able to use a VPN without much effort and avoid consequences. It is important to look for a VPN which doesn’t keep logs, as these can be used to prosecute you as evidence if authorities contact them and ask for the logs.

Kickass Torrent: Public vs Private trackers

Public trackers are defined as a website which has a search engine embedded into it which does not require a log in or require any authentication. The Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents and other similar websites are all considered to be public trackers, as they do not require a login to browse their wares. Private trackers are websites which are considered to be more exclusive. Usually requiring a login or some form of authentication, they are able to provide many different types of content of varying quality.

The benefits of using a private tracker website is that the downloads are usually faster and have higher quality files and downloads. The retention of the files are usually longer, and the overall experience is much more consistent and considered a safer experience. However, in the eyes of the law, public and private trackers are considered the same thing in terms of prosecution and will be considered as Internet piracy.

Streaming and torrenting

Streaming used to be much more popular than torrenting, as there were huge swathes of website dedicated to streaming illegally downloaded movies. However, the recent rise in awareness of Internet piracy means that many of these websites have been shut down, making torrenting much more popular. Streaming websites are simple to access, and a user only has to use a search engine to find websites that stream movies. With many of them shut down, users are often left with inadequate streaming services which provide low quality media.

With torrenting, you are much more likely to find media easily which you can download and watch in your own time. Streaming often results in movies that buffer constantly and are of a low resolution quality. With torrents, downloads are relatively quick and you can pause and play media whenever you feel like it, rather than having to wait for buffering times.

With both streaming and torrenting movies, you are still breaking the law regardless of whether you stream the movie or download it. With streaming, you are also running the risk of the website logging IP addresses which are sent to law enforcement.

Kickass Torrent: Extra tips

When you looking to download torrents for movies, it is best to avoid newly released movies which have come out in the past 60 days. Usually, the torrents that come out for these movies are created by people who are recording the movie in a movie theatre and releasing the movie as a torrent file. Furthermore, copyright holders will be vigilant during this time period to tracking people torrenting newly released movies, making you more likely to experience prosecution when torrenting newly released movies.

You should also be wary of the torrents you are downloading. The most popular torrents often will be closely monitored by copyright holders. Moreover, torrents can contain viruses which can infect your computer. It is important to exercise caution when downloading anything from the Internet, and this is especially true for torrenting. You should carefully review the torrents you are looking to download and read the feedback comments before going ahead. Even if the comments are positive, you should scan the torrent with an antivirus software to ensure it is safe. However, often antivirus software will consider foreign files with no official branding to be a virus regardless of the contents of the file, and this should also be taken into consideration.

You should also be careful about the media you are torrenting. While most copyright holders in different industries are going after torrents, there are some industries which are aggressively targeting torrents. This is especially true for the music industry which goes after torrenters, especially those who upload, quite aggressively. Most of the time in these modern days, litigation is done on behalf of companies by copyright trolls. Copyright trolls will send out settlement letters to torrenters and will go through Internet providers in order to contact users. In doing so, the Internet provider might choose to take action against you. For these reasons, it is important to use a VPN when you are torrenting.

If you are very concerned about hosting torrents or using them, then you can choose to take further action to conceal your identity, however this may require further software which can become expensive and complex and may require a higher understanding of technology and software. It is not necessary to go to these lengths as you are not likely to face significant legal action unless you are hosting a website with the torrents.

Overall, torrents are an Internet phenomenon which many users across the world have taken advantage of. If you were to use torrents, you should ensure that you stay safe when doing so. Use a VPN and ensure that you vet your torrents before downloading them. Remember that torrenting copyrighter content is illegal and you should heed caution before doing so. Prosecution and action may not occur however it is always a risk, and you should remember this before choosing to go ahead with torrenting.

This has been an educational article on torrenting.

Disclaimer:

Torrenting is illegal and should not be used by anyone as it is a violation of the law and steals from people. This piece is for educational purposes only.

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Do you feel exhausted and sore after your workouts? If you’ve needed to go to a chiropractor often or ice your aching limbs, chances are you are overworking your body. Unfortunately, it’s easy to overestimate what your muscles can tolerate when you get into a workout routine. Luckily, in this article David Reagan, an Atlanta-based personal trainer, suggests ways to protect yourself from getting hurt while working out.

Step #1. Wear the right shoes

When it comes to fitness, newbies often go for the better-looking shoes of their favorite brand versus shoes that will give them adequate support during the workout. Although it may seem as if you can wear the same pair of sneakers to run, hike, lift weights and do HIIT exercises, unfortunately, it’s far from the truth. Wearing the wrong type of shoes while exercising can increase your risk of straining the ligaments and muscle tendons in your toes, feet, and ankles, so make sure that you do your research before buying your next favorite pair of Nikes.

Step #2. Warm-up before every workout

Everyone knows the importance of warming up, but we often forget about it due to lack of time. As a result, we put pressure on our muscles, resulting in injuries and strains. Starting your workout with a gentle 5-minute stretch and low-impact cardio is an excellent way to ensure that your joints are loosened up and ready for a more intense part of the workout.

Step #3. Watch your form

Bad form is one of the primary reasons why people get hurt during their weight lifting sessions. If you work out at the gym, make sure that you look in the mirror to ensure that your back is straight, your knees are bent, and you are isolating muscles that lift weights. It is very common for people to swing weights with their entire body, therefore, not working out select muscle groups and increasing the risk of injury. The best way to ensure that your form is correct is to hire a certified personal trainer to help you learn the basics.

Step #4. Start with a lower weight

It may be tempting to start lifting heavy weights with fewer reps, but this is yet another way to injure yourself. Lifting too heavy often results in strained and torn muscles and an increased risk of back, shoulder, and knee injuries due to bad form. Instead, start with lower weight and more reps. This way, you will ensure that you keep your form and work out only the muscles you are supposed to without needing to engage your back.

Step #5. Change up your routine

Letting your workouts get repetitive may also increase your chances of injuring yourself. Instead, try different activities and change up your routine frequently. You will not only give your muscles a break from the same exercises but will engage other muscle groups to further your progress. Switching up your routine also helps to kickstart your metabolism, helping you achieve your weight loss goals.

Working out requires dedication and discipline, and the best way to keep a consistent routine – is not to get hurt. Follow these tips provided by David Reagan, Atlanta certified personal trainer, and you will ensure that you have fun during and after your workout instead of laying on the couch with an ice-pack and sore muscles.

About David Reagan

David Reagan is a NASM Certified personal trainer from Atlanta, GA, specializing in weight loss, personalized workout plans, bodybuilding, and nutrition. He caters to high-end clients and executives, helping them achieve their fitness goals by accommodating their busy schedules. The client’s needs come first, and David’s fitness plan will set you up on the path to success.

This article is adapted from the Dharma Ocean podcast of a talk given by Dr. Reggie Ray at the Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado.

In our culture, we hear about meditation in the service of relaxation, for helping us sleep at night, for helping us to manage the tremendous stress of modern life, and all of that is fine. But Somatic Meditation is a much more radical and fundamentally transformative kind of process. Meditation, as a tool or as a resource for our conscious mind and our currently existing life, is not a bad thing, but Somatic Meditation becomes a way for us to enter into a different world and a transformed way of being.

To use an analogy from the Narnia books by  C.S. Lewis, it’s as if the realm of ego is a stable, and we are living inside the stable, taking it to be reality. It’s dark and dank, and there’s straw on the floor, and there are windows, but they’re covered over with grime. We can vaguely see outside that there’s a world, but we think it is as dank and dark and closed in as the stable itself.  And the only food is sawdust. We think that the life in this ego — a stable is the sum total of human life and its full range of possibilities.

But then we use meditation, having a vague idea that it might be worth trying because nothing else has worked. And so we meditate, but we don’t really know quite what we are doing or what we’re setting ourselves up for, and that is a way of presenting ourselves at the door to the outside of this stable of ours. Somatic Meditation is a way of presenting ourselves at the door to the outside of the stable and calling for help. The interesting point is we can’t open the door ourselves because there is no handle on the inside. The door has to be opened from the other side.

We meditate, and at a certain point, we sense there’s some light, and we see what might be a crack in the door. Meantime we’re sitting. We’re following our breath. We’re being in our body. And then the door starts to slowly open. In the beginning, we can only peer out. The crack isn’t big enough to step through, but what we see completely stuns us. We see lush, green, summer fields waving gently in the wind. We see trees, tall and majestic, and we see hills, and we see a blue sky that is so deep and vast, and we feel a breeze coming into our dank little stable world.

For the first time in our life, we know for sure that this dank stable is not the totality. We feel the longing of our heart to step into that vast, infinite, beautiful outside world, and we know that this dank little ego world was never meant for us. Meantime, we’re back in the ego world, but we can’t forget what we’ve seen, and we know it’s what we were born for. And that is the strange and amazing thing about meditation—we find out there is help all over the place if we are willing to call for it in the right way. And so we practice, and the door begins to open again; then it opens a little wider.

There are moments, looking out of that crack in the door, that we forget we’re in the stable, and we feel that we’re out in that world walking through the deep green summer grass, and we can look up at the sky and lose ourselves in it, and feel the majesty of the trees and the soft rolling of the hills around us.  So we practice and practice and practice. And strangely enough, more and more we find ourselves outside the stable, and we find ourselves meeting old friends, but we meet them in a completely different way. There’s a kind of infinite openness and gladness here that is completely new and yet also feels very, very ancient.

Somatic Meditation is a process of the deepest kind of change you could imagine because we are entering into a different world; a world that is the real one. But then we have a problem, which is that we have a connection with that ego world, that dank, dark stable, and we feel we need to go back to help the others. We have stepped out and experienced the freedom and the stunning beauty of the true world. But we remember that there are thousands and millions and billions of beings who live in the stable and have not discovered the world that they were born for. Our question now is how do we fulfill our sense of connection and commitment to those beings who are suffering without knowing what’s possible for them?

We realize that the vessel isn’t quite ready—that somehow we don’t have the personal, psychological vastness that’s needed. We don’t have the absolute openness of heart we need to love others. We feel our limitations. The more we encounter this vast world outside the stable, the more we feel that to go back to the stable, we need to grow further. We are interested in unburdening our heart of all of the armor, protection, defenses, and fear of being vulnerable because we sense that we do truly have the capacity for unconditional love for other people.

We begin to experience our heart as being a bright beacon of love for others, but also, through doing Somatic Meditation day in and out, we’re changing our nervous system. If we train ourselves in a certain way, we are not simply experiencing a different way of being, we’re changing the neurological structure of our bodies, so we become more loving. For many of us, the idea that we could love other people in an unconditional way is shocking—it seems impossible. We think we have these problems; maybe we weren’t loved as small children, or we have this terrible story of trauma. But we start to realize everybody else has the same story.

Meantime, as we do these practices, our neurological structure changes so that the experience of tenderness is not just a random event but becomes who we are. We become more tender and open. And we begin to discover that we deeply love other people. We may still get activated, or triggered, and shut down—these things happen—but we come to realize that these are just surface disturbances. We discover,  through our practice,  that our true nature is fundamentally loving. That’s actually who we are. And that loving nature is indestructible.  That kind of change is very much like the initial crack in the door of the stable, where we glimpse this beautiful world that we could live in.

The same thing happens with compassion. Initially, we’re closed-down, narcissistic people, just looking after ourselves. We’re self-absorbed. Even when we are engaged in “helping” people, it is still ultimately all about us.  This is just how we are in the modern world. Then we start to see that crack widen, and that becomes a deep inspiration for us to continue with the practice; to widen that field of compassion in ourselves so that over time it becomes who we are.

We realized that there is, within us, far beneath the ego concerns for convenience and ease, a deep wellspring of love that will do anything to relieve the suffering of another person. That’s a shocking discovery—we’ve always thought of ourselves in such a low way. We never thought that we have this deep wellspring that yearns to help people. There’s a teaching about the bodhisattva path that if the bodhisattva were to see a person who is actually okay (which, of course, never happens), his/her heart would sink a little bit because there is this deep need to meet suffering and to relieve it. On the other hand, if the bodhisattva has his/her last piece of food and a starving person comes toward them, they feel a deep sense of joy because they can offer something to relieve suffering.

Through doing the practices and deepening our sense of connection with our own hearts, we discover this is who we are. When you step outside that stable, you realize that your life is Life with a capital “L” flowing through you, and your biggest problem is staying with the immensity of your life and the magic that is washing all over you and through you. How are you going to stay with that? That’s why we meditate. It’s why I meditate, because if I don’t, I can’t stay with the program, and I do want to stay with the program. This is a good program, and I’m talking about the big program, the cosmic program. In a way, it’s a huge relief for us. “Wow. All I’ve got to do is just really show up, and the rest of it is not my problem.” It’s a huge relief. But then you realize that showing up is not that easy. Somatic Meditation gives us the tools to show up, and continue to show up.

About Dharma Ocean

Dharma Ocean is a non-profit global educational foundation that focuses on somatic meditation as the way to help students – of any secular or religious discipline, by teaching them the importance of embodiment in both meditation and their daily lives as taught in the “practicing lineage” of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The foundation was established in 2005 by scholar, author, and teacher Dr. Reggie Ray, and is located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Southern Colorado.