Every year there is a torrent made to let listeners download most of the music for SXSW. This year's torrent has recently been posted (previous years' are also available at the same site). I don't usually use Bittorent, so I asked around for client suggestions; Transmission seems to be a favorite among several of my TUAW colleagues.

I also remembered a tip from my friend Guillermo Esteves (who did the awesome Star Wars crawl using only HTML and CSS), about using Dropbox to start torrents remotely. Guillermo provides some detailed instructions for Transmission and µTorrent to set them up to "watch" a folder for new .torrent files, with an important caveat to make sure that you don't download the files to your Dropbox.

One additional Transmission tip: be sure that you un-check the box next to "Display 'adding transfer' options window" so that files will automatically be added, and be sure to check the box next to the "Start transfers when added" option. Guillermo shows both of those settings in his screenshots, but it took me a few minutes to figure out that I had them set incorrectly.

Then I asked myself: "How can I be even lazier?" and I remembered Hazel, a program for automatically moving files from one folder to another based on a set of predefined rules. So I added a Hazel rule for ~/Downloads/ which will move any file where "Kind is BitTorrent Document" to my ~/Dropbox/Torrents/ folder. I repeated this on both my iMac and my MacBook Pro. Now I can be on my MacBook Pro and download a torrent file to ~/Downloads/ and have it moved to my Torrents folder, and have the torrent automatically start downloading on my iMac. So when I'm done with my MacBook Pro I can just close it without having to worry about interrupting any of my downloads.

You may have noticed that we're big Dropbox fans around here. We use it for syncing Things or instead of a USB sync cable or keeping our notes with us or sharing screenshots, along with any number of other uses. Do you know of any other unusual uses for Dropbox? Let us know in the comments.

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Google Voice on the iPhone has been something of a sore subject for me. If you need a full-recap of the whole sordid iPhone/Google Voice story see this story from December or more of our coverage. I even started a little site devoted to waiting for Google Voice on the iPhone called IsGoogleVoiceAvailableForTheiPhone.com.

It has been 6 months and 19 days since Apple claimed it had not "rejected" Google Voice but was "studying" it. During the course of Apple's "study" the company moved to purge all existing Google Voice apps from the App Store.

There were three reactions to this from developers:

Google revamped the Mobile Google Voice page so that it looks a lot nicer on the iPhone.

GV Mobile released its app for free on Cydia for those who have jailbroken iPhones.

The folks behind Voice Central went a different route. They decided to make a web app instead. I've been using it in beta for the past few months, but as of today it has been released to the public as Black Swan.

The difference between the Mobile Google Voice site from Google and Black Swan is that Black Swan is stored locally on your iPhone, like Pie Guy from Neven Mrgan of Panic.com. Riverturn calls this a "weblication," which is a fairly awful name, but apparently they aren't the first ones to use it.

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• Apple Store: [iPods] Refurbished Apple iPod touch MP3 Players from $139 + free shipping
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Microsoft has just released updates to the 2004 and 2008 versions of Microsoft Office. According to the company, the updates, which weigh in at 9.7 MB and 221.5 MB respectively, provide "fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code" as well as improvements to stability and performance.

The update for Microsoft Office 2004 can be downloaded here, while those with the 2008 version can find it at this link.

As with most Mac OS X-related updates, whether from a third party app or a system update, you should consider backing up your data before proceeding.

Keep in mind, as you install this update, that right around the corner is Microsoft Office for Mac 2011. Notable updates for the next version of the suite for the Mac include the replacement of Entourage with Outlook, the return of VBA and, gasp (or hurrah!), a more ribbon-oriented user interface, à la the Windows version of Office.

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