While waiting for a download of a Gentoo Live CD image I suddenly felt like reading through a few news feeds again. Chance hit me as Debian Package of the Day introduced me to something I had to try out instantly: aria2. It's basically a GUI-less download manager. While I was downloading that Gentoo image before with no more than 200KB/s from the mirrors I tried, aria2 boosted that to about 500KB/s when given several mirror URIs. This is the appetizer by Anthony Bryan and Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa that introduced me to aria2 - check it out:

• aria2: high speed command line download utility