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As we have 9 or 10 computers sharing the same network, this is one of my passions. So this review from Lifehacker proved very interesting for me. I was particularly intrigued about the possibility of sharing files between two computers using just a “normal” RJ45 cable (ie not a crossover cable) which is mentioned widely in the comments. I’ll try this very soon and post back if it’s successful.
I was surprised, however, that nobody mentioned a very simple procedure, that is my method of choice for transferring files from any of our computers to another, irrespective of platform. This is the Python SimpleHTTPServer which I’ve posted about this in my other blog.
Even though Gmail offers 7.5 GB of storage to users for free and this sounds like a lot, it’s amazing how fast you can fill this up particularly if you send and/or receive lots of emails with attachments.
Well, there’s a free app that can find the larger of your emails so that you can judiciously choose which ones to delete to create some space for your future emailing. It’s called appropriately FindBigMail.
I’m using about 20% of my Gmail storage allowance and FindBigMail took about 10 minutes to analyze my situation. It then labelled the larger emails with three categories of labels: Big, Really Big and Ultra Big.
I found this be be extremely useful although, at 20%, I really don’t need it right now.
One problem, though, is that I would almost prefer if there was an option to just delete the attachments, which generally is stuff you have stored somewhere on your computer, but keep the text as a reminder of the email.
Came across this interesting post from Simple Help that tells you how to create and send torrents to anybody you like. I had done this some time ago (I think with Vuze) but it seems so much simpler with µtorrent as explained.
Now I didn’t as yet have the opportunity to try this out to another network so I tried it on our own LAN. And it works fine, well it works OK. Actually, it kinda works ……. sometimes.
First, all torrents that I made whether in Windows 7 or OS X 10.6.2 gave rise to HTTP error 400′s when launched in the bittorrent client. Nevertheless, in most cases after a few minutes the download completed although ……. not always for reasons that are not clear to me.
Another thing is that the instructions in the guide are for Windows only. But it works in µtorrent on the Mac too. Note that the Preferences for this app on the Mac are quite different. So, there’s no opportunity to set bt.enable_tracker to True. However, this didn’t seem to matter. Perhaps it’s already set to True.
When creating the new torrent, you must precede the tracker address with http:// as otherwise you’ll be asked to specify a valid tracker.
Maybe it works better between different networks, but on this experience it’s not at all attractive for transferring stuff between computers on you own LAN. For this purpose, nothing comes close to the Python SimpleHTTPServer in my view.
Well, 9 months after it hit the headlines, I’ ve finally decided to take a look at Windows 7′s Godmode as it showed up in the Delicious hotlist today. Does it really transform our control over Windows 7 in some divine manner?
I don’t really think so, as do many others, given that nearly everything that I’ve come across in it is already readily available in Control Panel.
Nevertheless, it does provide perhaps a more convenient way of leafing through a long list of configuration a troubleshooting options. So, it’s certainly not a complete waste of time but hardly worth the grandiose name that it has received. I believe, however, that the name itself is unnecessary and could be anything you choose as long as the code after the name is unchanged.
My MacBook which is 10 months old, and has probably been my principal computer over that time, was starting to get quite sluggish in its operation. In particular, while it used to boot in 35-40 seconds, now the boot was taking about 90 seconds.
So, I turned to this very useful guide on how to get rid of this lethargy. However, I really only tried one of the tips which was to run Onyx which is sort of a more sophisticated version of CCleaner but only for a Mac.
I ran through ALL of the options provided for de-crufting my machine which took about 30 minutes. However, the results were spectacular and now I’m back to a 40 second boot. However, I wish I knew which of the various options gave the most benefit. Maybe next time, I do a more scientific analysis of the benefits of Onyx which might allow me to speed things up a lot more quickly.
There really is quite a lot more to this Windows 7 than I had expected. This post provides some very interesting keyboard shortcuts.
