How to get more out of uTorrent
So, you use uTorrent for your torrenting needs of things like linux iso’s and various other items. But it is kind of a pain to remote in to your home PC and add the torrents if you aren’t sitting at the PC yourself. So here are a few tools that can make torrenting that much easier.
So, first, of course, you need to install uTorrent on your computer so that you can get the downloads flowing freely. If you aren’t quite sure how to do that, the uTorrent site actually has a nice little tutorial up on what to change and do to setup uTorrent with your internet connection. Then just setup the webUI in the options
Next up is the mobileui. This interface is just a web interface that allows you to add/remove/change torrents from anywhere you have access to the web. For me personally, I just have it as a bookmark in Chrome so that i can check it whenever I want without having to type it in. And that is probably the easiest way too.
Next is the actual webui Firefox extension. This extension runs in the lower corner of your screen and tells you how many torrents you are running, as well as the upload and download speeds of them all put together. And if you click on it, it will open the webui in a sidebar in the browser. It is a nice little extension to have running for anyone who likes to keep an eye on what’s happening at home.
Or the uTorrent for Chrome extension that gives you direct access to your torrents like it was running on your remote machine.
And finally, the last thing is tying them to the app infrastructure.
On the Android, you can install something like Transdroid to manage everything that goes on in your uTorrent installation, or the official uTorrent app to do the same thing. But then there are items like EZTVDroid that helps you to search for TV shows, and can add them directly as well.
On the iPhone, you have to use the Project Falcon Alpha in order to get to your torrents since not just any app can get through the app store approval process with Apple.
So, with all of these little helpful applications running on your computer, won’t it kill your home PC beyond usability? Believe it or not, even with all of this running, you will barely even notice the difference since uTorrent is written so lightly that it barely touches your memory, and in terms of CPU usage, unless there is a problem, you won’t even notice.
I used to use Azureus because of the java applets you could run on top of it to make things easier, but it was such a memory hog that I could not handle it anymore. I moved to uTorrent and haven’t looked back since. I couldn’t imagine downloading in any other manner. If you haven’t downloaded uTorrent before now, maybe you should look into it.
With these pieces in place, you should pretty much be able to do anything you could do on the host machine from anywhere. It works great, and hopefully it helps.
Amazon Cloud Player
This morning, the Amazon Cloud Player launched, and I must say, I am impressed.
As with most things Amazon, they went all out. It launches with 5GB of storage out of the box just for having an amazon account, an Android app, as well as a nice web player that works quite well. All of your playlists and music automatically sync so that you can have the same experience, no matter what device you are using.
And if 5GB isn’t enough, it won’t be for me, you can buy more storage 20GB for $20 per year, or buy an MP3 album and automatically be upgraded to that 20GB plan. There are even albums for less than $1
And you don’t have to just store mp3′s on there, but also any other file you would like, but obviously you get the most flexibility out of MP3 files. And when I say MP3 files, I don’t necessarily mean MP3′s exclusively can be used, you can actually upload Apple’s m4a files as well so that you can listen to them using your amazon cloud player as well. Wav files and ogg are out of luck, but most people have mp3 and m4a as it is, so you should be good with most of your collection.
And of course, Amazon makes it easy to click on an artist and shop for more music from that artist in the Amazon MP3 store.
There is even a really nice Adobe Air MP3 uploader from Amazon that automatically scans your Windows Media Player and iTunes libraries for files and playlists and lets you choose what you do and do not want to upload.
I am listening to it right now on my Android and it is working extremely well over a Wifi connection and I’ll have to try it out over a 3G connection to see if it can keep a good connection. But if Pandora can do it, there is really no reason that Amazon can’t. It does give you the option of downloading the files from your Cloud Drive to your Android device in case you will be out of range and need something to listen to, but that kind of defeats the purpose.
I do have a few things that I wish I could do that I can’t. I have a few files that I have ripped that didn’t have track info and it uploaded and of course the album and artist are “unknown”. I wish there was a way, other than re-uploading the file, that I could edit that information, but as of right now I don’t find a way to do that.
I also do wish that it had an iOS app, but I am sure that is coming. It probably just takes awhile to get it through the app store approval process. I tried to use the web player on the iPad, and though it loaded, I couldn’t actually get my files to play. But I was able to download them to the device, which I guess would work if there was one file you wanted to listen to.
I also wonder how long it will be before there is a Roku app or it is built into my Tivo. Because that is one piece that will make things much more interesting as Amazon Video on Demand is already in the living room, and putting Amazon MP3 in the living room would seriously upgrade the home theater capabilities of most people’s homes by having their MP3 collection easily accessible without having to go through all of the steps of finding it on your network.
The real test is going to be when Apple or Google announce an inevitable competitor to Amazon so we can see how each of these monster companies handles the same task.
But with Amazon being the first player of the big boys to do this, it definitely gives them the edge. If people get comfortable with their product and invest early, then that gives them an upper hand on these other competitors that would be more likely to own this space and allows them a good shot at owning the cloud MP3 space.
Anyway, try it out at Amazon Cloud MP3
Restore posts and comments from an old mysql backup of WordPress
I was talking to my wife about her blog, Poots and Pans, and she was asking about the old blog I used to do with some friends, so I thought I would get my old posts back from old backups to look at my old content. I looked through old emails to find the latest backup and found it was a mysql backup and not an actual wordpress backup. So, what does that mean? It means that it is a little more difficult to get your content back up and running without having the same domain name under your supervision. If I still owned the domain name, it would be pretty easy, but I don’t, so I had to be creative.
I was running a Xampp installation on my computer using the newest version of WordPress, version 3.1. It had PHP, MySQL, all the good stuff already up and running. I use this install for testing wordpress in all its glory for themes and plugins because it is a lot easier to use than doing it on a remote server for things like customizing a theme and then uploading the changes.
I thought, well, I can just install another wordpress site and have it all back. If only it were that simple. I imported the sql.gz file using phpmyadmin, then pointed the new wordpress install to the existing database and thought that should do it. Two things I didn’t think about were that the database was using the old version of wordpress, somewhere around 2.6, and I would have to have access to the actual URL in order to get logged in to the site. I tried that, but upon trying to login to the site to get my posts, it sent me to the old URL which I no longer have access to.
I decided that since the content is in the database and I can see the content, there has to be an easy way to get the posts out because that is really all I care about.
I looked for converters and different methods but couldn’t find a way to get wp_posts to turn into a wordpress export file.
But then I thought about the structure of the wordpress database and that there were common themes between the database of the existing test I was running on localhost, and the new database I just imported, they both have a wp_posts table.
So, I thought it was worth a shot just to send the new wp_posts table to the current, running database. So I stayed in phpmyadmin and went to work.
I went to the existing database, called wordpress, and selected the wp_posts table from the left-hand nav and went up to the top of the page and selected “Drop”. This will drop all existing content in the wp_posts area, so all posts are gone for good.
Then I went to the new database and selected the wp_posts table and went to the operations tab.
From there I chose to move the table to my existing wordpress database with the same name for the table of wp_posts.
I hit Go, and everything is set. Now all I have to do is login to my existing wordpress site, and I can export my posts very easily. I can do the same thing for comments if I would like, using the wp_comments table.
Hope this helps some of you. Let me know if you have any questions.
Compare Android phones with DroidThing
I was looking at cell phones for my wife whose contract is up in a few months. We could always go with an iPhone on AT&T or Verizon, but there is a premium you pay for going with one of those carriers.
So I thought I would look at some of the second tier carriers like Boost, Virgin Mobile, and US Cellular.
I was trying to find a way to compare US Cellular’s Android offerings and came across a site called DroidThing.
DroidThing is a very easy way to compare Android devices even across carriers.
You just put in what parameters you are searching for and it will bring up the phones that meet that criteria. It’s well done and works really well.
Below is a video about how the site works and how to search it effectively.
Get Angry Birds Rio for Free on AT&T Droids
So, today Angry Birds Rio came out.
Not only did it just come to the market, but it also came to Amazon’s new App store FOR FREE for the Android as well. Unfortunately for those of us on the AT&T side of things, this means that we can’t install it as the file comes from an unknown source. This means it doesn’t come directly from the android market and AT&T decided to turn this option off by default on all of their android devices. So you have to find a workaround. Luckily there is just such a workaround.
You can go to this page and scan the QR code or have them send you an email/text with the link to the app store for download.
When you download, it will go into the downloads folder on your internal memory.
That’s the easy part, now comes the part that adds a little more complexity.
First, turn Debugging on in your settings. Settings–> Applications–> Development –>USB Debugging. Next, you need to use your USB cable to connect to your computer so that it shows up as a drive on your computer and go to your downloads folder to find the amazon-appstore-release.apk file. Next, transfer that file to your computer.
Now, download the sideload wonder machine following the steps documented here and install the amazon apk file.
Next, sign in to your amazon account and try to download the Angry Birds Rio file. It will download, but when you try to install, it will fail.
So, we’ll sideload this application as well. It can be found on internalstore/android/data/com.amazon.venezia/cache as a random apk file. Mine was called vnz56419.apk.
You’ll go through the same steps that you used above to install the amazon app store.
After that, just unplug your phone and start playing Angry Birds Rio, which looks great and I especially like the jungle level with the monkeys.
This isn’t just for Angry Birds, but any app that comes from the Amazon Marketplace that you want to install.
Test Post
This is a test post to test the RSS feed.
Androidify Android app
So I just got a new app on my phone that I think is pretty cool. Its called androidify and it is built by Google. This app allows you to create your own android avatar that is similar to the android mascot for their phones. If you have an android phone, I would suggest trying it out for a few minutes of fun and maybe build the whole family.
Leverage
I have found a new show that I am really enjoying. Leverage. This show is a crime caper show with a Robin Hood type mentality with the good guys being bad guys being good guys to help the little guy. Got it? It’s a really good show with some really good storylines and a lot of humor.
Netflix has both seasons 1 and 2 with Season 3 coming up this spring. It comes on TNT and since we don’t have cable, I haven’t really heard much about it, but Netflix recommended it and they were right on.
So, just to let you know that if you like crime shows, but not necessarily the hardcore dramas, you really might like Leverage. At least I really do.
How do you shop for tech?
photo credit: {Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester}
I do a lot of research for many different people in my life where I am the research person when it comes to technology. And as you are reading this blog, I would say you are much in the same boat. My question I pose to you is this. How do you shop for Tech? How do you know what is the best thing out there in the price you are looking at? Do you just go to Newegg, get rid of the features you don’t want out of a product, and then tell someone that you have found the perfect item for them? Or do you go to review sites and read up before even looking at prices?
Here is my way of going through sites to look at consumer electronics.
First, I go to Cnet and read/watch the reviews of the products and see what is out there. They normally have a nice list of their editor’s picks to choose from, then I look through those and see what looks like the best bets in the range I am looking at. Within that review, they will normally reference features of other products, which lead me to the reviews of other products that are similar, but have different feature sets. Another newer contender in this space is GDGT. This site is a community for gadget lovers and owners. This is where you can find people who own a specific product and ask them their thoughts. It is also a database where you can choose the features you want in a product and it will filter to find the appropriate product for you. The newest, and slickest, contender in this space is Measy. This site currently only helps with TV’s, Cameras, netbooks, and smartphones, but does it extremely well. I don’t know how big of a pool of devices it is pulling from, but it is a very sweet interface and works quite well.
Next, I check Google for the products that I like and see what user reviews I can find. Most of the time, I get the most user reviews from Amazon, but that isn’t set in stone, so Google is a better place to go than just to Amazon. And Cnet has user reviews as well, so it is a good resource for user and editor reviews of lots of products. Then if I don’t like what I see, then I go back to Cnet and look at other products on the same lists and reviews.
But if I do like what I see, then I go to Google Product Search to see what some of the best prices are on these items on the net. I then sort by price, lowest to highest, and look for the lowest price on the product itself.
When I find the lowest price, I then look to see the seller rating on Bizrate to make sure they are a credible vendor with enough of a background for me to risk buying from them. Obviously sometimes there are vendors that I know are big enough where I don’t do this, but for smaller vendors, you almost have to.
At that point, it is all up to the final price after shipping and handling to find out where my best deal is and where I should order from.
So, did I miss anything? Do you have a better way of shopping? Let me know in the comments.
The Ideal Home Network
photo credit: KIUI staff
I have been thinking a bit lately about what my ideal home network would look like. What kind of toys and tech would it take to fill all of my needs at home in the most efficient/coolest way possible? I got the idea from a recent video tour of Mark Pendergrast’s, who is a Microsoft employee and product manager, home where he showed off a lot of his toys. And though it was neat to see how a Microsoft employee would do things, it was a bit underwhelming. I have embedded the video below. Pretty neat to see, but nothing really that awe inspiring.
So here are my thoughts on the matter and the list of rooms that the device would typically be used or placed in. This is going to sound more like my wish list than anything just because in an ideal world, everyone would have all of these tools at their disposal so that they would be as wired as they wanted.
Home Office – I want to start here because this is where most people tend to think that all computer stuff should go. That isn’t really the case anymore as the home computer, especially the laptop, has really come out into the rest of the home. The items that you really need here are more of your back-end stuff that you don’t really care if people see or not. So, the items you would put here are your
- Internet Connection and Wireless Router – This is where your internet connection should come in. It is accessible if you need a wired internet line, and can be serviced easily if something breaks and you need your ISP to come out and help you. I would suggest any router that can run the DD-WRT software as it allows your router to do a lot more, a lot more efficiently. It is also useful for our next item on the list.
- Windows Home Server – I know I just wrote about this a few days ago, but I am in love with this little beast. It does everything on a home network that your corporate IT guys have to do manually. If it was available on a larger scale, I would be in love with this thing for business. It backs up all of your computers, holds all of your files so you can share with family and friends, and with all of the additional software you can load, it becomes even more powerful. It will even serve up a web site so that you can share media with family outside of your home network if you have family pictures or documents that you want to share. There are a few different pre-built servers that are great. Low priced entry-level ones and high priced, fully featured ones. One of the best parts is that these things are tiny. No bigger than a couple of books.
- Wireless Multifunction Printer – Everyone should have some sort of printer at home, and really should have a scanner at home as well. But not everyone has the time, patience, and knowledge to be able to setup that printer for printing from a laptop in another room through a desktop. But you don’t necessarily want your printer in a main area of the house taking up space and being a general eye-sore. So, these Wireless Multifunction printers are wonderful for making it easy and not having to have an extra computer running all of the time just so it can be a print server. Some even allow printing directly from iPhones or iPod touches.
- HD Home Run – This is probably one of the cooler items on the list just by sheer usage. This little device sits wherever your over the air high definition signal comes in and broadcasts it over your wireless internet throughout your home so that you can watch TV from any machine in your home, and even record it with the Windows Media Center software built into our kitchen computer.
Kitchen – This is probably one of the cooler places for tech and it would be used so much that you would wonder how you ever did without it.
- HP Touchsmart computer – There are a couple of hurdles you have to get past when you introduce a computer into the kitchen. The first is the stigma of computers still being for word processing alone, but also the input has changed many times so a keyboard and mouse are not the only way to use a computer. The new HP Touchsmart PC’s have an amazing interface for kitchen computing. It allows you to touch the screen and browse through whatever you are interested in without having to touch the keys of a keyboard or buttons of a mouse. They are especially setup for kitchens because they have a recipe application that will allow you to browse websites like food.com and if you find a recipe you like, it will add it to your recipe book where it is formatted for the touchsmart so you can find and use the recipe quickly and easily. There is a lower priced model and a higher priced model. Take your pick.
Living Room – This is where most people actually see your technology. This is your entertainment hub, as well as the place you spend the most time, so this is the area where you need to be comfortable and have all of the tools you available to you that are needed on a daily usage basis.
- Xbox 360 – This little device is getting more and more usable in the main entertainment areas. With the promise of Project Natal and the recent additions, including Last.fm, Netflix, Facebook, and Twitter, it is a really nice device. Not to mention that it is a Windows Media Center Extender where you can play all of the movies, music, and photos on the TV over the network from your home server, and with the HD Home Run, you can record TV shows to watch later. Plus, it is a great gaming device and nice DVD player.
- HDTV – Whatever size, whatever brand, you have to have a nice HDTV in your living room for viewing all of your content from the comfort of your couch. 1080p is a standard these days, so in order to get the most out of your TV, make sure it has all of the features you want so you don’t feel like you settled.
- Receiver – Whatever receiver you get, you need to make sure that it has all of the connections you could possibly need for your home theater experience to be all it can be.
- Wii – I highly recommend adding a Wii to your living room. It is by far the best party console to date. With the movement controller, and the games that cater to groups, it really makes things a lot more fun when people come over. Plus it is easier to just pickup and play than any other console.
- Tivo – This one may not be needed according to whether you want to use Windows Media Center for everything or if you just want to use it for a few of the entertainment pieces it can offer. I know a lot of people who just can’t live without Tivo, and I can’t blame them. It is the de facto DVR for recording shows and streaming content.
- Harmony Remote Control – There is nothing more frustrating than trying to figure out how to watch something when you have too many things hooked up to the TV and can’t figure out which input the receiver should be on and which the TV should be on. The Harmony remotes are made to rectify this exact issue. I have an older Harmony, but it works just as well as any of the new ones. You figure out what input has what device attached one time, set it up on the computer and plugin the remote. Then everything configures itself and you are a single button push away from doing whatever you want on your home theater. So easy your kids could do it.
- Laptop – Most households are going the way of the laptop as it is more versatile and portable than the desktop. Plus, who doesn’t love being able to sit in front of the TV and surf instead of being in a far away room trying to find something on the internet. No matter the make or model, this is an extremely nice addition to any couch surfer. Plus it can be used for more strenuous tasks like word processing, media editing, and downloading media.
- Internet Tablet – This is one that most families don’t have, or at least don’t think about having. The best current example of an internet tablet is the iPod touch. It is a simple, single functioning device that can be used for surfing the web easily without thinking about maintenance to the device or how often you reboot it. It is always on and easy to use for reference. No other good shipping examples are really out there right now, though real life examples are the Archos and Nokia tablets, but many are in development and will be available in the next year like the Camangi WebStation, the rumored Apple iTablet, and JooJoo, previously known as the Crunchpad. The Netbook could be posited here, but it is a bit more on the laptop side than you need for a tablet and would require more backups and maintenance than is needed for an internet tablet.
Bedroom – You could say that you don’t want tech in your bedroom, which would be fine, but there are some definite enhancements that can be made to the bedroom if you allow the right tech in.
- Smaller HDTV – TV’s are so cheap these days that you can get a 19″ HDTV for under $200. So, if you want to watch TV, movies, or anything else in the bedroom, these are readily available.
- Windows Media Center Extender – This will allow you to watch all of the content from your media center computer in the kitchen easily. That means recorded TV, live TV, music, movies, plus most of the extenders are DVD players as well.
- Roku – Since Windows Media Center Extenders don’t yet support Netflix, this is a nice device to have that is small and allows you to stream your internet content from Netflix, Amazon, and lots of other fun channels directly to your bedroom.
- Chumby – The Chumby is one of those devices that you aren’t sure how you’d use it until you get it. Then when you get it, you can’t live without it. It is small, portable, and does so many cool things besides just being your bedside alarm clock. Plus since the price of the Chumby One is only $99 bucks now, it is a really nice addition to the bedroom.
So, here is my question. Did I miss something? Is there anything that I should have added to the list that I didn’t? Does anyone out there actually have all of these toys to play with? If so, when can I come over and check it out? Let me know in the comments.
