A Stupid yet Useful uTorrent Tip for People with Bad Memories who like to Seed

If you're a considerate bittorrent user (i.e. not a hit-and-run leecher) then you most likely have tons of complete torrents, just sitting there, seeding in uTorrent right now... and as long as you have a reasonable upload limit imposed, seeding like that will usually have little to no impact on your download speeds.

However, there is one caveat to being a super-seeder... losing track of what you downloaded! I cannot count the number of times that I have forgotten having downloaded a particular file, because it was visually lost in my large list of seeding torrents.

Here's a stupid, yet useful, tip to prevent that from happening again... and to order your torrents in a much more logical way...

In uTorrent, while looking at your torrents, if you scroll all the way over the right, you will find a "Completed On" column. (Despite being right on uTorrent main screen, this column is not very well known, as few users ever have a reason to scroll that far to the right) Click twice on the words "Completed On" and your list of torrents will now be sorted according to... you guessed it, when they completed downloading.

Voila!

(Editorial Note: I feel like this tip may have been too simple to have used so many words to describe it... Sorry, I'll try to turn the verbosity down in the future)

Google Alerts... I can't believe I am just finding out about this!

It's 2:49am... and in between stalking Stackoverflow for an answer to a particularly baffling Android question and updating my to-do list on Todoist, I discovered something AWESOME (by 2:49am standards).

I recently sent out a myriad of press releases to various online news outlets and blogs covering the release of my newest Android App. To monitor for any press coverage, I had been refreshing a Google News search for the name of my app... and that is when I discovered Google Alerts.

Google Alerts, much like everything else that I am proud of myself for "discovering", is not by any means new, in fact, it has been around for years. However, I believe it is an under-utilized tool that deserves a bit more attention.

From the Google Alerts page:

Google Alerts are emails sent to you when Google finds new results -- such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blogs -- that match your search term. You can use Google Alerts to monitor anything on the Web. For example, people use Google Alerts to:

• find out what is being said about their company or product.
• monitor a developing news story.
• keep up to date on a competitor or industry.
• get the latest news on a celebrity or sports team.
• find out what's being said about themselves

All you have to do is enter a search term, then decide what type of results you want to receive and how often. Once created, your alerts are linked to your Google account and can be modified or deleted at any time, from the same Google Alerts page.

Try it out: http://www.google.com/alerts

Reasons why the Internet and I have a Love/Hate thing going on...

Like the vast majority of my peers, I occupy a world that is, at least to some degree, defined by the existence and influence of an undefinable entity... a shapeless hive-mind that has made us simultaneously smarter and yet individually less capable than the generations that preceded us. It gave us a tiny world and a huge stage.

By now it is most likely obvious that I am, of course, referring to this.

You see, me and the internet... we have this love/hate thing going on.

I LOVE the idea of "blogging" but I have genuinely HATED every single blog that I've ever read (in fact, I even hate this blog, as I proof-read it to myself)

I LOVE cats.. but I HATE lols.

I LOVE intellectualism... but I HATE anyone who uses that term.

I LOVE viral videos... but I HATE how I'm always the last person to see them.

I LOVE crowd-sourcing and querying the hive... but I HATE every incoherent yet oh-so-adamantly stated opinion that flies freely from the mouths of those that don't have to look you in the face.

I LOVE irony... but I seem to HATE all the people who use it as a neatly-packaged replacement for a personality (read: myself).

I LOVE linux... but one time I told this dude on irc that I used KDE, and apparently that made me a girl, so now I HATE that guy.

I LOVE extended three letter acronyms... but I HATE when people say them phonetically (VOIP is not voyp)

I LOVE streaming... but I HATE buffering.

I LOVE bittorrent... and I really don't have anything bad to say about it.

I LOVE trolling people who use poor grammar... but I HATE myself for doing it.

I LOVE the font helvetica and the word fail... but I HATE anyone who uses either of them frequently.

I LOVE the cloud... but I HATE the ground.

The END.

Dropbox + Eclipse = Developing ANYWHERE!!

If you are a programmer with multiple computers, then this quick tip is for you. Using Dropbox's cloud storage you can easily configure the Eclipse IDE to allow you to sync your work across multiple computers. In addition to convenience, this method provides redundant off-site data backup and a (all be it extremely simple) revision tracking system for your projects.

Step 1. Get Dropbox  http://db.tt/q1JNXsy

Step 2. In Eclipse, Go to File -> Switch Workspace -> Other...

Step 3. In the Select a Workspace window, Browse to your Dropbox folder and create a new folder called "workspace" and select that folder.

Step 4. Nope... you're done!

Do the same on all your computers and you will have a redundant, fast-syncing and versioned development environment.

Note: Dropbox's versioning system (accessed via their website) is limited compared to other, more robust revision control systems... but, for the casual developer, it gets the job done.

(For all you Android developers out there, don't forget to move your keystore to the Dropbox folder as well, so you can sign your apps from anywhere)

Frank's Guide to Making the Perfect Password

Pick any word that has 5 or more letters and contains (but does not start with) the letter "a"... then pick a 4 digit number (such as would correspond to a date) then combine them, but capitalize the first letter and replace the "a" with an @ symbol. Example: Frid@y2011 or Alex@ndra2302... because these passwords are over 8 characters, contain capitals, symbols and numbers, they are almost impossible to crack without the aid of a supercomputer... yet they are very simple to remember. (Tip: If you are creating a Windows login password, add five spaces to the end of your password, this will make it even harder to crack (by increasing password length to at least 14 characters) and additionally, since spaces are not typically allowed in passwords, I would guess that most hackers are not even including them in their brute-forcing character sets)

Considering the processing power of a modern high-end computer, the password "Frid@y2011" would take just a little over 600 years to crack via brute-forcing... pretty good, considering that it is such an easy to remember password!

Using Chrome's Incognito Mode to Log into Two Accounts at Once

Yet another thing to be filed under the "Stuff I figured out on my own but then realized Lifehacker did an article on two years ago" category.

Because Chrome's Incognito mode is sandboxed and therefore does not share cookies with a normal Chrome instance, it is possible to simultaneously log into two different accounts on one website or service.

For example, you could open Chrome normally and log into your primary Google account (which will subsequently log that browser into most Google services... Gmail, Blogspot, Docs,Claendar etc...) and then, by pressing CTRL-Shift-N, open an Incognito Window and log into a secondary Google account, and all of it's associated services, without having to log out of your primary account. The two accounts will live peacefully in separate windows, instead of constantly logging each other out, as they would if run from a normal browser.

This can be extremely useful if you monitor multiple Gmail inboxes, use Google services spread across multiple login credentials, or if you value keeping your work and personal profiles separate but easily accessible... the list goes on. Of course, I have just been using Google services as an example... this method will work equally well with any site that requires a login.

{REDACTED}... a story idea

This is the verbal testimony of Dr. Phillip C. Vistrum. I am being held against my will in an underground facility, somewhere near {REDACTED}. I have been asked to relate, in great detail, the events of the last year… the events which culminated in my discovery of the {REDACTED}. This request has come at gunpoint, so I feel obliged to comply.

I can remember, quite clearly, the moment in which I realized that this world is not real. It was a Tuesday evening, just after sunset. My wife, if you can call her that, was sick in bed with a mild flu. She asked me to run to the market to pick up some cookies and a bag of oranges. 

Now, I will tell you this… I’ve seen all the movies, read all the books, hell, I’ve even studied a few mathematical proofs on the topic… simulations within simulations, red pills, dead pixels in the sky… the type of paranoid delusions  that fill the seats in movie theaters and fuel the rantings of over-zealous conspiracy theorists.  Any serious scientist would classify such theories as pure hokum, and that is what I believed too… right up until the moment I saw it, staring me right in the face, and in the frozen food section no less, that is where I realized that {R E D A C T E D}