For those interested in electronics a professor in Maryland has been selling a cheap LCD controller on the order of a few bucks. You can buy a whole kit with backlit screen for about 30 bucks. It has been pretty fun to play with thus far and could be used for projects like a system resource monitor or displaying RSS feed titles.
Last night I was getting fed up with Azureus. I had got used to it killing the performance of my computer when it’s in heavy use but ever since the most recent update it along with Java decides to completely freeze my machine to the point where the mouse is no longer responsive whenever I try to exit. So I unistalled everything - all the Java versions I have along with Azureus, rebooting several times along the way as I was asked. So I start fresh go ahead and follow the FAQ on how everything should be installed and what do you know? A complete meltdown again.
Time to find a better solution. bitComet is available but I have read a lot of sour posts from people about it’s ability to actually disable certain functions even when you have them disabled which leave me with the feeling of what gives?? So I have been hearing of µTorrent for a while now (pronounced micro torrent for those not in the know) so I decided to give it a whirl. Holy crap this thing rules. The entire program is just a standalone exe that, in it’s current 1.4 stable release, weighs in at 130KB.
This kind of took me by surprise at first as I failed to read the instructions. Maybe I was thinking it is just a really tiny installer for a really tiny program. When you double click on the exe it fires right up and asks you if you want to associate torrent files with it and will create the association to it’s current location if you say yes. For some reason the idiot inside me decided to click on yes even though I had the exe on my desktop. Well I closed the program and made a folder for it in Program Files (x86) and dropped it in there. When I ran it again it must have noticed the association was invalid (as it was pointing to the desktop) and asked me if I wanted to associate it with torrent files again. Very cool.
There are still a lot of things I love about Azureus and I will keep it on most computers I use but I think for the most part I will be switching to uTorrent. The plus side about writing Azureus in Java is that it will run on more operating systems than just windows which is currently the only platform uTorrent runs on. The performance appears to be spectacular compared to azureus probably largely due to the fact it is not running on top of Java. One of the great this about Azureus is the auto update ability but I have read a few sites online that claim that uTorrent auto update takes less than 5 seconds from start to finish including downloading the update and restarting the client. I don’t think Azureus can even start in that amount of time! It seems like the designer of uTorrent modeled it after Azureus as a slimmed down version that would be PC only.
Head over to µTorrent’s website and check it out.
I released a “Spyware Attack Pack” on De-Blander.com. I know it is not life altering but it just has a group of good standalone tools I usually download at one point or another when working on a computer that has been crapped on by spyware.
Well I just got notified automatically by Firefox about the 1.5.0.1 update about an hour ago. It went very smoothly and I am honestly happy to see that. One of the things I didn’t like about Firefox 1.0 was that even though I could explain to people how to update it, show them when it was signaling it needed to be updated, or walk them through it once or twice, every time I visited those computers they were always out of date and potentially at a greater risk. These are the computers that need the monthly registry, services, hijack this cleaning. Now that it has the overly large “update me now!” screen that comes up I think most people will be able to catch on. I wonder how long it will before unscrupulous advertisers start making their ad look like the Firefox update screen.