Downloading Torrents Made Easier

BitTorrent is a fantastic protocol that facilitates the distribution of large files across the Internet easily and efficiently. Traditionally, users would first need to download, install, and configure one of the many BitTorrent clients available. Unfortunately, this is not for the faint of heart unless you are familiar with port forward and opening holes in [...]

Proof that your ISP is Throttling BitTorrent

The idea of traffic shaping has finally started to garner some major press, thanks in part to the FCC investigating Comcast over such practices. The basic principles of this throttling involve chocking off the client’s upload speed for certain protocols, usually Peer to Peer or BitTorrent. Without a decent upload connection, it’s very difficult to [...]

Changing the Search Engine in Firefox’s Awesome Bar

You are likely aware that searches can be executed directly from Firefox 3’s Awesome Bar - the address bar whose functionality was greatly enhanced in the latest release of the browser. You probably wouldn’t have a reason to be reading this post if you didn’t. To me, it is a curious feature because Firefox already [...]

Force Any Application to Run from the Windows Tray

Trayconizer is a light-weight program that provides functionality that allows just about any application to minimize and run from the Windows tray. While there are other utilities that provide this feature, Trayconizer is unique for the following reasons.

There is no installation, instead it is just a single executable.
It’s very minimal on system resource usage, right [...]

Determining When Windows was Installed

Here’s a tip you may find useful - how can you quickly determine when your copy of Windows was installed? I have a friend from college that used to religiously reinstall Windows at least once a semester. This was during the Windows 98 days when the notion of bit-rot was common place. Bit rot was [...]