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Welcome!
Welcome to my site. I usually write about technology, such as satellite television descrambling, comparing Linux and Windows, and I also talk about other things when they fit my fancy. I currently have an article in an upcoming issue of 2600, regarding Internet Archeology. I also am interested in collecting SURGE merchandise, and enjoy all things Power Rangers and Super Sentai (see the downloads section!).
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Thursday, 26 June 2008 |
Google Web Accelerator isn't officially compatible with Firefox 3, at the moment. This means that current users of the products don't really get the speed they are used to. At the same time, there are probably people out there who think the idea of an accelerator sounds interesting, and would like to try it, but they've already installed Firefox 3.
Well, there is a little hack you can do to get it working; however it doesn't enable the little time savings counter, which you can probably live without until the accelerator is upgraded.
To do this, all you need to do is open the Firefox Options (Tools > Options > Network > Advanced > Settings), and tick the box that says "Automatic Proxy Configuration URL."
In the box, enter this: http://localhost:9100/proxy.pac
Restart Firefox, and watch the little accelerator icon "Rev Up" as you look at websites...you've got the Accelerator again!
If you don't already have Firefox, get it here:
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Wednesday, 04 June 2008 |
So, you're one of the poor souls out there scouring Google for a solution to the problem of iTunes not running on Windows XP. Either you get an error prompt with the option to send an error report, or you get nothing, and the iTunes process hangs and eats resources in the background.
Sometimes, the problem is nLite related, with missing DLL's and all. You can find help for that elsewhere. I'd try this fix first, though, as it is much easier to accomplish.
If you still have iTunes installed, go ahead and uninstall Quicktime Only! If you get an error and can't, delete the QuickTime folder in C:\Program Files and try it again. Then, go download QTAlternative (not the lite version), the opensource clone of Quicktime. Install that puppy, and try to start iTunes...success?
If you have already removed iTunes, grab the installer and extract it with WinRar or 7zip. Then, only run the iTunes installer, after you have installed QTAlternative.
With this setup, iTunes runs, and I don't have to see those annoying Quicktime ads every time I watch a .mov file.
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Monday, 02 June 2008 |
Yes, this will work for any distro that uses apt-get, and the concept should work for all of the others...it may even be as simple as removing wget and replacing it with a symlink to axel.
I have created a little shellscript that increases the speed of apt-get by many times. You need to have the axel download accelerator installed, which is a simple, short process, but everything else is extremely straight forward. I started out downloading the upgrades for the newest version of Ubuntu, at 32kb/s. Not terrible, but not that great. When I was done with the script here, I was getting up to ~850kb/s. That's great, huh?
To do this, you first need to download and install the axel download accelerator. It is really a good drop-in replacement for wget, as it is bash based. Once installed (just follow the readme), we are ready to download our updates at amazingly fast speeds.
Paste the shellscript below into text editor somewhere, and save it as "apt-fast " and chmod +x apt-fast :
#!/bin/sh
#apt-fast by Matt Parnell http://www.mattparnell.com , this thing is FOSS
#please feel free to suggest improvments to admin@mattparnell.com
# Use this just like apt-get for faster package downloading. Make sure to have axel installed
#If the first user entered variable string contains apt-get, and the second string entered is either install or dist-upgrade
if echo "$1" | grep -q "[upgrade]" || echo "$2" | grep -q "[install]" || echo "$2" | grep -q "[dist-upgrade]"; then
echo "Working...";
#Go into the directory apt-get normally puts downloaded packages
cd /var/cache/apt/archives/;
#Have apt-get print the information, including the URI's to the packages
apt-get -y --print-uris $1 $2 $3 $4 > debs.list;
#Strip out the URI's, and download the packages with Axel for speediness
egrep -o -e "(ht|f)tp://[^\']+" debs.list | xargs -l1 axel -a;
#Perform the user's reqested action via apt-get
apt-get -y $1 $2 $3 $4;
echo "Done! Make sure and check to see that the packages all were installed properly. If a package is erred, run sudo apt-get autoclean and try installing it again without the use of this script.";
elif echo "$1" | grep -q "[*]"; then
apt-get $1;
else
echo "Sorry, but you appear to be entering invalid options. You must use apt-get and one of apt-get's options in order to use this script.";
fi
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Once done, just use it like apt-get. To install a single package, make sure your database is up to date, and run sudo ./apt-fast install packagenamehere. Watch it download with incredible speed, and install. To upgrade or dist-upgrade, do the same thing. Just use sudo ./apt-fast dist-upgrade or sudo ./apt-fast upgrade. That's all there is to it!
Should your download stall for any number of reasons, you'll need to go into the apt-get cache directory and remove the offending package, and then re-download it.
This is a FOSS script, of course, so please improve upon it and modify it as you will. If you figure something out better than the original, please post it in the comment section, below.
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