Category Archives: Applications

Battlefield 4 Issues (Xbox 360) – Resolve Initial Crap Performance

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BF4 has been out for just over a month and a half, and anyone following it will be aware of the nightmare DICE have been trying to dig themselves out of, and the Class Action Lawsuit being filed against EA!

When starting Multiplayer, the game downloaded the Multiplayer Update 4, installed itself and played. Then lagged, crashed mid game, and finally started locking up the entire console mid session losing all progress.

Raging, I took to Google and after a while finally resolved my issue. You need to MANUALLY INSTALL UPDATES 1,2 AND 3!

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ownCloud + Bit Torrent Sync = Dropbox Clone!

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ownCloud is a very good self hosted solution to host all your contacts, photos, documents etc. Now, ownCloud does provide its own file sync application, but I believe using BitTorrent Sync is much better solution to keep your files in sync between your local machine and your ownCloud installation.

This post won’t cover installation of ownCloud, or BitTorrent Sync (see my post here for BTSync setup) and shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes!

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Install BitTorrent Sync on Debian (Raspbian)

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BitTorrent Sync

BitTorrent Sync was released last month and I’ve been playing around with it for the last couple of days. I currently have it syncing data between OwnCloud and my personal machine, effectively creating my own fully fledged DropBox replacement (more on that in another post!).

Today I am going to cover installing BitTorrent Sync into your copy of Debian (I am using Raspbian on my RasPi), so that when you restart the machine, it starts up with you. Hit the jump for the detailed instructions!

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Secure Public Wi-Fi on Mac OS using SSH and Raspberry Pi

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If you are a regular user of a public Wi-Fi access point and have a Raspberry Pi being used as a web server, you can secure your connection in these areas using SSH.

First of all, you need to have your Raspberry Pi (or any server with SSH installed) running and accessible from the outside world (I’m not going to guide this, there is plenty of help on google if you want to get this running). A basic installation will have this.

Next, go to http://chetansurpur.com/projects/sidestep/ and download the application (and check out the rest of Chetan Surpur’s website, its pretty good!). When this is installed, follow the steps and your away.

When ever you are on a public wifi, click connect!

Sidestep.

Sidestep.

 

Chrome Owns Firefox

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Ever since I started with Google Chrome about 2 months ago I was amazed at how little there was cluttering up the viewing space. I hadn’t realised quite how much was missing in chrome until I revisited Firefox for the first time in that time!

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As you can probably see from the above comparison, theres just less clutter! It gets even better when I use the Ctrl + B shortcut to hide the bookmarks menu in Chrome.

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This increased space on the viewing window and lack of clutter has made my mind love chrome, and when I tried to go back to Firefox it was like looking at a very untidy desk full of useless rubbish!

I will say that Firefox has that amazing extensibility etc etc that Chrome lacks, and the “magic bar” in firefox that allows you to use shortcuts for bookmarks is very nice, but other than that its Chrome FTW!

 

But, at the end of the day, its what ever takes your fancy! I personally think Chrome, now I’ve been using it for a while is the way forward.

Windows 7 on Idle

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What the hell!!!  Not only does Windows 7 boot amazingly fast, when I’ve got my applications loaded and sitting in the system tray this is my idling CPU usage. Its around 0-5%.

On the same machine with Vista running it was idling at around 20-30% if not more. Plus the memory usage was about 1.5Gb higher! Very glad I took the plunge and ignored the “no adoption until service pack 1”! Thank you University of Kent School of Computing and MSDNAA (for my free license of Win7 Professional)!

Dell Dock and Windows 7

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The Dell Dock was very very useful when I had it installed on Vista, and decided that I needed it on Windows 7 too. I set about getting it and the website that Dell suggest (www.delldock.com) wouldn’t let me download the application.

Luckily good ol’ CNET has it in their downloads area and I acquired it from there. Once I got it installed, I found out that 7 wouldn’t let me drag and drop shortcuts into the application! This kind of defeats the object of the dock! Solution was needed.

Then I thought about using the technique I use on Windows Live Messenger in Win7. Run the dock in Vista SP2 compatibility mode and voila, all working!

iTunes 9: Its wicked!

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I think this is pretty cool, so far iTunes 9 has been reasonably nice to me. It crashed but after that it was ok. The design changes are reasonably drastic but make it look a lot nicer. The new Genius Mixes is a thing I have yet to get working, but other than that its quite nice.

More soon!

Useful apps: Gladinet Cloud Desktop

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I’ve decided to start a useful apps part of this blog, mostly will be for apps that will be useful for new university students (as I will be in 3 weeks!). I will kick this off with Gladinet Cloud Desktop.

This application can mount “cloud storage” services such as Amazon S3, Google Docs and Windows Live SkyDrive. The SkyDrive support for me is the best thing, because it now has 25GB of online storage for free. Once the storage service has been mounted you can use it just like a normal drive on your pc/laptop and copy files to the ‘cloud’ without having to use the web interface.

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There is a free version, which includes the professional version trial for 30 days. After that you lose the ability to backup stuff automatically and some advanced features. There is an academic license, which is the professional version for a cheaper price. All you need is an academic centre email address (@college.ac.uk if your in the uk) and you can get the £39.99 application for £7.48.

If you worry about losing your precious work and you will have less than 25GB of the stuff, buy this and you can auto backup to Google docs and SkyDrive and access your stuff anywhere.

This is much cheaper than getting a MobileMe account with Apple and using the 20GB of storage, and you don’t have to worry about needing Firefox on your campus computers (I have mobileme, I back up to there too!)

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