Thirtyfootscrew’s Blog

Everyone living in a shared house will eventually run up against the problem of sharing broadband, especially if you’re downloading music, movies, games and system updates.   I live with my girlfriend and a couple of days ago she was working from home and I really needed to download some Audible books for a long journey I had the next day, unfortunately whenever I tried to do this it kept knocking her off of her company’s VPN connection.  Now, I’ve seen download managers and bittorrent clients with bandwidth restrictions but nothing that would throttle a web browser so I did a bit of Googling and found this helpful post.  Basically I’d worked out that at full pelt I was getting 135Kbps and this caused a problem with the VPN connection so I figured that maybe a third of that (45Kbps) would be a fair amount of bandwith to take, to do implement the bandwidth cap I had to…

• Open up a session on OSX as the Administrator (I did this in parallel to my existing login).
• Open up Terminal.
• Type:

  sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 45KByte/s

  This sets up the rule limiting your bandwidth.

• Type:

  sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80

  This enables the rule.

Once you’ve finished the downloading you wanted to limit you’ll need to flip back into the administrator profile and do this…

• Type:

  sudo ipfw delete 1

  This deletes the rule.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment. Please note that this only restricts Port 80 which is the general web traffic port, if you had other activity going on (Skype, Bittorrent) then you’d need to add a rule for each relevant port.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: bandwidth, darwin, Leopard, linux, mac, osx, sudo, throttle, unix

I decided to install Drupal on my web server and instead of downloading the install files to my desktop, unzipping them and then uploading them back to the web server (which takes ages over ADSL) I thought I’d have a go at downloading them manually over SSH. In effect SSH is a method of connecting to your Linux web hosting service as though you were actually at a terminal logged in to that machine, in effect you have complete control over your web space with the ability to use the array of commands available to all Linux users. Most web hosting companies offer SSH access on their decent packages and I definitely recommend it as a shortcut for various things such as deleting files, setting permissions and editing config files (yes, I actually like vi).  So, if you’ve got SSH access, how do you use it? First you’ll need to find out the Host Name, Username and Password from your hosting provider, then one of the following – depending on whether you’re a Windows or Mac user…

If you’re on a Mac running OSX you’re in luck, you already have an SSH client to hand, if you go to Applications then double-click on Utilities you get an array of useful applications – be careful here but the one we want is Terminal. Once you’ve launched Terminal type the following: “ssh username@system”, you will then be prompted for your password and you’re in!

If you’re on Windows then get yourself a copy of PuTTY, a small but fantastic little application that’s free for both commercial and non-commercial users.  As an aside, the PSFTP client on offer there is also a great secure FTP client.

Now, if you’re not used to having command-line access to systems and especially if you’ve no Linux skills at all I’d suggest you read some good starter materials and learn more about Linux – messing with the command-line is very dangerous and there is no undo feature!  I may start writing some posts about both the Linux and Windows command-line but in the interim please feel free to ask for advice, just leave a comment on this page and I’ll get an email, alternatively send me a direct message on Twitter.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: command-line, Drupal, linux, mac, osx, PuTTY, web hosting, windows

This week Macworld saw the launch of the Apple TV (formerly iTV), on the surface it’s a pretty good device allowing wireless transfer of video, music,
podcasts and photos from up to five Macs or PCs to your swanky HDMI compliant TV set all for a relatively reasonable $299.  Many people might immediately realise that this is not a new idea, in fact I had a device that performed a similar task about 3 years ago (albeit using SCART) and at the time both wired and wireless versions were available.  Actually I don’t see this as a problem, there were MP3 players before the iPod and that didn’t stop Apple
becoming the market leader, Apple have a knack of doing things better than the competition and have got a great reputation when it comes to usability and reliability. Despite all this, I’m not really impressed with the Apple TV and as it stands I doubt it will have the impact that everyone expected.  The single biggest drawback of the Apple TV is that it doesn’t play all of the popular video formats, it will play anything that iTunes plays but nothing more.  This means that any video you already have in other formats, be it snaffled from bittorrent, downloaded from the web, ripped from DVD or captured from camcorders will not work without going through the laborious process of re-encoding.  This is more than most people want to do and the kind of people who really need a device like this probably use multiple formats and probably have stacks of DivX and Xvid movies that they’d love to watch on their
TV and Apple aren’t going to be much help at all.The secondary factor is that due to Apple’s late arrival in this space there are already some pretty good devices out there, though the biggest threat probably comes from their classic rival in the shape of the Xbox 360.  For $399 you get a device that can stream video, music and photos from your PC
(though you’re stuck with just WMV for video), allows you to directly purchase and download TV shows and HD Movie rentals without even touching a computer, comes with a free headset allowing free phone calls to other Xbox 360 users, also supports video calls with the webcam accessory, and on top of all that is to date the best selling High-Definition games console on the market with over a hundred titles available.

So the Apple TV has a big hill to climb but if anyone can push it up that hill then surely Apple can.  One light at the end of the tunnel which might generate some additional sales is the already mooted prospect of installing Linux on the Apple TV and using a Linux media player distro to do the rest -
now that might just make me buy one.

written by admin \\ tags: Apple, bittorrent, hd, linux, macworld, xbox, xbox 360