Opera in the Can
It's true, I'm a fan of the Opera, but certain things such as not conforming to certain web standards has made me decide to go back to my gold standard: the reliably slow... Firefox. When I went to digg often times Opera wouldn't let me digg an article, the script would "fail to initiate" so it told me. I will miss the very speedy browsing, and built in scripting, rss feeds, and torrent client, but not enough to keep me an Opera user until they make it more compliant with today's web 2.0 standards. I must say as a final note though, the pc version of Opera runs like a dream, and I'd highly recommend it to any Windows user out there!
Google Profiles
For more info check out the unofficial Google news and tips site.
Tiki Bar Fans
QuickLook
To install: open your hard drive/Library/QuickLook and put the component file from inside the zipped file in this folder and log out. When you log back in QuickLook into a folder and check out the goodies!
Bit Torrent Clients
If you use a client such as
Azureus,
Transmission,
Xtorrent,
or even the torrent downloader built right into
Opera(my
current favorite 'cause it works well and it's wicked easy) you
most likely won't even notice a difference on your network because
they are set up to work optimally right out of the box. These
modern clients don't aggravate your network with constant tracker
updates and they have the options to limit upload speeds. Check out
the difference in ping times from when I had Bit Torrent running
downloading a file without an upload limit and when I quit the
application, which is necessary to making sure the client isn't
still running. When you hit "pause" it doesn't stop the client from
slowing the network at all, you need to actually quit to be
sure.
Network Ping times (the time it takes for information to get from
your computer to a site, in this case Google, and back, in
milliseconds:
64
bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=855 ttl=115 time=4053.799
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=856 ttl=115 time=4099.037
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=857 ttl=115 time=4055.384
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=858 ttl=115 time=4033.114
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=859 ttl=115 time=4195.999
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=860 ttl=115 time=4137.639
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=861 ttl=115 time=4139.862
ms
Here is what happened when Bit Torrent is quit... we magically get
normal ping times again:
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=862
ttl=115 time=19.645 ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=863 ttl=115 time=13.137
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=864 ttl=115 time=15.742
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=865 ttl=115 time=14.918
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=866 ttl=115 time=17.739
ms
64 bytes from 68.87.60.144: icmp_seq=867 ttl=115 time=16.239
ms
Moral of the story, make sure your bit torrent client (and your
room mates!) is set up to work optimally to keep your internet
running like normal, not to mention so as not to piss off your
friends on the network.
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