I finally decided to give uTorrent another try and switch from my favorite client Bitcomet to it. It seemed to me lately that Bitcomet was using more system resources than it was expected to use which is the main reason for the switch. Others are that the torrent community frowns upon Bitcomet naming it bandwidth stealer.
Migrating torrents into uTorrent is a pretty simply procedure. Before you can load them into uTorrent you have to make sure that all extensions that have been added by Bitcomet, or any other client, are removed. Bitcomet for instance adds .bt! at the end of every file if you have selected it in the options. This could be a tedious task if you have many small files that you want to download.
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Knowledge
, p2p
We all made our jokes when Nintendo;s new system Wii emerged about how the fat video gaming kids would lose weight while playing video games. Well, someone decided to give it a try and use see if a daily Wii workout would reduce his weight and body fat. He called it the Wii Sports Experiment and had some astonishing results.
He decided to add a daily 30 minutes session of Wii Sports to his normal activities and keep track of several elements such as bmi, body fat and weight. He would not change his other habits like eating. The results that he posted on his website are incredible and could help Nintendo enter the fitness market as well.
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Entertainment, Games, Knowledge
A recent forum post from ffolke at the ghacks forum asked about a free method to clone a hard drive to another one. There are actually several freeware tools out there that can do this and they distinguish each other mostly by ease of use and interface. The one tool that I would use for such a purpose is called DriveImage XML which supports SATA drivesn external hard drives and flash memory such as that of my iPod Nano.
Drive Image XML has a real nice gui which can be run in Windows. To clone a hard drive to another one click on the drive to drive entry on the lower left side of the main window. Drive Image XML scans all drives that are currently connected to your computer and displays them all in a list. Just select a drive that you do want to clone in the first step. After that you may select to use a raw mode copy which would copy all of the sectors of the drive to another one which means that even the unused sectors would be cloned to the new location.
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Operating Systems, Knowledge
, Tools, windows
backup
, freeware, hard-drive, software
I sometimes have the desire to create custom DVDs of movies that I own or that I downloaded to be able to view them on my tv using a dvd player. Many people might think that it is a rather difficult procedure to convert a avi file into a DVD compliant format and create DVD menus to be able to playback the movies on a standard DVD drive. This is not the case.
You do need two freeware programs for the whole procedure. The first is called Super. Super is a great converter that is able to convert to many formats including a DVD compliant MPEG II format. The second freely available application is DVD Styler which we will use to create the navigation of the DVD and the DVD iso file. We can finally burn the iso image using a program that is able to burn such images.
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Knowledge
, Tools
convert
, divx, dvd, freeware
Not long ago I wrote an article about converting flv files which are used by Youtube and Google Video to another format like avi and mpg to be able to watch them on your computer without the need of using a flv player or plugin. Fastdump pointed out in the comments that the program VDownloader would do the same faster and easier, what can I say – he was right.
Vdownloader is a little freeware program that scans your clipboard for links to youtube, google video, grinvi and dailymotion. Once it detects such a link the movie will be automatically downloaded and converted to the format that you specified in the settings. You may save the video as avi, mpg or psp and change the output size and audio bitrate in the process.
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The Web
, Knowledge
convert
, download, google-video
Do not Disconnect was implemented on Apple Ipods to prevent data loss by warning the user not to disconnect the iPod while it is still in use on the computer. This message should be taken serious most of the time. If you transfer files to the iPod for instance. Removing the iPod while transferring files could lead to data loss and file corruption.
Sometimes however the message Do not disconnect appears although all transfers have been finished and iTunes has been closed. But don;t worry, you can try several things to make the message do not disconnect disappear. If iTunes is still started close it and see if the message disappears. If that is not the case start it again and click on the Eject Disk icon in the lower right of the screen.
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Knowledge
, ipod
apple, ipod, itunes, video