Internet | Technology Blog

Network Traffic Balancer

November 30th, 2008

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Maximizing the download rate of an Internet connection might be a good way to download a file the fastest way but it can put a strain on all other network and Internet activities in that time. A user wanting to play an online game while downloading with full speed will notice high ping rates which is not desirable. It can also lead to disconnects or temporary load errors in general.

One way of dealing with this situation is to run a traffic balancer to ensure that the other activities are not affected by the downloads or uploads.

Netbalancer (via To The PC) is not limiting the bandwidth of the applications directly. It is instead changing the network priority of applications to control the Internet traffic. The network priority of a software that is demanding lots of bandwidth would be reduced by Netbalancer to ensure that other applications with a higher priority get their share of the bandwidth.

Baresite Makes Mobile Browsing Affordable

November 17th, 2008

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Only a minority of cell phone owners have access to a data flatrate. Most have to cope with utterly insane pricing schemes and pay per Megabyte transferred. If you are old enough to remember; That’s how the first Internet Service Providers handled business when the Internet became popular in the Nineties.

Some cell phone owners have a free data contingent per month before they have to pay for additional data transfers. The fees are usually ridiculously high for a Megabyte of data and cell phone owners who do not have another choice have to make sure that they optimize the data transfer.

A good way to optimize the traffic is to use services like Baresite. Baresite basically removes the unnecessary parts of a website before sending it to the client. It acts like a proxy server that alters every page to reduce the amount of data that gets transferred from and to the clients device.

Internet Connection Check

November 7th, 2008

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It can sometimes be complicated to check if an Internet connection is still alive. Sure, modem or routers usually display information about the Internet connection and might reveal if it is still up but they are sometimes not in the same room or even house. Some users would like a software based way to check if an Internet connection is still alive.

A software program called Is It On by Erightsoft, the makers of the popular video converter Super, can do that. It is a small portable application for most Microsoft Windows operating systems that can check the status of a connection in a heartbeat and displays a green or gray light depending on the status.

The interface of the software application is as basic as it can get with virtually no settings available at all. It displays three items under Network Status: Direct Active Internet Connection, Lan Connection and Behind Intranet Network Proxy.

Barebone Web Surfing With Finch

October 13th, 2008

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We have featured some articles in the past that explained how to reduce the bandwidth usage while surfing the Internet which is important for users who have to cope with a monthly bandwidth limit and those who are stuck with slow Internet connections. (Reduce Opera Bandwidth Usage and Use The Opera Mini Browser On A PC are two that come to mind)

Finch tries to achieve a similar goal. The web service acts pretty much like a web proxy with the difference that bandwidth reduction and not anonymity is the top priority. Finch will not load CSS files, no images and no scripts. Stripping a website of most of its contents reduces its size tremendously. The size of the New York Times homepage is reduced by 94% when using Finch.

This method has some serious disadvantages though. Many websites become unusable. Finch does not support scripts which are required by some to function properly. Cookies are not supported as well which meaning logins won’t function properly as well.

Open DNS

October 11th, 2008

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My Internet Provider decided to capture data that I entered in a browser’s address bar that could not be resolved to an Internet address and provide me with their own search interface instead of the default one that I enabled in the browsers. This is one of those sneaky moves that makes me want to run away from the provider as fast as I can even though I’m perfectly happy otherwise.

They did provide a switch in the user control panel to disable that feature again but this is again a company that is forcing the user to take action for something that they changed.

Open DNS has been covered before on this website and I just want to remind everyone that Open DNS can be used to get rid of search boxes from your provider. Setup of Open DNS takes a few minutes at most and should be doable for everyone.

Web Proxy Server List

September 29th, 2008

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Keeping up with web proxy servers on the Internet can be a time consuming task. Proxies come and go that quickly that one could say it is nearly impossible to keep up unless someone would use scripts to check the web proxies automatically. The web proxy server list posted on Ghacks dates back two years and the main reason it was not updated is the fact that updating the servers would have to be done dynamically to provide visitors with a working list of proxy servers.

That is probably the same line of thought that the developer of Prime Proxies had when he created his website. The website publishes an up to date list of working web proxy servers which are checked regularly so that the chance of encountering a non working proxy server is slim.

Proxies are divided into three categories that are named after the proxy script that is being used on the proxy websites. The three main scripts are PHP Proxy, CGI Proxy and Glyph. Some proxy scripts work better on specific websites than others and it comes down to finding the web proxy server script that displays the favorite websites properly.