TECH RESET » Internet

Bandwidth Meter/Monitor for Mac

Admin — Tue, 04 May 2010 04:06:17 +0000

I found a tiny, basic and very practical bandwidth meter that just sits in the menu bar: MenuMeters. Can also display CPU, memory and drive use. Free.

A fancier and more comprehensive alternative which monitors many more system functions is iStat Menu, but it’s $10.

Easiest way to install apps on a fresh Windows install

Admin — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 20:42:34 +0000

Most definitely the easiest way to install all your basic apps after a fresh install of Windows is using Ninite. You simply go to the website, select some popular apps you would install anyways (like Winamp, iTunes, Firefox, Adobe Acrobat Reader, uTorrent, WinRar) and the site checks for the latests version of those apps and then gives you a package to download of all of those apps, and then runs all their default installations disabling all the annoying installation options like ad-ware, toolbars, etc. And done!

Best software you may have not heard of

Admin — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 17:18:05 +0000

Great topic over at reddit.com asking “What’s your favorite software that no one has heard of“. I’m discovering and discovering a lot of gems as we speak.

My New Favorite Bandwidth Monitor: NetWorx

Admin — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 02:27:36 +0000

For years I’ve been using Bandwidth Monitor Pro but for whatever reason it became buggy when I upgraded to Windows 7. It wasn’t correctly detecting my network cards and interfaces and rather than troubleshooting I decided to look for a free alternative and finally chose NetWorx (free, PC-only). Somehow, I had overlooked this particular bandwidth monitor in my searches the last couple years. And all the other apps that were coming up in my searches were inferior

NetWorx actually has more features than Bandwidth Monitor Pro, but most important to me is it’s simple and straightforward graph. I almost always keep this graph up because it helps me avoid getting frustrated over browsing and downloading slowdowns or videos buffering. This way, if I see no obvious drops in the visual graph of my connection, I get to more accurately place the blame on YouTube’s slow servers or slow torrent seeders.

Screenshots below of how I like my graph and of one of the settings tabs.

I still use VNC once in a while

Admin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:29:14 +0000

My first choice for remote controlling my main home desktop/server (running Windows 7) is Windows Remote Desktop Connection. As a backup I also have that computer running LogMeIn for when firewalls block RDC or if I want to log in via a browser. And while those two have replaced VNC which I used exclusively years ago, I still use VNC for when I want to log in and remotely control a computer as is… without it having changing resolutions or desktop settings the way it would to accommodate LogMeIn or RDC. For example, I use it when I am watching a movie or playing music from on the main computer and want to change something in the media player without interrupting whatever is playing.

In those cases, my preferred choices are UltraVNC as the PC server, and Chicken of the VNC as my VNC viewer from my Mac notebook.