It's Rishi

No, not that kind of pacer! I realized the other day that I pace back and forth…a lot. Sometimes for an hour at a time. The weird thing is that I don’t do it consciously. Most of the time I will have been pacing around the room for 20 minutes before it hits me, “When did I get up and start pacing?”.

The upside is I find that, when pacing, I’m able to think deeply and efficiently. I often find that questions that I struggle with throughout the day can be resolved with a solid session of pacing. I liken it to the standard meditation technique of softly staring at a familiar object. The idea (I presume) is that since your senses are not being stimulated at all, your mind is free of outside distractions. Similarly, when I’m pacing around back and forth – covering the same steps over and over – there are no outside distractions. My mind is able to dedicate 100% of its processing power to internal thought. The key, however, is to find an environment that is so familiar you can mindlessly and freely walk around without thought.

So, why am I telling you this? You may have noticed that I categorized this post under the Lifehacks category. This is because the process of pacing for me is just that. If pacing doesn’t work for you, find a method that does. I promise that it will help you reach conclusions to complex issues you may be deliberating over.

I came across a (relatively) new torrent aggregator for TV shows called tvRSS.net. It’s pretty awesome – much better than TVTorrent.info which I used to use but one day ceased to exist a few months ago. tvRSS.net has torrent listings for just about every popular show on TV right now and seems to stay very up to date. Torrent listings appear just a few hours after the show airs. You will notice that tvRSS doesn’t really “aggregate” tv-show torrents so much as just organizes torrents that are listed on mininova, a popular torrent search engine. Even though, it’s possible that there may be more torrents out there that aren’t on mininova, I’m guessing it’s pretty rare.

It looks like Brian/alienvenom, the creator of tvRSS.net, is really trying to build a best of breed TV show torrent destination – adding such simple, but novel, functionality like parsing torrent names so that they can be searched more effectively and removing torrents that are of the same show episode (but released by different groups). I’m definltey looking forward to what else he has in the works for the site.

Oh, if you are going to download torrents, make sure you install and run PeerGuardian. PeerGuardian blocks connections to peers from IP addresses which are known to be up to no good. An example of why you should run this is there have been many reports of people receiving threatening letters in the mail from HBO after downloading torrents of various HBO shows like The Sopranos and Entourage. PeerGuardian works off of a block list so it’s certainly not foolproof but it’d be stupid not to use it.

People who know me well know that for the past couple of months, my computer’s been messed up. All of a sudden, IE and several other Internet-based apps like AIM and Outlook would, immediately upon being launched, start sucking 100% of the CPU. The problem manifested itself one day and I spent hours upon hours trying to fix it. Those that know me well also know that there is rarely a Windows problem I can’t fix. But, I just couldn’t figure this one out even after going so far as to running the problematic apps in my Visual C++ debugger to try to pinpoint the issue.

So for the past couple months I’ve been working around the issue. IE not working wasn’t a big deal since I use Firefox exclusively. But workarounds like using Meebo instead of my AIM client was becoming very irritating. The fate that I was almost ready to accept was re-installing Windows. That was until a couple days ago when I was randomly poking around the options panel in IE7 beta that I had recently upgraded to (in hopes of it possibly solving the issue). Low and behold, I came across this button in the Advanced tab:

A Reset button! Note that this is different than the “Restore Defaults” button, which was present in previous versions of IE, that simply resets a few advanced settngs. Upon finding this Reset button, I quickly said “what the heck?!” and clicked it. After a few seconds of churning, magically IE was no longer sucking up 100% CPU. I fired up AIM and Outlook and I practically jumped out of my seat when I confirmed that they also stopped sucking up 100% CPU.

Now that IE is actually usable for me, I’ve played around with this new version and I must say that it is very impressive. Because of the various customizations I have in my Firefox, I won’t switch back to IE7 but this is definitely going to slow – if not halt – the exodus of IE users to Firefox.

If you’re having problems with IE and want to try the Reset button or simply want to get a sneak peak at the next version of IE, go to the Microsoft IE7 page to download it.

Hard drive failure can be very, very painful. Since hard drives are generally reliable, many computer users have never experienced failure. But, for the rest of us who have had a drive crap out on us, we know it to be an event as horrific as a catastrophic earthquake. However, the difference between earthquakes and hard drive failure is that hard drive failure is often predictable.

If you’ve ever looked at the feature list of your hard disk, one of the items listed will be “S.M.A.R.T.”. No, that doesn’t mean that your hard disk is super intelligent. S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (Wikipedia article for more info). Basically, it’s a monitoring system built-in to your drive which detects and reports on it’s condition.

In order to read the S.M.A.R.T. report off your drive, you’ll need to download and run a small piece of software. I use a free, open-source tool called smartmontools. To download the Windows installer, click here.

1) Run the installer program. (For platforms other than Windows, read the appropriate steps for your OS)
2) Open up a command prompt (Start|Run|type in ‘cmd’|OK) and change directory to where you installed smartmontools (e.g. ‘cd “Program Files”\smartmontools’)
3) To get a health check on your primary disk, run smartctl -H /dev/hda. If you see PASSED you’re in good shape. If you see FAILED, the time to start panicking is NOW! Create a backup asap and go get a new disk because you’ll be needing it very soon.

If you want to give your drive a thorough check-up, follow the steps outlined here (Scroll down to the “SMART Testing” section). Running the full battery of tests takes about 30 minutes and does not interfere with your use of the computer.

It’s a very good idea to run this test periodically, say once a week or so. It takes almost no time at all and the potential benefit in time and data can be priceless.

There were some scary rumors floating around that AllOfMP3.com was shutdown after the site was “down for maintenance” for a few days. Well, the good news is that they are back up. Phew! The funny thing is, if in fact AllOfMP3.com was shutdown, I simply would have downloaded more albums off of BitTorrent. So instead of paying ~$1.50 for an album, I’d pay nada. RIAA: take your pick. =) I should note that I spent more money on music last year than probably the preceding 3 years combined. The difference is that between buying music on AllOfMP3, my Y! Music Unlimited sub, and buying discounted used CD’s from Amazon and GEMM, I feel as though I’ve gotten tremendous bang for my buck.

Do you ever need to search more than one city at a time on Craigslist? I do…on what seems like a regular basis. I came across a useful site called Crazedlist which allows you to do just this: specify a Craigslist search and choose several cities to search all in one query. When selecting cities there is no “Select All” action but you can either fire off rapid [spacebar] [tab] sequences or simply modify the HTML to create and save your own template for the page with all the cities you want selected.

Seen a good video on YouTube or Google Video and want to store a copy of it locally? I found a nifty little tool that can do just that.

MyTube: YouTube Video Ripper

Basically you enter the YouTube or Google Video URL and the script returns you the direct URL of the video which you then can download. I tried using it for a couple videos and it works great. As suggested, I’d also recommend you download and use VLC Media Player to watch the files you saved because the video format is On2 VP6 which your typical Media Player won’t play unless you download a codec.

UPDATE 7/17/06: It seems as if MyTube is currently broken and is in the process of being fixed. I found another site called KeepVid. I just tried ripping a YouTube vid and it does work. Just paste the YouTube URL, click Download, and then once the page refreshes you’ll see a link which you right-click save.
For you Linux people, try this nifty bash script

I heard on TechCrunch that Attensa for Outlook came out of Beta. However it’s no longer free and thus is no longer my RSS reader. I really hate to sound like a stingy bastard and I certainly don’t mean any ill will towards Attensa, but I just can’t see myself spending money for an RSS reader when there are plenty of free readers available and since Microsoft has already announced that the next version of Outlook will have RSS reader functionality built-in.

It’s kind of a shame because except for a couple weird memory-hogging and stalling issues, I have generally enjoyed using Attensa for Outlook since December when I first discovered it. Luckily, Attensa does allow me to export my subscriptions to an OPML file. Now the question is, to which free RSS reader will I import this into. I think I’ll check out Attensa Online, their free web-based reader which just launched.

Anyone else using a RSS reader they think stands out from the rest?

Up until now, I’ve been trying different web-based RSS readers and haven’t really fallen in love with any that I’ve tried. Currently, I use MS Outlook for e-mail and I was waiting for the next version of Office being under the assumption that it would bring RSS reader functionality. Well, it turns out, I won’t have to wait. Attensa has developed an RSS reader plugin for Outlook. I downloaded it today after reading this article about the company’s $9MM series B funding announcement.

I downloaded it today, added all my feed subscriptions, and let’s just say I think I have an RSS reader solution that I’ll be sticking with.

Last month, Microsoft acquired a file-synchronization software company called FolderShare. What’s so great about it? It’s a very simple tool to transparently synchronize files amongst many computers. Even though there are many software solutions out there that solve this problem (most which cost $$$) , still most people use relatively cumbersome ways to accomplish file transfer: e-mail, IM client, FTP, uploading to file-serving websites, etc. Furthermore, it’s always surprised me how much trouble most people (even myself on occasion) have just setting up file sharing between Windows PC’s at home. Clearly, a free and easy solution is needed by the masses.

I tried FolderShare out and it definitely worked as advertised. You just need to download their Satellite program which, once installed, runs in the background. Within a couple minutes of playing around with it I had sync’d up a folder between my laptop and desktop, shared my music folder with my sister, and can now securely access my hard drive via the web. The great thing is that it’s all peer-to-peer so the process is very efficient.

FolderShare used to charge $50/year for the service. The first thing Microsoft did after acquiring the company was to make it free. Very cool.
Microsoft has definitely been on a bit of a hot streak in the geek blogosphere with the debut of Live, releasing SSE under Creative Commons license, and now this.