VirtualBox – Shrink your VDI images. Image size = Space used up inside VM.

Often when you install a VM in virtualbox you’ll notice that initial size of the VM image would be more or less equal to the disk space actually used in the VM. However with time, as you play around, you will find that the size of VM image would always keep on increasing. The disk space actually used would be far lesser than the VM image size. We would try to compress the VM image to the space actually used up inside the VM.

General Updates, Control that bandwidth looter. “trickle” them. Play your favourite shoutcast stream while your torrents download happily in background.

Back after a long time. Will provide some general updates and introduce you to this fine little cuty called trickle.

Ever stuck with torrent downloads who steal all your bandwidth, and you can’t even open google .com. Talk about limiting download speeds from torrent clients, which never work efficiently. Or how about listening to shoutcast while your firefox blazes away.

Cron and crontab, The easy, powerful and useful scheduler.

Being on hardy, I had developed this evil habit of “sudo apt-get update” which I ‘d do now and then, hoping for a better updated, greater hardy or hoping for some miraculous update which would fix all my annoying hardy bugs.

Even otherwise, we do miss our nifty Windows task scheduler. Or how about shutting down your internet connection at 8 in morning to save bandwidth. So here is the linux cute thing.

mp3splt – Split radio shows, online shows with cue sheets.

Ever stuck with those big 200 mb shows,  or single track CDs and felt bored of browsing through entire 2 hour track to reach for your favorite track? Welcome our hero, mp3splt.

This is a nice tool which lets you split mp3/ogg files. So people wondering what’s new about the splitting, It has a nice feature that lets you split files according to track information from cue sheets or even from cddb(Internet).
Sounds good?

Local DNS caching – pdnsd. Reduce name resolutions times. Run your own caching DNS server. And there’s something about OpenDNS.

Often, I find, You hit a website and you see “Looking up www.zzzzz.com” in status bar. This becomes intensified if you are running a P2P software like torrents.

Often people enable host name resolution in torrents. With hundreds of connections and name resolutions, I often feel the rates of “Looking up … ” continuously increases. These are most definitely DNS name resolution delays. Running a quick sniff for a un-responding website suggests a name resolution delay.

Swiftweasel, the faster fox.

So, I laid my hands on Swiftweasel, which is open source and optimzed build of Firefox for Linux. It lets you download processor specific optimized builds. So I installed build for Pentium 4 M and I could see some noticeable speed differences

Proxify any application. Tsocks and proxychains. Force any program to communicate through a SOCKS, HTTP(S) proxy. And how to use cascading proxies.

How many times have you found applications not having proper proxy support. Or sometimes, they support proxies but does not let you provide proxy authentication. Ever used plain old telnet through a proxy ? Ever ran port scanners through proxies ?

Ever found wanting on how to use multiple cascading proxies, like two or more proxy in series.

Skype 2.0 beta for Linux goes Video, “The great revolution” and I am smiling…

From skype developers

A great time is upon us. A time of change. A time of revolution.

In the past, we have struggled in a world of glass panes and fruits. Forbidden from seeing the world around us. Denied the possibility of showing who we are. But today, our eyes open. We’re not afraid to see, and we’re not afraid to show ourselves.

Gone in 15 seconds… My neighbour’s WEP key

Hi,

Its 5:55 am, Office @ 9:30 am. But lemme sleep with a smile.

Here’s my neighbour’s (27% signal strength) WEP key.

Combine two connections (Wifi or ethernet) for a single torrent download. Listen to streaming audio and download side by side. Routing through multiple uplinks.

Hi, So my friend was out on weekend, and I had two spare/live connections (256kbps) at my disposal. My objective was to download a single file(using torrents) at 512kbps.

Here’s what I finally achieved.

Updated – Azureus supports multiple interfaces. Check out the end of post.

Ubuntu, Windows – Limit CPU usage. Control that bully. + Ipod tip.

I do a lot of video and audio conversion for my Ipod. And almost aways, my conversion program (ffmpeg), hogs up my CPU for the entire time with 100%CPU and manages to heat it upto 80 degrees (C). I have seen as high as 85.

Finally, thought there must be some ways of handling it apart from just nicing it or renicing it. Here are the tools I found out.

Possible ubuntu bugs with handling laptop hard disks. S.M.A.R.T. attributes for Hard Disk. Laptop hard drives being damaged ?

Hi, I was subscribed to an age old bug related to incorrect hard disk shutdown. And I came across another related bug with hard disk power management on laptops. Today I am going to talk about these two bugs and about your HD SMART parameters.

So before discussing those bugs, lets find your SMART parameters and understand what they could mean.