Supercharge iTunes With Some More Of Doug’s AppleScripts [Mac]

If you’re a heavy iTunes users with a significant size music collection, you definitely should know about Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. Doug Adams has been writing scripts for iTunes ever since Apple’s inception of its popular jukebox. As far as I can tell, iTunes seems to be the most scriptable of all the default Mac applications.  Last year I talked about some of Doug’s scripts and now I want to cover some more useful ones. If you’re not familiar with AppleScripts don’t let the techie name scare you off. Doug‘s site has scripts for managing your music tracks, playlists, album covers, controlling iTunes, networking, managing files and lots more. Instructions for downloading and installing scripts are very clear and if you...

How To Remotely Control Your Mac Using Simple AppleScripts

If you’re lucky to have two or more Macs in your home or office, you no doubt find occasions where you would like to remote control a Mac either from another room or from another part of the country. You probably know that you can use the Shared feature to remotely control another Mac on the same network. But by creating some simple AppleScript commands you can control a remote Mac much faster, alleviating the need to open the Shared screen feature. If you have never worked with AppleScript before, don’t fret. The following Mac remote control scripts are very short and easy to use. Settings For Remote Control In order to remotely control a Mac, say your desktop machine, you must first set it up for commands to be sent to it. To...

How To Download Google Books As A PDF File [Mac]

Google comes up with the coolest services. Every time I look at the diversity of the things it can do, my jaw drops in awe. If you don’t agree with me, well — just think back. This little company began amazing us by providing the largest email inbox in history. Email! And now? We can’t live without Google’s services. Google Books is one of the offerings that completely blows my mind. The fact that I can now read magazines that was published way back before I was even born is absolutely astounding. The only teensy-weensy flaw that makes me cringe is the lack of offline support. If the magazine or classic that I’m reading is free, then it should be made freely available — even offline. That’s where Google Book Downloader comes...

How To Trigger the Download of a File Remotely (Mac Only)

These days, almost everybody is connected to more than one computer. The common scenario is: one computer at work and one computer at home. This configuration often requires people to move files between computers, raising the popularity of USB drives. Sometimes you find something at work that you want to download for your home computer (or vice versa). You could: download it on your work computer and bring it home later, or… ask your home computer to do a remote download right away – real time – from your work computer. There’s nothing wrong with the first option, but even from the non-geek point of view, the second one is way cool. So if you have a Mac machine (which is always connected to the net) and a Dropbox account, I’ll show...

How To Remotely Trigger A Torrent Download Via Email [Mac]

For a long time now, I’ve been searching for a way to start a torrent download from a remote location. And since I’m on the road most of the day, Transmission’s WebUI isn’t any good to me. I couldn’t be bothered to set it up anyway, it would involve having a fixed IP address or DynDNS — too much hassle to being with. What I actually needed was a simple way to download a torrent on my iPhone and send it to my Mac running at home. When I realised that the iPhone didn’t support downloading files natively, I was back to square one. Then I thought of using Dropbox — but that didn’t work. After a couple of hours of research, I finally found a solution, albeit a pretty rudimentary one. It involves a secondary email, Mail rules, Transmission...

How to Access your Torrent Client & Download Torrents Remotel

BitTorrent is great for sharing large files. If you have been using BitTorrent for some time you know the kind of stuff you can find out there. From movies to TV to games to Stanford lectures. Here is how you can manage and download your torrents remotely which means that you can start a torrent download on your home computer while you are at your friends place or anywhere with access to the internet. So that when you come back home the downloading is already finished and it’s ready to use. Sweeeeet? Lets make it happen. You Will Need: Either µtorrent (Windows) or Transmission (Linux or Mac) A little tweaking around. For Windows: 1. Download µtorrent Web UI (Direct Link) and follow these instructions to set it up.2. You need...

Increase the Speed of Your Internet Connection

Does your ISP deliver the speed you pay for? It’s rather easy to test your broadband internet speed. However, there are a few things to keep in mind. For one, ISPs usually promise an “up to” speed, so you can’t expect top performance at all times, that’s part of the deal. During high traffic times your ISP will suffer from high loads and will certainly not be able to deliver the maximum speed. Thus you’d best perform different speed tests at different time points, to see whether you ever reach the top speed. Also, when running a speed test, make sure no other applications are using the internet, else the result will not be accurate. Speedtest.net is a good place to test your internet speed. They operate through...

5 Ways To Increase Your Torrent Download Speed

For many people, the distributed peer-to-peer download power of torrents isn’t all it’s made out to be. If you’re feeling drowned in fake files, choking from ISP speed throttling, and sick of being told you’re unconnectable – this guide is for you. We’ll have your torrent downloads in tip-top shape in no time. Note, I’m not touching on security here. If you’re paranoid about your ISP or the RIAA, your only solution is to run everything you do through a VPN and be done with it. If you follow everything I show you here, your torrent overview screen should soon be capable of looking like this: Open Those Ports! Your first step how to speed up torrent downloads is to ensure you can actually be connected to from other peers. The...