[How-to] Remote Torrenting using Dropbox

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Have you ever wished you could use Bittorrent on-the-go? Here’s a short guide how utilizing the magic of Dropbox!

What is Dropbox?

Dropbox is a free service that grants you 2GB of online storage space. You can upgrade your account for more space if you wish, but in my experience, 2GB is more than enough. It’s just like having an online USB disk.

Who is this guide for?

People who have computers running at home while they’re out in the office.

What do you need?

  1. An internet connection (duh).
  2. A computer running at home with your favourite Bittorrent program running in the background. I use uTorrent for the Mac.
  3. The ability to download .torrent files with the ability to save .torrent files to Dropbox (Sorry, this won’t work on iPhones!).

Typically, this process would involve installing the Dropbox application on both your home computer and your remote computer. However, if you do not have permission to do so, you can always use the Dropbox web interface to upload your torrent files.

Here’s how!

  1. Sign up for Dropbox. If you use this link, both you and I get an additional 250MB free!
  2. Install Dropbox on your computer.
  3. Create a dedicated Torrent folder in Dropbox on your computer.

  4. In your favourite Torrent application, set it so that it monitors the Torrent folder setup in step 2 above.  Here is what it looks like in uTorrent on my Mac:

My settings above are such that whenever uTorrent starts a new download, it deletes the original .torrent file. This gives me an indication that the Home computer has successfully picked up the .torrent file and has begun downloading.

And you’re done!

How it works

When you download a .torrent file and save it into the Dropbox/Torrent folder, it gets automatically synced your other Dropbox installed locations. So what happens is that your Home computer that runs uTorrent in this case automatically picks up the .torrent file and begins the download process.

Uploading the torrent file via the web interface isn’t that difficult either. Just go to www.dropbox.com and sign in. From there, just navigate to your Torrents folder and click upload.


Have fun!

Finding Directions on Google Maps

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Google Maps is brilliant. When it first launched, I thought it was pretty amazing. Then came Google Maps on the iPhone. It was then I lost (haha) the ability to get lost!

Google Maps on iPhone

Let’s take for example, the simple task of finding out how to get from Taiwan to China.

Google Maps is even smart enough to tell you that a journey by car will involve a ferry and that you have to pay tolls!

But for some INSANE reason, check out step #24 of 165km!

Thinking this was a fluke, I tried an even longer journey: Driving from California to Japan.

You apparently need something extra for this one

Thanks Fadh for showing me this!

The T-shirt Vendor’s Offer

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“So how much would you like me to put on the invoice?” asked the gentleman at the other end of the phone.

“What?” I replied in bewilderment.

The setting for the conversation was in my last year in high school. I was speaking to the vendor from a t-shirt printing company whom I was arranging for some t-shirts to be printed for my boarding house. A couple of weeks prior to the conversation, the housemaster had just approved the new design and I had just emailed the vendor the digital copy when I received the phone call. We were expecting delivery by the end of the week.

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Visualizing the Gulf oil spill

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If you center the Gulf oil spill to KL (5 June), you’ll see that it stretches as far south as Melaka, as far east as Dungun, as far north as Cameron Highlands, and across the Straits of Malacca reaching Indonesia (ifitwasmyhome.com).

Deepwater Horizon @ KL, 5 June 2010

There is no doubt that what we have on our hands is an ecological disaster that was man-made, driven by energy policies that we as human beings, should have tried weaning ourselves out of as soon as we possibly could.

In any event, I think that sealife in the Gulf as we know is, for lack of a better word, fucked. Taking into account the upcoming hurricane season means that (1) any relief well drilling measures to stem the flow of oil isn’t going to be within 3 months; and (2) even more oil is going to be gushing to the surface. And with the gulfstream potentially taking the oil further east towards the eastern seaboard of the United States, then further north across the Atlantic into the North Sea and Meditteranean, don’t be surprised if you see patches of oil here in Asia in the next 2 years or so.

Mark my words: Deepwater Horizon may just the beginning of a dark epoch in mankind’s history.

So if you haven’t considered taking up diving, the next few years may be the best time to do so. The life you see 30 metres down today may be the last you’ll ever see of them.

Update:

  1. Photos of the oil spill destruction up close (via Life)
  2. A computer model simulating how the oil slick will get to the Atlantic.
  3. The oil spill now moves towards the Florida keys (bye bye tourism + beachfront home prices).

Install MAMP and WordPress on a Mac

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I recently installed WordPress 3 RC1 on my local test server a.k.a. my MBP which really wasn’t too difficult to setup. This reminded me of the days when I brewed up a readme on how to install Apache, MySQL and PHP + WordPress on WinXP!

In any case, running a MAMP (Mac-Apache-MySQL-PHP) test server and WordPress is really easy:

  1. Download MAMP. I use the “free” one.
  2. Install MAMP by dragging the icon to the Applications folder
  3. When MAMP completes its installation, go to the phpMyAdmin page from the menu at the top.
  4. Create a database. I called mine wp-database
  5. Download WordPress. In this example, I downloaded WordPress 3.0 RC1
  6. I unzipped the contents of WordPress into my users/myusername/wordpress folder
  7. In the MAMP menu, go to Preferences > Apache and select the Document Root per Step 6.
  8. Assuming you didn’t change any other settings, go to http://localhost:8888/wordpress and you’ll be prompted to fill in a few details to install WordPress.
  9. A couple of clicks later and you’re done!





Here are a few other guides in case the instructions above weren’t clear enough:

  1. Sawyer McFarlane Media: Installing MAMP
  2. Lullbot: Install a Local Web Server on Mac OS
  3. Blog-Nyo Mangoeni: Menginstall WordPress menggunakan MAMP

Facebook’s Privacy Options mapped out (NYT)

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At 5,830 words at present, Facebook’s privacy policy is longer than the US Constitution without amendments. So its no surprise then that you will probably need this map by the NYT that charts out the plethora of options available to you as a FB user to control the information that they have over you.

I still cannot get FB to stop publicly showing my ‘Likes’. I am seriously considering “unliking” all my pages to stop this feature. Either that, or the “Only Me” selector is broken!