By David, on May 27th, 2009
The IPFilter Updater application now has its own page: http://www.davidmoore.info/ipfilter-updater/
uTorrent is one of the most popular BitTorrent clients out there. In my opinion it’s the best.
You can set up IP filtering in uTorrent to block bad seeds and peers from a list maintained by the community.
How to set up IP filtering in uTorrent
- Open up uTorrent and go to Options > Preferences from the menu or click the Preferences button in the toolbar
- Select the Advanced option in the tree
- Find ipfilter.enabled in the list and make sure it’s set to true
- Click OK
How to get and update the ipfilter.dat
I’ve written a simple program that will download the ipfilter.dat from SourceForge and copy it into the file where uTorrent expects it.
uTorrent IPFilter Updater [ Requires .NET 3.5 ]
UPDATED 26 Jan 2010: Now requires .NET 3.5, and allows mirror selection
- Extract the files to a folder, and run IPFilter.UI.exe
- Wait for it to download the mirrors, select the one you want, and click Go
- Once the file has downloaded and extracted, you can close the window
Enhancements
Done:
- Download and extract zip file to speed up the download time and minimize the download usage
- Allow selection of mirror you want to use
To Do:
- Automation through command-line arguments, for scheduled tasks
Source Code: http://github.com/DavidMoore/IP-Filter-Updater/
How to get uTorrent to pick up the new ipfilter.dat
You have two options:
- You can simply exit and restart uTorrent to load theIPFilter or
- You can leave uTorrent open and reload the IPFilter by selecting the Peers tab, right clicking in the list and choosing Reload IPFilter. Annoyingly you need a selected torrent for this to work.
Looking in the Log should show a message similar to “Loaded ipfilter.dat xxxxxx entries)”
Because IP ranges and addresses change often, it’s a good idea to update your filter list often too.
By David, on May 26th, 2009
Opera has built-in torrent support which is very handy and nice, but not quite as nice as a full-fledged client like uTorrent
To disable the Torrent support in Opera so that uTorrent or your default torrent client will be used instead:
- In Opera, type in opera:config in the address bar and hit enter
- Click the Bit Torrent section to expand it
- Untick Enable
- Hit Save
- Click OK at the message box
You won’t have to restart Opera for this change to take effect
By David, on May 26th, 2009
One of the things I learned long ago was to always have more than 1 drive or have my single drive partitioned.
You keep your programs and operating system on the C drive.
On your D drive goes all your data, downloads and anything that you don’t want to vanish on you suddenly.
A couple of advantages of this are:
- This keeps the C drive quite lean if you want to make an image of it. It contains the operating system files and installed software and nothing else.
- The D drive contains everything in one spot that you can easily set up for a backup procedure
- If something catastrophic happens to your operating system, you can (mostly) be comfortable with formatting and installing over the C drive without blowing away all your precious music, photos and docs.
- You can store your favourite software installers and drivers on your D drive which you can reach easily if doing a reinstall – rather than having to download them all again if starting from scratch.
If you don’t partition or have more than one hdd, an operating system failure could mean the hassle of removing your hard drive and backing data up off it on another running machine.
Things can be difficult though with the way Windows likes to store the user profile data on the C drive by default like your application data and My Documents.
Here are some instructions for changing Windows 7 so that all your user data is stored on your D drive (or wherever you like).
This is starting from a clean install of Windows 7 but you could do it from an existing install; just that trying to change the location of an existing user profile is extremely difficult and not recommended (hence the Dummy account):
- When prompted to enter a user name in the Windows 7 installer, use a throw-away username rather than your desired username e.g. Dummy
- Once installed you should be logged in as Dummy
- Open up C:\Users and copy the Public and Default folders to the new location e.g. D:\Users
- Open up regedit and go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList key
- Change the Default, ProfilesDirectory and Public values to the new location (e.g. replace %SystemDrive% with D:)
- You should also consider moving the ProgramData location too
- Restart then log on again as Dummy (not sure if this is necessary but just being safe!)
- Create a new user. This will be your preferred account. Name it what you want and add it to the Administrators group.
- Log off Dummy and log on as the new user
- Click the Start Menu and click on your folder name just below the profile grapic and above “Documents”. Right click on the folders and go Properties to verify they are stored in D:\Users
Now, if your Windows 7 install becomes unrecoverable, you can safely format and install on the C drive and your user profile will remain intact on D.
By David, on May 11th, 2009
iTunes without the bloat, and the invasive Quicktime installer + annoying Bonjour service.
Install Quicktime Alternative, then the iTunes installer from Ajua Online.
That’s currently 17.8MB for the iTunes installer, and 10.8MB for Quicktime Alt. As opposed to the 80MB of bossy Apple iTunes installer.
By David, on February 28th, 2009
Firefox still tends to be a bit of a memory hog over an extended period of time, even though the latest major version (3) has made massive memory usage improvements over previous versions.
This tweak will make sure Firefox behaves more like standard Windows applications when it comes to being minimized, as in freeing up the memory it’s using for Windows. The down-side to this is that when restored or maximized again, there will be a delay as the application shifts chunks from slow virtual memory to system memory.
- Go to about:config
- Right click anywhere in the list and choose New > Boolean
- Call the entry config.trim_on_minimize and set it to true
- Restart Firefox
- You might want to go to about:config to confirm the change took effect
