I want to have something that highlights certain projects I’m working on while still allowing me to scribble.

Check it out in the next few days and give some feedback

I hope everything will get back to normal shortly.

You can now define how and when you want to be notified about your timeline. You can choose to stop playback and pop-up a small notification window while you watch a movie whenever you’re mentioned or receive a direct message. It’s pretty cool because the pop-up closes itself if you don’t touch anything after 5 seconds, so it’s not too bothering.

There are many more features, especially better authentication process with Twitter and some more visual notifications when things are happening.

@blittan is working on merging his changes which completely revamps the application’s behavior with tags (very interesting, can’t wait!) and other improvements including the autoexec.py script for the automatic execution.

I hoped to release it yesterday and today isn’t looking too promising, so with the risk of being wrong again, tomorrow. That’s the target date.

Imagine this scenario: you’re downloading a movie using your preferred Torrent client and a while into the download you get a Skype/VoIP phone call. Now, there’s no way to have a descent quality phone call while your torrent client is downloading full speed. The usual thing to do is to get up, walk to the other room and shutdown your torrent download, this can be very painful if you waited for an hour just to get the download rate to a good level.

The other option (and the point of this  post) is that you utilize the QoS capability of your router. QoS provide different priority to different applications, users, devices, etc… Using QoS for our scenario we will define a new rule set for it in the router to say that if the router needs to route packets (data) for both torrents and Skype, then Skype takes priority. Then, whenever such a situation happens the router will automatically switch to give priority to Skype packets and cater it first. You can also create a rule set based on the MAC address of the different devices which can be very useful for example to allow you play PS3 while downloading torrents.

The QoS controls the throughput using these priorities, so in fact it doens’t close connections established between your and your torrent peers, it just affects the bandwidth allocated to each of the peers. This is a huge advantage with keeping your download/upload rates, because when the Skype call or PS3 game is over the router will simply give all the throughput to the torrent client without needing to re-establish the connections with the peers.

If you need specific instructions on how to accomplish this with your router, post a comment below and we’ll try to assist.

The apartment we moved into was quite spacious and its layout interfered with the wireless signal. Something had to be done and the obvious path was to extend the transmission of the wireless router in a way to would cover the entire apartment. I found it to be too flaky. Would it work? Do I need to go out and buy the expensive n standard just to test it? Remember that the n standard was more than double the cost for g router.

I then came across something which was relatively new, Ethernet over Powerline (EOP). It was a bit cheaper than buying an ‘n’ router and it was something cool, so I decided to go ahead and test it. I never looked back!

The EOP is very simple to operate, to be honest it’s just like connecting your toaster to the power socket. You get a set of at least two electricity plugs, each with a RJ45 socket. You plug it to your normal electricity socket in one room, you connect the other plug in another room and that’s the end of it. The rooms are now connected, all there’s left to do now, is to hook a normal Ethernet cable from the plug into the computer/router/hub/switch in each of the rooms.

The EOP plugs supports up to 200mb per second, this is very high in comparison to wireless routers these days. It had zero faults, reboots, etc… unlike my (very common) Linksys router. The high throughput it supports allows you to play everything over it. I now can stream a 11gb Full HD (MKV) from the living room (storage) to the bedroom (streamer) without any frame drops or lags.

Since then, I added another set of two EOP adapters to connect the other rooms. So, in total I have 4 adapters, each providing network to each of the rooms in the apartment. One of the adapters is hooked into the router which enables all rooms to access the network. Pretty cool, and simple.

If you give it a try and have issues, drop me a line, I’m sure we can sort it out.

The new version main highlights is a better support for the bit.ly links and the new user interface that stops playback and pops up a OSD with the tweet. You can choose to do this for mentions and direct messages. The pop-up allows you to reply and supports auto-close which I think is a really close feature. If you don’t do anything the pop-up will close itself within a pre-defined time (you control it in settings).

A screen shot:

Tell me what you think

As always, feel free to post comments and feedback.