Since it passed though, I have found a great and much cleaner solution and I thought I’d share all that I’ve tried with you guys.

TorrentFlux

In the begining, my personal file server was an Ubuntu box. As I had mentioned in an earlier post, I first tried using TorrentFlux to centralize my downloads at home.

Unlike most other manager, TorrentFlux is not an application with a web based counterpart; It’s truly running as a web app. This required a running webserver on the machine on which the app installed. I happened to do my personal web development on that box and already had MySQL and PHP installed and set up, but that might be one hell of an issue for someone who might not have the technical know how.

Because of all overlapping open source technologies related to this project, it had lots of potential but never really worked out for me. Also because of all the overlapping open source technologies, it seemed rather buggy at the time and lacked a couple of key configuration settings I was looking for.

Transmission

Then came Transmission. I had used the app on my MacBook for a while and was interested in trying their web UI to replace TorrentFlux. Somehow, I could not make it work over my LAN. It was likely a router problem, but I couldn’t get around it. Maybe the most current version of the software would worked fine now, but then I never figured it out.

The end of eras

Tired of always having technical issues with my Linux server in addition of the lingering hardware hiccups, I moved all my fileshare over on a Windows 7 box that also acted as my Home Theater PC.

uTorrent or the ‘it was right there all along app’

Almost everyone I know uses uTorrent by now. It’s a truely lightweight and elegant solution for maintaining your torrent downloads. Packaged with the software is a simple web based solution that bridges the uTorrent file process on the central computer with web clients. Basically, you add a file from the browser on your laptop and it downloads on the central file share automagically.

Once WebUi has been turned on from uTorrent’s preferences, you can reach it from everywhere on the network at a URL that could look something like this:
http:// [IP of the machine with uTorrent] : [uTorrent port] /gui/

You can additionally set up login authentication if you need some level of security around the access to it.

I’ve been using this for the larger part of the last 2 years now and it has been working great. The only gripe I have against the WebUI is how visually different it looks from the uTorrent app itself. I mean it’s not even close: candy colored buttons, barbershop lines as backgrounds and somewhat clumsy dialogs layout (the upload dialog for instance).

Sure, it’s not a real problem. Still would have appreciated some level of polish on it anyway.

To your local LAN and beyond

With that running you can access your torrent transfers from any computer within your LAN using a web browser. The only constraints is to have that main computer always stay on and make sure uTorrent launches on startup. Then you’re all set.

If you want remote access to the UI, you could just set up simple port forwarding to have request point to the right IP and port on your local network. Be aware of the security issues this may bring though.

Soon, as Canadian weather goes to hell, I will get back to the workbench and play around my little projects — one of them being the new skin I’ve silently pushed on this blog.

In all honesty, I have not really tested it in older Explorer versions because all my main computers have all sinuously been converted to Macs. Because I’m using CSS shadows, rounded corners and transparency statements that aren’t supported in Internet Explorer 7 and down, I can bet many things look odd. Consider this a work in progress!

This skin was one of the first designs I’ve completed apart from the ones I do at work. Mostly because I can’t come up with something I find worthy of The Music Tank, but also because I’ve let myself being boxed in corporate guidelines, I’ve been banging my head consistently against a wall for a while now in website designs.

I like how this one turned out though and it had the thumbs up from friends, which is a big plus it has for itself.

Of the new features introduced with the skin is a page displaying my lifestream. I tried using wordpress plugins at first, but it didn’t quite do what I wanted so I ended up regrouping all my web feeds in Yahoo Pipes and then displaying what they generated with jQuery.

Stay tuned for updates on projects and new posts on the blog in the near future. I have a few drafts waiting for me to finish up and publish.

I’m out!

Installation did not go smoothly mostly because of the disappointing internal error reporting capabilities implanted in TorrentFlux. The logs and error messages should be more precise like the ones printed in the Apache logs. From the searches I did on the interwebs, I seem to have bumped in an easy to fix, though still much too common, issue.

If QManager is not running (PID: ‘nothing’ in the admin logs) or if the torrents do not download, make sure all the paths in TorrentFlux’s configuration do not have spaces in them. That goes for the download directory and for the paths to the multiple BitTornado files. Obviously, make sure you installed the prerequisites like Python and Curl and double check your php configuration file also.

If you had already added torrents to the queue, you may have to delete and add them back using the web interface. This is because the path will have changed without TorrentFlux noticing.

My friend has a iPod that stopped playing the mp3s it holds. The proprietary Mac and Microsoft software he normally uses, like the obvious iTunes or other iPod rippers of sorts, did not recognize his iPod either.

I had a hunch Ubuntu would have something to offer to save his music collection. While I was expecting to have to do a few console tricks, turns out the included media software read and fetched the mp3s off his iPod without any problems.

The only thing we haven’t tried yet was to actually try and ‘reset’ the iPod using the open source platform. My guess is that while I could get his mp3s back, we were going to have to return the songs to the iPod using iTunes in the end.

Because the process of saving the files on my Ubuntu box, sending them over to my Mac and re-include them to the freshly wipe iPod through iTunes would have been too lengthy, my friend wanted to try a few other things first. At least now we have a back up solution, though.

Feels good to be a nerd with social skills.

You do have to let it go at some point though: just like one chooses to trust your Mom & Pop’s local merchants won’t duplicate your credit card while scanning them under the counter, you have to expect websites to treat your private information respectfully.

Amazon just sent me an alert saying another user tried to make purchases with my credit card, which they had previously linked with my account over there. I didn’t expect them to actually make proactive checks like these and was pleasantly surprised.

I have yet to understand when my card information was harvested and if transactions were made on other websites, but at least Amazon’s suspicion will be noticed by my credit card provider.

Totally awesome.

Now, I know I could be posting this news because there’s still 2 hours left before the show starts… but I know people don’t care about what I need to report so I just won’t be doing anything about it.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo

I had the preconceived notion that BootCamp would spoof Microsoft’s installer into thinking there is only one hard-drive using up the manually allocated space. I also expected BootCamp to somehow protect OSX’s files using special user file rights or methods that would protect it from the Microsoft installer. Windows Setup found 3 partitions (wtf?) that I went on deleting carelessly. Just for the record, I really think this is my fault in a obvious lack of paying attention to what I was doing.

Fortunately, I’m the happy owner of Time Capsule and Leopard so my whole Mac was backed up to the minute. Thing is, in all the excitement that comes with mistakenly wiping off your drive, I had forgot I could use that backup.

In a nice implementation of their solution, Apple noticed I had a Time Capsule running during Leopard’s installation process and asked me to use the backup it had found. Things went very smoothly afterwards. After a long wait, all my stuff was back where it had been before my mistake. I only had to change the file system from NTFS to whatever Mac uses previously in the process.

Apart for the wireless not working easily with my Xbox 360 (which in the end is Microsoft’s fault) and sometimes having connection hiccups I really only have good words for my Time Capsule.

While the Kravitz show didn’t really spark any kind of interest, I did spend a few minutes around the video streaming service looking around for stuff I would actually enjoy.

For something obviously “Microsoft” and actively targeting a wide audience, they kind of have a nice choice of mainstream artists.

Notably, you can stream the Smashing Pumpkins and Chris Cornell — which mostly does Soundgarden songs — among established artists like Elton John.

Services like these are nice because things are neatly grouped and bow-tied, but unfortunately it’s not making any effort of posting content that would allow for musical discovery. It’s a service that brings them money first and foremost and the showcased artists are filtered accordingly… and that will always seem inevitable for giant portal websites like MSN.