Free Google Tool Helps Determine if Your ISP is Throttling / Blocking BitTorrent

As I mentioned in a previous post ISP’s are throttling and sometimes completely blocking Torrent services.  I stumbled across a handy tool which helps detect if your ISP is indeed throttling or blocking your torrent uploads/downloads.  They report that a majority of US users being blocked / throttled are in the Cox or Comcast networks.  To run the test go to http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php

Console Killer? OnLive Offers High-End Gaming On Demand

OnLive is launching the world’s highest performance Games On Demand service, instantly delivering the latest high-end titles over home broadband Internet to the TV and entry-level PCs and Macs.  So how is that going to work?  Chances are you have heard the buzz about Cloud Computing.  If you haven’t,  Wikipedia defines it as a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources are provided as a service over the internet.  Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them.

So users of this service don’t need a pricey high-end computer with a top end CPU and video card to run these games since all of the processing power is done at the OnLive game server center (or the cloud).  All you need is an entry level computer.  What the service does require is a high speed internet connection since you need a way to access the OnLive game service center.  This is pretty exciting for gamers out there and probably a little worrisome for Sony, Nintendo and Mircosoft.  Could this be the console killer?  Time will only tell and I am looking forward to hearing reviews on the beta testing this summer.

The service, which is scheduled to go into beta testing this summer promises to offer high end games such as Bioshock, Prince of Persia, Fear 2, Tomb Raider and many more.

For more information on OnLive check out their website.

For more information on Cloud Computing check out Sun Microsystems website.

Western Digital My Book Studio II 2TB Review (WDH2Q20000N)

I backup my PC on a regular basis, but I needed a backup solution for my newly purchased Macbook.  I thought it was  necessary after taking all my photos and music from my PC and loading them on to the Mac.  So after doing some research I decided to go with the Western Digital My Book Studio II.   I was debating on getting a NAS for the Mac but decided it wasn’t really necessary and to go along with that there really hasn’t been a Mac compatible NAS with stellar reviews.  All of them had some drawbacks.  So to save some money I went with the Western Digital; which is Mac and PC compatible. If you are a Windows user looking for a NAS read this post on my favorite NAS. Read more

The Importance of Data Backups: Are You Backing Up Your Data?

Are you backed up? I had a scare recently that I had lost all of my pictures on my computer when none of my photos would open up. It turns out that everything was fine after a reboot, but for a minute I felt the pain of what it would feel like to loose everything. It made me question how I am backing up my data. Today, everyone is storing something important and of value on their computer; whether it is a mid-term paper, family photos/movies, music, emails, or business documents. This makes it that much more important to backup data on a regular basis. Some of you may be backed up already but are you backed up enough? This blog post will explore the options of backing up data for everyone.
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Stream Video/Audio and Download Torrents from a Network Attached Storage (NAS) Device Made Easy

Before you go ripping/downloading your favorite DVD’s and TV Shows to your hard drive you may want to consider an external NAS hard drive. With movies ranging from 600 MB to 12 GB (depending on quality and length) you can fill a computers hard drive extremely fast. I have been in the market for an external hard drive because I want to archive all of my DVD’s to my computer and then have the option to stream them from the external device to my media center (currently the PS3). Read more

What Technology Will Look Like in 2019?!

You may or may not have seen this video floating around on YouTube. But this is what Microsoft envisions the year 2019 to look like. This video was featured at the Wharton Business Technology Conference on February 27th in Philadelphia. Read more

Downloading Torrents Anonymously and Keeping your ISP from Throttling your Bandwidth

I frequently download torrents and I was noticing a downward trend in my download speeds. I used to get speeds of up over 200 Kbs/second and about a week later that same download was going under 50 Kbs/second. I have read numerous articles online about how ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) are throttling back speeds on its users that are downloading torrents. So I looked at the various solutions out there to download torrents in privacy such as block listing and proxy servers but none of them really stopped my ISP from throttling back my speeds. Read more

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