How To: Monitor Your Internet Bandwidth Usage
Knowing how many gigabytes a month you’re using can be important if you have a metered internet connection, or your ISP measures your bandwidth and charges you if you go over. I know many Universities in the US have implemented bandwidth-overage charges (which students decry as unfair and stifling) to help combat bittorrent P2P filesharing, which will sap even a wide broadband connection. So, whatever your reason, you may want to see what applications are using bandwidth on your PC. The following instructions are for Windows XP / Vista.
The solution is to download and install NetLimiter 2 Monitor, a free application for bandwidth monitoring. If you like it, and want the ability to shape your internet traffic (limit the bandwidth used per application), you’ll need to pony up and buy the full version. Note that it uses the Win PCAP libraries to capture internet traffic, you may need to install them if you don’t already have them.
The main monitoring tab shows you how much you’ve uploaded and downloaded per application, in real time. For example, in my screenshot I refreshed the firefox tab I was working on, so you see Firefox using 99% of the activity. Steam, a gaming platform from Valve, is always chittering to their servers, so you see a .01 kbs from them.
The statistics tab is where it gets useful, telling me I’ve downloaded 95 GB this month, and uploaded 49 GB. You can also click on an application or time period and get detailed statistics across either of those dimensions. Fantastic!
New Facebook Design Preview
If you hurry over to new.facebook.com you can see a Beta version of their new design (Pulse says they took it down, but they haven’t for me). It’s interesting, because while it’s definitely going in the right direction, it’s nowhere near complete or solid. It is unusual for a company to publicly “try out” their design work, but Facebook is the first of a new breed. Anyway, here’s my take on things, starting with the new “home page”, your wall:
The new wall page, the first page you see when logging in
- The new “All Posts / Wall Posts / Posts by Me” filters are nice.
- Only three posted items in the right bar? It should have at least 10.
- Posted items have a thumbnail and text; without the text, they are mostly blank space.
- There is a ton of blank space between the footer and chat bar!
The new info profile page, tells you about you
- The edit information button renders wrong.
- The “fan pages” have too much blank space with the vertical layout!
The photos page has the best layout
- The photos page is perfect, the spacing is great. There’s little wasted space here!
Note also that on a wide monitor, there is just a huge amount of blank space to the sides of each page. Also, Mashable has their own “New Facebook” review; they conclude stuff isn’t “working as I’d expect.”
John McCain Not Eligible To Be President
The law is quite clear–John McCain is not eligible to president. The New York Times, in A Hint of New Life to a McCain Birth Issue, explains:
A law professor at the University of Arizona has concluded that neither Mr. McCain’s birth in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone nor the fact that his parents were American citizens is enough to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the president must be a “natural-born citizen.”
The analysis, by Prof. Gabriel J. Chin, focused on a 1937 law that has been largely overlooked in the debate over Mr. McCain’s eligibility to be president. The law conferred citizenship on children of American parents born in the Canal Zone after 1904, and it made John McCain a citizen just before his first birthday. But the law came too late, Professor Chin argued, to make Mr. McCain a natural-born citizen.
Essentially, to become a “natural born citizen” you can either be born in the United States (John MCCain was born in the illegally occupied Canal Zone in Panama), or to be covered by a law enacted at the time of one’s birth. The law in effect when McCain was born would grant citizenship to babies born to American parents “out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States.” However, while the Canal zone was out of the limits of the United States, it was not out of the jurisdiction of the US.
However, in a statement to the AP, John McCain said:
Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona when it was a territory, Arizona was a territory, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And there’s no doubt about that. And it was researched again in 2000. It’s very clear that (the idea that) an American born in a territory of the United States whose father is serving in the military would not be eligible for the presidency of the United States is certainly not something our founding fathers envisioned. I am confident that the United States Supreme Court, should it ever address the issue, would agree.’
If John McCain can be president, then Arnold Schwarzenegger can run too. Of course he’s going to say it’s legal for him to become president, given he’s running. Is anyone interested in preventing him from gaining presidency using this legal technicality?
iPhone 3G Yellow Discolored Screen Problem
We’ve written previously about the easily broken iPhone screens, and it seems like the iPhone 3G will be no exception to the display problems. According to Bob Borchers, the senior director of product marketing for the iPhone, the “yellow screen” phenomenon is “because the screen’s color temperature has been purposely altered to produce warmer, more natural tones, sharper images, and deeper blacks. The 1st gen iPhone screens appeared colder and less defined.” Unfortunately as you’ll see, the new iPhone 3G’s screens look worse:
Apparently updating to the latest firmware (connect your iphone to Itunes, run a restore, and get the newer firmware 5A347) can fix this problem in most units, so give it a try if you’re experiencing a yellow screen. So fixing the yellow screen problem should be fairly easy.
Update: Apple Insider has screenshots of what a proper iPhone 3G should look like; the yellowing is not supposed to be as bad as above.
Update 2: Wireless Info has done some color testing, which shows the new iPhone screens are brighter and slightly warmer than before. The warmth appears to vary with the backlight strength. Mat Honan has a Flickr photoset which shows the difference more clearly:
Iran’s Photoshopped Missiles
This is hilarious; Iran has apparently photoshopped an extra missile into the photograph they released to the press about their recent missile test:
As news spread across the world of Iran’s provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo was used on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.
This is the image that ran in the papers and has recently been retracted for being “apparently digitally altered” by Iranian state media. Agence France-Presse said the fourth missile “has apparently been added in digital retouch to cover a grounded missile that may have failed during the test.” Here I’ve blown up a portion of the smoke so you can clearly see the ’shop:
