Dienstag, 4. Januar 2011

other Software

I am currently developing an android app that will show the currently used network bandwith in the status bar as well as keeping track of your daily/weekly/monthly used traffic. My initial motivation to set up this blog was to promote this and any future apps. But now this blog is set up and I have no mobile app to show yet, so my first post will be about something else I made a while ago.

If you own more than one computer you will probably run into a problem regarding having your personal files available on all of them. When I ran into that problem I bought myself a consumer grade NAS called LinkStation Live (TM). Now I don't want to do any promotion on the producer's behalf, actually I think the read/write performance of this thing is rather poor (less than 10MB/sec either way) but it came at a reasonably price and has some nice features like a builtin DNLA server (to be able to watch movies/listen to music stored on the device) and BitTorrent client (to download, erm, Linux distributions). Now the BitTorrent Client itself is again not the greatest, most importantly it lacks DHT support, but it works for torrents with trackers that are not mostly down and this lets you save a lot of energy by shutting down your power hungry PC and letting the LinkStation do the downloading.

The LS BT client lets you add torrents either from URL or from a .torrent file via its web interface:


Both methods are rather cumbersome, because adding from an URL does not allways work and both methods require you to do multiple steps:
1. copy link location/save torrent
2. open client web interface
3. paste url/choose .torrent file

What I wanted was something more along the lines of
1. Click link - DONE

So that's what I made, a program that takes a .torrent file as an argument and sends it to the LinkStation and gives some feedback, e.g.


and



Just link .torrent files to the executable in the browser of your choice and voila - one click adding of torrents. The application is called Torrent2LS and you can get it here. If you have trouble compiling it or just can't be bothered write me a mail, I'll send you the binary.