python setup.py build –compiler=mingw32 install

But what if you want to install using easy_install or pip? or you want to use a pip requirements.txt file in a virtualenv? I have the solution for you.

First: Install MinGw including gcc, make and all the other regular goodies you would have on a Unix system.

Second: Add your \MinGw\bin directory to your path.

Third: If you are using an older version of Python (pre 2.6.6) you will have to manually set your HOME environment variable to your user directory.

Finally: In your C:\Users\Admin (where Admin is your Windows user account, Windows XP users, adjust to \Documents and Settings\ appropriately), create a text file called pydistutils.cfg and paste in the following options:

[build]
compiler = mingw32

That’s it! Enjoy using the magical goodness of pip and easy_install on packages like Twisted, SimpleJson (with speedups) and postgres


#!/bin/bash
BIND=127.0.0.1:9000
USER=www-data
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=15
PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=1000
PHP_CGI=/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi
PHP_CGI_NAME=`basename $PHP_CGI`
PHP_CGI_ARGS="- USER=$USER PATH=/usr/bin PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=$PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=$PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS $PHP_CGI -b $BIND"
RETVAL=0
start() {
echo -n "Starting PHP FastCGI: "
start-stop-daemon --quiet --start --background --chuid "$USER" --exec /usr/bin/env -- $PHP_CGI_ARGS
RETVAL=$?
echo "$PHP_CGI_NAME."
}
stop() {
echo -n "Stopping PHP FastCGI: "
killall -q -w -u $USER $PHP_CGI
RETVAL=$?
echo "$PHP_CGI_NAME."
}
case "$1" in
start)
start
;;
stop)
stop
;;
restart)
stop
start
;;
*)
echo "Usage: php-fastcgi {start|stop|restart}"
exit 1
;;
esac
exit $RETVAL


Nginx.conf from

http://elasticdog.com/2008/02/howto-install-wordpress-on-nginx/


>>> x = {'a':1, 'b':2}
>>> x
{'a': 1, 'b': 2}
>>> y = list(x.values())
>>> y
[(1), (2)


Your router is typically your only device with a direct connection to the internet. All your other devices connect to the internet through the router. Webpages on the internet cant really tell the difference between your computer or someone else’s in your house. The router takes care of figuring out which of your networked computers requested what from the internet.

Static DHCP

Each of you computers attached to the router is typically assigned an IP address from the router itself through a protocol called DHCP. These IP addresses are internal and only accessible on your local network. This is what allows you to just plug in your computers to your router and them work automagically. Your network settings are probably the same as this which is the default configuration for most operating systems. We will modify settings on the router so we dont have to change anything on any of your computers.

The Important Part of this Article: The problem with relying on DHCP to assign IP addresses to your devices is that some times the IP addresses assigned to a device will change. This is a problem for a device like the DNS-323 because we need to use the IP address for configuring BitTorrent software, using the IP address to connect to the DNS-323 etc.

The solution is a setting that can be found on decent routers (I own a Linksys WRT54-GL with Tomato Firmware) called Static DHCP. This allows you to create a setting on the router that will assign devices on your network an IP address that does not change. This is done by assigning a MAC address (the hardware identifier on network interfaces) to a specific IP address.  It’s allot less complicated then it may sound.

Finding the MAC addresses of your devices is not difficult. To find the MAC address of you DNS-323 you must connect to it from the web interface. The MAC address can be found on the Status page. Once you have it, go to the Static DHCP settings in your router settings (it will be different than above but try to find it) and link the DNS-323 MAC to an IP address on your network.

Now you should be able to connect to your DNS-323 from an IP address that does not change every time the NAS is rebooted!

Transmission comes with a fantastic web interface built in. The web interface is sometimes referred to as Clutch, which was the name of the web interface project before it was included officially with Transmission.

While transmission-daemon is running on the DNS-323, you can access the web interface by:

http://<DNS-323 IP>:9091 or in my specific case http://192.168.1.5:9091. It is important that you assign you DNS-323 a static IP (easiest to do on the router) so this IP address does not change.

Transmission Remote .NET

This interface is for Windows machines and is very similar to operating uTorrent. The webpage for this project can be found at http://code.google.com/p/transmission-remote-dotnet/.

From the settings menu, add the IP of the DNS-323 and you should see all the torrents running in the familiar interface.

Transmission Console Interface

There is a nice and easy to use console interface available for use with Transmission. The webpage for this project can be found at http://github.com/fagga/transmission-remote-cli. Download it here http://github.com/fagga/transmission-remote-cli/raw/master/transmission-remote-cli.py.

The Console Interface is a single Python script that can be run on a remote or local console. First you must install a few dependencies. Python and several modules are required. If you are installing the script to run on the DNS-323, these are the following Debian packages that are required:

apt-get install python
apt-get install python-simplejson
apt-get install python-geoip
apt-get install python-ndas

You can use the interface by typing:

python transmission-remote-cli.py –c <DNS-323 IP>

Keys to control torrents are pretty intuitive and the options are labeled within the program.

From your desktop computer, visit http://www.transmissionbt.com/download.php. You are not looking for an official package; you are looking for the source code. Right click on the bz2 version and click ‘Copy Link Location’. SSH to your DNS-323 and using an unprivileged account, use wget to save the source code on the device (anywhere).

Example: wget http://download.transmissionbt.com/files/transmission-2.04.tar.bz2

Extract the source code: tar -jxvf  transmission-2.04.tar.bz2

Change dir to the source and build the program:

cd transmission-2.04

./configure –enable-daemon

make

As root or by using sudo:

make install

Transmission should now be successfully installed.

Configuring Transmission for Remote Control

To configure Transmission we will first launch it so it will create a default configuration. This includes a dirctory to store settings, torrent resume files, etc.

As a non-root user:

transmission-daemon –g /mnt/HD_a2/Volume_1/.transmission-daemon

Leave Transmission running for half a minute so it has time to start-up and create the files. To shutdown Transmission, from the command line:

pidof transmission-daemon | xargs  kill

Or if it’s easier to remember, use two commands:

pidof transmission-daemon
kill <number from pidof command>

Now we can edit the default Transmission configuration. It is located in/mnt/HD_a2/Volume_1/.transmission-daemon/settings.json (or Volume_0 depending on which HDD bay your using)

You can view the configuration options available fromhttp://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/ConfigurationParameters. The options we are primarily interested in are those that will enable remote operation of Transmission.

In settings.json add/modify the following:

“rpc-enabled”: true,
“rpc-bind-address”: “0.0.0.0″,
“rpc-port”: 9091,
“rpc-authentication-required”: false,
“rpc-username”: “”,
“rpc-password”: “”,
“rpc-whitelist-enabled”: true,
“rpc-whitelist”: “127.0.0.1,192.168.*.*”,
The configuration above does not require a username and password but clients may only connect from a local network. To be able to connect and control your torrents from an internet connection, add a * to the whitelist, a username and password and you must port forward port 9091 on your router to forward to the IP of you DNS-323. If you add a password it will be encrypted in the settings file the next time Transmission is opened.

Configuring Transmission to automatically download Torrents from a watch directory

Transmission has a built in feature (finally, it required a script before) to automatically add .torrent files to the Download queue when they are saved to a specific ‘watched directory’. This will allow you to download a .torrent file from your desktop web browser, save it to the watched folder and forget about it! Transmission will add the Torrent and start the download. These are the settings you need:

“watch-dir”: “/mnt/HD_b2/TorrentWatch”,
“watch-dir-enabled”: true

Make sure you create the directory and that it is readable by the user you run Transmission as.

After you have added these settings to settings.json, save the file and start Transmission.

transmission-daemon –g /mnt/HD_a2/Volume_1/.transmission-daemon

You can now save .torrent files directly to the TorrentWatch folder and Transmission will soon after start downloading them. For convenience, you may find setting up a Firefox plugin like FavLoc useful which allows you to select the download location without having to browse through multiple directories.  Find it at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2140. I set this up for my wife and it works great.

Perform mass extraction of downloaded RAR archives (Experimental)

Just recently I spent a few hours and started to work on a script to automatically extract all my torrent downloads. Extraction on the DNS-323 is painfully slow due to its slow processor speed. Extracting many large files (TV shows, movies) manually is a long and boring process. I have made it one step simpler (and will continue to improve the process as time permits).

You may find the project page and monitor updates at http://bitbucket.org/markstahler/auto-extract-python/. The latest version of the script can always be found http://bitbucket.org/markstahler/auto-extract-python/src/tip/auto-extract.py.

Currently, the script takes one argument, a directory which contains archives you wish to extract. The script will recursively search for any .rar archives and extract them one at a time until they are all extracted. Each directory that contains an archive (only one archive per directory is supported) is marked with a hidden file named .unrared. This file will cause the script to ignore the archive within if that specific folder is scanned again. This means that you can safely run this script, pointing it to your main download directory whenever your downloads are fully complete. It will extract your downloads and you are able to move the extracted contents (.avi, .mkv or whatever) wherever you wish and the script will not re-extract them. This allows you to see the original downloaded files as long as you wish.

Sample usage:

python auto-extract.py /mnt/HD_a2/Volume_1/downloads

This will recurse my downloads directory unextracting every archive found. Default behavior is to overwrite files if a .unrared file is not present. You can safely run this on your downloads directory but be warned, it may take a very long time depending on what type of files you have. The script took several hours to complete on my DNS-323 extracting many seasons of TV shows in Xvid format.

-A fully stable and remotely operable BitTorrent client on your DNS-323. I will show you how to setup 1) A remote web interface and 2) A Windows desktop application that is very similar to uTorrent that can remotely control and monitor your torrents.

-Have your DNS323 download torrent files for you with a single click and without using anything but the Firefox web browser.

-Have your DNS323 automatically extract RAR archives after they are downloaded.

-Store and maintain your torrent downloads on the DNS 323.

-Stream videos and movies from you DNS 323 to your Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 (or similarly compatible device).

Introduction:

This guide will walk you through the steps to turn you Dlink DNS 323 into a fully functional Linux server with the capability to download Torrents extremely easily (using the Transmission BitTorrent Client), remotely administer those torrents via a web interface (Transmissions built in Clutch interface) and a uTorrent like desktop app for Windows (Transmission Remote .NET).

Required Skills and Software

-Set your home router to assign your DNS-323 a static IP

-Basic Linux command line skills

-SSH client (Putty on Windows or OSX comes with one, available from iTerm)

Debian Linux

To run an advanced setup like this, you must install Debian Linux on your DNS-323. Debian is a full operating system that will run in a self contained environment. It will note replace or overwrite anything from Dlink and you may remove it at anytime. You will still be able to access the Dlink web interface just as before.

The Debian installation takes 5-10 minutes as there is a fun-plug package that automates all of the work for you. Debian is installed in a chroot environment which means it is completely separated from the rest of the DNS-323 software.

For Fonz’s Fun Plug Users Only (If you are using an unmodified DNS-323 skip to the next step)

If you (like I was  originally) are currently running Fonz’s Fun Plug you will first have to remove it before you can install Debian. Fonz’s Fun Plug is a nice system but is not as powerful or as up to date as a full Debian Linux system.

To remove Fonz’s Fun Plug, delete the funplug directory in /mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug. It is possible it can be done via Windows Explorer (or whatever) if you changed its permissions/owner, otherwise do it from the command line. I will assume you know how to do it as you install it in the first palce.

(Please be careful using rm -rf, you can destroy a Linux system with one wrong delete)

rm -rf /mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug
chmod -R 777 /mnt/HD_a2/ffp
rm -rf /mnt/HD_a2/Nas_prog

Reboot the DNS-323 and delete the /mnt/HD_a2/ffp directory.

Debian Installation

You are now ready to install Debian. This is very simple using the Debnas Fun Plug package. Fun Plug is a mechanism that comes with the DNS-323 that allows users to boot custom scripts. This allows us to boot to a chrooted operating system so easily. You can find the DNS-323 Debian Installer at http://sourceforge.net/projects/debnas/. At the time of this writing 0.5 is the latest version. Version 0.5 installs an older version of Debian which is unfortunate but Debian itself provides a way to easily update itself to the latest version available.

Download and extract the Debian Installer package to Volume_1 of the DNS-323. SSH to the DNS-323 an extract the DebNas package (tar -jxvf  debnas-0.5.tar.bz2 or by using 7-zip from Windows Explorer). There should now be linux.tar and the fun_plug file in the Volume directory now.

Reboot the DNS-323 and Debian will install automatically. Installation will take several minutes. SSH will become enabled when the device eventually boots. Be patient, the DNS-323 is roughly the equivalent to a 10 year old computer. As awesome as it is, it’s slow as hell. SSH to the 323. The default login credentials are:

Username: root
Password: 12345678

Root is the equivalent of Administrator on other types of systems. You can do a lot of damage using the root account if you don’t know what you’re doing. Create a new unprivileged account and change the root password. You can add a new user by using the useradd command. Don’t forget to change the root password with the passwd command. You can find a pretty good command line tutorial here http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/.

Upgrade Debian

Now you have a full Linux environment on the DNS-323 with all of Debian’s software packages at your disposal. Most Linux systems have a software manager that allows you to easily install common software. Debians system is among the best.

The first step is to upgrade to Debian Lenny, a more recent stable version of the operating system. As root, edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/etch.list, replacing the word etch with lenny. I also changed the mirror url to a North American mirror rather than the German one by removing the de. in the url. You may also rename the filename from etch.list to lenny.list if you feel so inclined.

Now we need to update the repository packages listing and upgrade to lenny. You may have GPG issues which you can resolve by following the guide here :

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

This will take a while to download and then upgrade. When it is done reboot Debian. I had to reboot using the command ‘reboot -f’. When Debian comes back up, it will be running Lenny. When it comes back up, update to make sure everything is current.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

This will likely take a very long time and require some interaction. It is a good idea to reboot the system (although likely unnecessary) after a system wide upgrade. Type reboot from the command line.

Installing New Software

As mentioned previously, Debian has a fantastic software manager. Most of the software you need can be installed automatically for you. The only downside to this is often, software you like and use often is not updated to the latest version. The only thing we will install manually however is our BitTorrent client.

To install a software package use the following command. You may find many tutorials on the internet about using apt-get.

apt-get install <package name>

The apt-get system supports dependencies as many Linux programs require other programs to operate properly. Apt-get has a dependency system and should resolve and install all the required packages for you.

List of Packages to install

As root:

apt-get install automake
apt-get install build-essential
apt-get install sudo
apt-get install wget

These will install the tools we need to be able to install the latest versions of Transmission, straight from the developers website.

I would also suggest intstalling the Network Time Daemon. It will keep the time on you DNS-323 in sync with servers on the internet. For some reason the time on my DNS-323 always gets reset or is wrong without it.

apt-get install ntp
/etc/init.d/ntpd start

(It has been a year since I installed my original DNS-323 system. I cannot remember the exact packages I installed to get everything to operate. If I am missing something essential from the list please comment below and I will add it. Thanks.)

Expect an update very soon with a new guide regarding DNS323, Debian and Transmission BitTorrent.

1. Omnibar

In order for me to ditch Chrome (and I did try a few times), I had to have the single bar for search and urls. It is such a basic concept. When I need to fix something on my wife’s computer and need to use the web, everytime I type a search into the url bar and I get the annoying OpenDNS error message explaining that the website I am trying to visit is down. Ugh.

Omnibar is the single bar solution for Firefox. It is very convenient. Here is a screenshot incase you have not used Google Chrome or cant picture what I am talking about. Notice the small search bar in the top right is gone? Use the one bar for everything!

2. AutoPager

So you visit many websites in a day, how much time does it take clicking through pages of forum topics or of blog posts of a recently found site as you scan for relevant content before you add the author to RSS or Twitter? Autopager takes care of the pages for you. This extension is fantastic as it loads and appends the next page for you to the bottom of your current page. All you as the user must do (if the site your visiting has an AutoPager setup and tons of them do) is scroll down. When AutoPager recognizes that you are 80% to the bottom of a page it will load the next page in the background and append the contents within the current page you are at.

3. Mr Uptime

This has become my most recent favourite. Familiar situation: Visiting a web page that you know exists with the url you have but the website is not loading? How do you remember to come back? Keep the tab open and manually refresh? Not anymore. When a website is down, Mr Pingdom displays a small bar where you can add a ‘Watch’ with a single click. The extension will continuously check in the background for you and alert you, opening a new tab with the now working web site.

The Mr Uptime website has screenshots and a better description of the other features.

email.yml with no other related changes in environment.yml using Rails 2.2.2

production:

delivery_method: :smtp
smtp_settings:
enable_starttls_auto: :true
address: smtp.gmail.com
port: 587
domain: GMAILDOMAIN.com
authentication: :plain
tls: :true
user_name: "EMAIL@YOURGMAILDOMAIN.com"
password: "YOURPASS"

If you are setting up Redmine, there is a nice feature under Administration > Settings > Email Notifications > and in the very bottom right corner of the page, a “Send a Test Email” link.

EDIT: I no longer use the rTorrent + wTorrent combination, there were fatal bugs in rTorrent which caused it to crash after a short period of time (5 hrs – several days??). I use Transmission + .NET Remote + Transmission Web Interface. If you want a guide for this one (using Debian and built from source; a Funplug installer is currently available here), let me know in the comments.

This is a quick guide to getting rTorrent running on your 323 with the wTorrent web interface.

There are several ways that one could get this working in theory but this is the only method that worked properly. The fun_plug custom rtorrent package did not work properly at all nor did the ipkg one work with xmlrpc enabled (which is required for wTorrent).

To run rTorrent with wTorrent, you must install Debian Linux on your 323. This takes 5-10 minutes and there is a fun plug package that automates all of the work for you. Debian is installed in a chroot environment which means it is completely seperated and self contained from the rest of the 323 software.

If you (like I was) were running Fonz’s Fun Plug you will first have to remove it. This is done by deleting the funplug directory in /mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug. It is possible it can be done via Windows Explorer (or whatever) if you changed its permissions/owner, otherwise do it from the command line.

(Please be careful using rm -rf, you can destroy a Linux system with one wrong delete)

rm -rf /mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug
chmod -R 777 /mnt/HD_a2/ffp
rm -rf /mnt/HD_a2/Nas_prog

Reboot the NAS and delete the /mnt/HD_a2/ffp directory.

You are now ready to install Debian. This is very simple using the Debnas fun plug package. You can find it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/debnas/. At the time of this writing 0.5 is the latest version.

Download and extract the package to Volume_1 of the 323 (tar -jxf in /mnt/HD_a2/). There should now be linux.tar and the fun_plug in the root of the drive now.

Reboot the 323 and Debian will install, this will take several minutes. SSH will be enabled when the device boots. SSH to the 323, the default root password is 12345678. Change the password immediately with the passwd command.

Now you have a full Linux environment on the 323 with all the repository packages at your disposal. The first step is to upgrade to Debian Lenny, a newer stable version of the operating system. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/etch.list, replacing the word etch with lenny. I also changed the mirror url to a North American mirror rather than the German one by removing the de. in the url. You may also rename the filename from etch.list to lenny.list if you feel so inclined.

Now we need to update the repository packages listing and upgrade to lenny. You may have GPG issues which you can resolve by following the guide here :

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

This will take a while to download and then upgrade. When it is done reboot Debian. I had to reboot using the command ‘reboot -f’. When Debian comes back up, it will be running Lenny. When it comes back up, update to make sure everything is current.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Now we have a reasonably current Linux system to play with. Time to install rTorrent, lighttpd, wTorrent and all the dependencies.

apt-get install <package name>

Apt-get should resolve and install all the package dependencies for you.

List of Packages:

rtorrent
lighttpd
screen
php5
php5-cgi
php5-cli
php5-sqlite
php5-xmlrpc
libxmlrpc-c3
subversion
// Packages I dont think are required but installed anyways
automake
build-essential
libapache2-mod-scgi
libapache2-mod-php5
libapache2-mod-fastcgi

Dont worry about lighttp complaining that it cant be started because port 80 is in use, we will change it.

First we will modify the rTorrent settings. One thing that I do that you may also like is that I store my rtorrent settings on the NAS volume 1 and link it to /home/<user>/.rtorrent.rc

Add the following line to your .rtorrent.rc

scgi_port = localhost:5000

usually this line is already in the config and just needs to be uncommented. For this option to work, rTorrent needs to have RPC support built into the program. The rTorrent available from apt does but it is an older version.

Now edit /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Under the server.modules section, add the following lines at the end before the ).

“mod_fastcgi”,
“mod_scgi”

Change where the server stores webpages:

server.document-root       = “/mnt/HD_a2/www/pages/”

You also need to change the port the webserver runs on. 80 is used by the dlink admin page:
server.port               = 8080

Add the following section to the config:

## php support
fastcgi.server = ( “.php” => ((
“bin-path”  => “/usr/bin/php-cgi”,
“socket”    => “/tmp/php-cgi.socket”,
“max-procs” => 2
)
)
)

## enable communication between lighttp and rtorrent
scgi.server = (
“/RPC2″ => # RT_DIR
( “127.0.0.1″ =>
(
“host” => “127.0.0.1″, # Ip where rtorrent is listening
“port” => 5000, # Port specified in .rtorrent.rc
“check-local” => “disable”
)
)
)

NOTE: You can change the other settings to your hearts content. I changed the directories for my logs etc, I leave this up to you.

Now lighttp and php are configured properly. Lets make the web home on your 323 volume.

mkdir /mnt/HD_a2/www
mkdir /mnt/HD_a2/www/pages

echo “<html><body>TEST<?php phpinfo( ); ?></body></html>” > /mnt/HD_a2/www/pages/index.php

Start up the web server by:

/etc/inid.d/lighttpd start

Enter the URL including the correct IP for you 323 and you should see the PHP info version page
http://192.168.1.5:8080/

If everything works all you need to do is setup nstall wTorrent into a directory under your webserver home.

Download wTorrent from http://www.wtorrent-project.org/trac/ch … ormat=zip. Unzip the archive and move the /wtorrent/ directory to /mnt/HD_a2/www/pages/wtorrent. chmod -R 777 wtorrent.

Point your browser to http://<nas ip>:8080/wtorrent/install.php and follow the prompts. After installation is complete, start rTorrent and browse to http://<nas ip>:8080/wtorrent/.

It is hard to believe that four years ago I began my undergraduate studies at  University here in Ontario, Canada. This month I am graduating with an Honours Bachelors of Science in Computer Science and Business Administration and now looking for work in the Greater Toronto Area. In order to graduate with a Science and an Arts major, I had to attend four years straight including summer classes.

As a result of my graduation I am available for work! For the past two years I have worked part time for my school doing Windows, Linux and Solaris systems administration. I setup a new system (on new hardware) and maintain the servers that are currently used for academic support in the Computer Science Department, including web, development and database servers or anything else a need arises for. During school I have contributed to a couple Open Source projects including a popular multi-platform BitTorrent client as well as multiple web related side projects, mostly developed in PHP.  Prior to starting school I was in sales, attaining recognition of sales figures in my district and even attaining top 10% of salespeople in the country for two back to back quarters.

My passion and spare time for the past year has been starting the development of my own project, a desktop/web app that I have been wanting to build to improve the Microsoft Windows experience. About a year ago, after finding a mentor and recruiting four of the most skilled students at school, we started work designing and writing our app. I dont want to reveal specifics yet as we hope to have a public beta of our app in the summer. I have developed the desktop portion of our app and did the initial work on our application server (C# and WCF) not to mention all web/development server maintainance and configuration (which unfortunately almost equals development time).

I am looking for a .NET position developing desktop or web applications. I am well versed in C# .NET and confident in C++, Java and Python. I am very familiar with all common development tools and paradigms, taking an active part in the .NET community. If you are looking to hire an extremely promising and motivated young developer, I am available next month for remote or office work in the GTA. Send me an email (markstahler a@t gmail.com), Twitter message or use the contact form and I will send you my resume. I will also be attending the HackLab.TO Job Fair this Saturday in Toronto.

AutoStandby – I use my Blackberry alot, as you can imagine. One of the first things I did was buy a larger battery on eBay which gives me about 30% more life. Still wasnt enough. After purchasing this app which is deffinitely worth the $6 USD, I saw a greater improvement than the larger battery. Although the app has had some glitches in my experience, this one I can’t live without.

BerryBuzz – I picked this one up last week as I have wanted the functionality this app offers since I got my Bold. With this app you can change the colour of the alert LED depending on what caused the alert. Now without even taking my BB out of standby I can tell if I have a new email (and from which account), a SMS, Calendar entry etc. Here are some screens, all settings are done via standard options screen.

BBFileScout – This is BY FAR the best file manager program out on the Blackberry. I have tried half a dozen of them and none met my expectations until just the other week I found this gold mine. This is as close to Windows Explorer or Finder as you can get. When you click on a file, FileScout is smart enough to recognize the file type and open it with the appropriate application. Clicking a .doc file will open it in Docs to Go. What a concept! I cant believe other so called file managers havent included this feature. FileScout also includes zip support, text file viewing and more. This is absolutely essential. The author hopes to keep this app free and asks that you make a small donation on his website.

Tetris – This is a free Tetris clone made by a member of the Crackberry community, Papped. It has music from the original game and is great for when you have a few minutes to kill. Works like tetris! Donations are accepted and encouraged on his homepage.

QSMS – This little app is great, it creates a hotkey fot the letter Q to bring up the ‘Compose SMS’ screen. Invaluble.

QuickPull – The application simulates a battery pull on your device without you actually having to remove the battery. If you are having software or hardware/gps issues you can run this to reset the device. This simulates a battery pull which is different then a reboot – Alt + Right Shift + Del.

Capture It – This is a handy program if you ever want to take screenshots of your Blackberry. Many of the default applications have a ‘Capture It’ menu option to take a screenshot which is put in your media folder. For other apps, you can set one of your side keys to ‘Capture It’ which will launch the program whos only purpose is to take a screen capture.

I reference Lifehacker and the post Top 10 Free Video Converters. You can find a list of software there. I myself prefer Clone2Go Free version which is demonstrated in the screencast. Hope this helps!

I first heard about REXwireless while browsing the Crackberry forums. A few users were talking about productivity applications and highly recommended the applications from REXwireless. After checking out their website and finding there was a fully functional free trial, I thought it couldnt hurt to try the software myself and see if I was missing anything. I am glad I did. I will explain each of the products and how they are more useful than the stock RIM apps.

Todo Matrix: This is an advanced to do list application, greatly expanding on the capabilities of what the regular RIM Todo application does. Todo Matrix allows and requires organizing your todo items into categories and sub categories (called drawers). You can easily view items from each category or subcategory, view tasks by due date, overdue, priority etc.

Todo Matrix greatly extends the available status’ available in the stock application. You can place tasks on hold as well as a number of other useful selections and set up to 3 alerts for each task. What I enjoy best about Todo Matrix is that it handles large numbers of tasks efficiently. I no longer just put my high priority tasks in the Todo app and check it every couple days. I put everything I need to get done including reminders about little things that I typically forget about (dishes, recycling, etc). I then check my tasks much more frequently throughout the day and get more done.

Another very nice feature that both Idea and Todo Matrix support is data injection. This feature adds a menu item to your web browser, email, calendar, sms messages etc and allows you to send your selected data, page url, etc automatically to Idea or Todo Matrix without the copy/paste and task switching. This has become a very useful feature as you can easily create a note or todo task containing the information contained in an email or webpage.

Todo Matrix has many advanced features, my favourite being a great search mechanism and the ability to sync and edit tasks on the web via REX Desktop. It also includes task handling methodologies from Stephen Covey and David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’. You can view the list of features here as well as find a trial on their website.

Idea Matrix: This app is very similar to Todo Matrix except it is used for advanced note taking. This has replaced the standard Memopad app for me. It allows categories in the same way as Todo Matrix.

Idea Matrix supports an advanced search function that shows seach matches on the fly as you enter in search phrases. This is an amazing feature that really helps when you start managing a large number of notes. I use a whole section dedicated to keeping a list of peoples names that I am likely to forget. It is awesome that I am able to search these!

Notes can also have alerts associated with them and can be password protected which I found useful for my banking information, which I always like to have in my PDA but am always cautious with. Idea Matrix can also be syncronized to the web and edited with REX Desktop.

Alert Matrix: This becomes essential as the number of incoming emails/sms messages increases to the point where your Blackberry is buzzing or flashing red every 5 minutes. You know those days where you are just tired and turn your Blackberry onto Quiet Profile and turn it upside down? Yeah well if you set up Alert Matrix then you can save yourself from some of those times.

With Alert Matrix you can make profiles for your contacts so that emails/messages from certain people or that satisfy your filters can get a special ring, vibrate or led alert. For those times like where I mentioned above you can also enable filters for the particularly annoying people that send you massive ammounts of email. Alert Matrix will intercept the email and disable the alert before your berry notifies you. FABULOUS. It is also possible to have high priority alerts that can cause your berry to beep/ring whatever even when you have it set to Quiet Profile.

REX Connect: This is a small but useful app. I dont know of any other Blackberry developers other than REX Wireless that offer so many high quality apps. REX Connect gives you menu options to send the contents from Emails, memos, calendar entries, clipboard, address book entries and all the other REX Wireless apps to other applications. The following diagram illustrates:

For example, in my calendar I can select a Meeting entry, press menu and select REX Connect. This opens a small dialog which I can select any of the applications in the above picture. If I choose SMS my contacts pop up and I choose a friend to send a SMS with the calendar entry. REX Connect populates the text message area with the information from the calendar entry, allows me to edit it and send it.

This is another app that you really need to use before you can imagine how useful it might become. Thankfully REX Wireless offers full trials on all their software. They have a detailed website including tons of information about each application including screencasts, white papers on task management and more. From the dealings that I have had with them thus far, their support staff are top notch also.

Conclusion: I have spent alot of time introducing these apps from REXwireless but you really need to give them a try for yourself. They may not seem as intuitive as many other Blackberry apps are at first but once you memorize the shortcuts you will be thankful for the advanced functionality these programs offer.

If you sign up for the trial versions of Idea and/or Todo Matrix be sure you try out the REX Desktop which is a web interface to your data. Nice to be able to quickly copy/paste and enter large pieces of data especially for Idea Matrix.

Bundle and education discounts are available for all of the above mentioned software. I strongly recommend all of these applications if you are looking for more functionality and increased productivity on your Blackberry. Check out the REX Wireless software over at their website for more details.