Hard disk usage visualization tool

Ever wondered how you are running out of disk space even when you have a large capacity hard disk. Its very likely that you have bunch of large files that you do not need anymore. Actually, I faced this problem even more because I have a small capacity hard disk. I am almost perpetually short of disk space. So, I have to be very optimal in its usage. Sometimes, I store large files somewhere and forget that they ever existed after the use. One of the things that I keep doing is to use disk cleanup tool in windows and remove temporary files. But that does not reclaim much space beyond few MBs.

One day I was very frustrated that I have to continuously hunt for unwanted files on my machine. When I turned to the net for a tool that helps me in this, I found this nice tool called "WinDirStat" which stands for "Windows directory statistics". Its is a nice tool that quickly gives a map of all the files in the disk. Its visual presentation is very good with color-coding and size-coding. It visually shows the file sizes occupied by files and the directories.

The files will be shown as rectangular boxes and the size of the box represents the relative size of the file. All the files in a directory will be given same color. If you put the cursor on the blocks, it shows the filename etc. With this tool, you can quickly identify the large files/directories in your disk and delete them if they are not needed. Or you can backup the large files and delete them from your disk. You can do some basic operations like opening, deleting, seeing properties etc directly from the tool. I feel that this is a very convenient feature.

Here is the list of other tools that are available in case you want to explore more.

Motion-Activated Headphones

Wow! it feels very nice to blog after a long time. I had been busy the last 1.5 months both at work and off work. At work, its the usual boring stuff. Off work, I had a wonderful vacation for 2 weeks roaming all over(not really) the country. I had visited some places which I always yearned to go. And...Even more wonderful thing is hapenning in my life. I am getting married!. So, busy for obvious reasons. Just wanted to share this with the world :). Lets come to the topic...

Sony Ericsson launched earphones with an interesting feature. To stop/pause the music you do not need to press any buttons. The control is done based on some gestures. To start playing the music, just put both the earphone in the ear. To stop playing the music, just remove them from the ear. To pause the music, just remove one of the earphones. This earphones are meant for mobile phones. So, one can attend a phone call by removing one of the earphone. This particular gesture might not be good because you will not get to put both the earphones while talking on phone. Hopefully, this is configurable. See this link and/or the following video.

Iphone OS 3.0 issues

I wanted to update my 2g iphone from OS 2.2.1 to OS 3.0. I am a little bit apprehensive about upgrading because of the fears that it might have drawbacks or other problems. When I searched the net, I am a bit relieved because I did not find too many complaints. For the time being, I will wait and watch. The most common problem reported is the poor battery performance. See the following snippet from an article in pcmag summarizing the problems.

We received a number of reports from users point to issues with their phones' battery life, slowed speeds, and crashing or a generally inability to run certain apps. A reader named Gary reported that, "[i]t drains my battery in a few hours even if I am not using it." Tom had slightly better luck, writing, "my battery also drains in one day. It used to last three days."

A number of speed issues were reported amongst users, many of whom have considered reverting the software back to its 2.2 iteration. Meanwhile, reader Dave tells us, "most of my iphone apps stopped working after downloading the new 3.0 software on my iPhone 3G." Jason added, "Also Facebook always locks up and won't allow me to move to the desired tab."

Unlock/Jailbreak 2G & 3G iphones with OS 3.0 on windows (link)

First of all thanks to iphone dev team to come up with unlock almost in parallel to the official release of iphone OS 3.0 launch. The tool name is "redsnow". And, thanks to people from iclarified for coming up with such a nice tutorial.

For 2G phones, you can jailbreak and unlock the iphone having OS 3.0 firmware. Here is the link to tutorial for windows users.

For 3G phones, for now, you can only jailbreak the iphone having OS 3.0 firmware. Here is the link to tutorial for windows users. The iphone dev team will be releasing shortly the tool to unlock the OS 3.0 which they are calling it "ultrasnow". Follow thier blog for updates on this.

Update(june-24th): The iphone dev team has released their "ultrasnow" to unlock 3G phone running OS 3.0. And, here is the tutorial from iclarified. Plese note that none of the above unlock solutions work for iphone 3GS, which is the latest phone.

How to fix 169.x.x.x IP problem in windows vista

The other day me and my friend were struggling to fix this funny problem in windows vista where it always gets 169.x.x.x IP address. And because of this the PC is not able to connect to the internet. When we searched that net I am surprised to see the number of people facing this problem. But unfortunately, the solutions offered in those forums did not work for us. We tried many things like disabling the DHCP and assigning a static IP address, editing some settings in registery entry for the network connection, remvoing and adding the connection again etc.

At the end of an hour or so, when we found the fix for the problem we felt like slapping our face because the problem is such a stupid problem. Ok, the problem is that the mcafee is installed on the machine and the firewall is enabled thereby forming a proxy network which is not allowing us to directly connect to the internet. We simply disabled the firewall in mcafee and voila!, we are able to connect to the internet.

It may not be such a good idea to completely disable the firewall as the machine is directly exposed to the internet. There should be some solution to connect to the internet while the firewall is enabled. But, we will worry about it for some other day.

Standalone torrent downloader

For a long time I was wondering why can't there be a standalone torrent client. When I say a standalone client, I mean a device which can download torrents without the need of a PC. Recently, I got my answer from twitter feed of one of my friends. Here is the link to the product. It can download torrents to external hard disk, usb flash drive. It has an inbuilt SAMBA file server and FTP server. It has web server allowing connections over internet for administration. It seems to have decent security features allowing to created different users with different privileges. As I do not own this product, I cannot share personal experiences. But the link has reviews from users who own the product.


On a related note, when I was searching the web, I found that utorrent software has a standalone mode which is different from what I am expecting. It basically means that utorrent can run without installation. This gives it an advantage that it becomes very easy to move partially downloaded files from one PC to another. If you have a pendrive, have both the utorrent client and the download target on the pendrive and you are good to go. You can continue the download from any machine without needing to install. This is also a pretty good use case.

Mouse customizations not working after standby

I was using Logitech marble mouse(trackball mouse) for a quite some time. BTW, it is a very nice alternative for the regular mouse especially for people who get pain in the wrist. I closed down on this item mainly because of its cost effectiveness and good set of features. First of all its ergonomic. It fits well for both left-handed and right-handed people. In general, trackball mouses causes less strain on the muscles because you need not hold the mouse and move it. It stays in a place and we only have to move the ball on top with our fingers. I read on the internet that gripping the mouse contributes to most of the strain caused by mouse usage. Though its very less strain to do it once, we catch the mouse a few hundred times in a day and it causes RSI(Repetetive Stress Injury). I used to get pain in my wrist earlier because of my typing and mouse usage. Now, my pain reduced a lot after using this trackball and a softkey keyboard.

Coming back to the main topic of my post, recently, I started getting one strange problem with my mouse. I customized the mouse buttons to do page up and page down when I press the small buttons on the mouse. (By default they are assigned to previous and next for the browser). When I boot my machine from scratch I do not have any problem and my customizations work fine. There is a mouse icon in the system tray which can be used to customize the button assignments. The problem starts when I put the machine and standby mode and come out of it. The mouse icon in the system tray is missing and my customizations do not work any more. Everything goes to default. Rebooting the system is not an acceptable solution for me.

Finally, I found a solution to the problem where I need not reboot the machine. The trick is to get back the mouse icon in the system tray, i.e. get back the necessary daemon/service working. From the list of applications that run during the startup, I figured that LOGI_MWX.EXE is the one that corresponds to the mouse service. It is located in c:\windows\logi_mwx.exe. The solution is to run this application after coming out of standby mode. You will get back your customizations. You can create a shortcut to this application on the desktop for easy access.