Parazoid.net » cool tools

PrintWhatYouLike

ben — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:10:55 +0000

This is helpful for anyone that prints articles to read for later or whatever purposes you come up with, but also to anyone that reads articles online. If you haven’t run across it before, PrintWhatYouLike.com is an amazing service that lets you format a web page for printing. So get rid of ads, select and remove that annoying comment section full of trolls, enlarge certain sections…

The best part is that they provide a bookmarklet to easily format a page you are reading. Sometimes I will use it just to clean up an article I am reading not to print, just so I can focus on the content and not all of the cruft that makes it part of a website.

So go check out PrintWhatYouLike, save some paper and ink.

Ninite bulk installer

ben — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:44:36 +0000

Posting this is probably mostly for me as I keep forgetting the name of this tool, but it is worth sharing. I found this from a Lifehacker article a while ago, and if I could remember the name of it I would use it every time I do a Windows install. Ninite allows you to go to a web page, select a bunch of freeware apps you want installed giving you a custom made installer that will just go to town downloading and installing the software you selected, resulting in very few clicks and questions. One simple shot at installing a bunch of apps that would take at least an hour if done manually.

Their Ninite One product would be awesome to have on a USB disk as well, but I’m not paying for a professional license.

Cool tool: iftop

ben — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:28:19 +0000

I’ve got a list of tools I think are cool or useful, so I’m going to start sharing my thoughts of them here….isn’t that the point? So today’s tool is iftop. It can be used to display bandwidth usage on an interface. If you can’t figure out what it does based on the name, their description of the tool lays it out well:

iftop does for network usage what top(1) does for CPU usage. It listens to network traffic on a named interface and displays a table of current bandwidth usage by pairs of hosts. Handy for answering the question “why is our ADSL link so slow?”.

Small and simple tool, what’s not to like. Real good for those times that you know something is eating traffic but don’t know what. Check out screenshots of iftop at http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/iftop/.

Update: While perusing through logs it is clear that people find this page because they are looking for information on how to read iftop output. Looking back at this post I clearly stiffed everybody on that aspect of things, and have wanted to post an update on how to interpret what’s going on in iftop. Luckily Techthrob.com took care of that far better than I would be able to do, so go check out his article How to Monitor Network Traffic in Linux.