Smarterware » Windows

Todotxt.net Windows GUI for Your Todo.txt File

Gina Trapani — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 02:22:47 +0000

My Todo.txt project turned five years old last month—happy birthday, shell script which runs my life—and development is still going strong. The Android app is selling great, iOS app development is moving along, and now Ben Hughes has released a simple Windows client replete with keyboard shortcuts, no Cygwin required. Nice job, Ben! Download the todotxt.net Windows installer here to give it a go.

“Notice the ASCII art rendering of a floppy drive”

Gina Trapani — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 22:36:11 +0000

Watch as a modern PC gets Windows 1.0 installed, and upgraded through every major version up to Windows 7. Not sure what's more amazing; that this screencast is possible today in a VMware virtual machine, or that applications installed in Windows 3.1 still worked through every upgrade to Windows 7, representing nearly 20 years of compatibility. (via kottke)

Namebench Benchmarks DNS Services

Gina Trapani — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:02:17 +0000

See whether or not your ISP's DNS server is faster or slower than other alternatives like OpenDNS or Google Public DNS with Namebench. This free benchmarking tool pits your current DNS servers against alternatives and generates handy charts and recommendations for which of your DNS choices are the fastest. Using either your browser history or Alexa's top 10,000 global domain names, by default Namebench runs 200 tests to see which resolve most quickly using regional DNS servers, public services like Google's and OpenDNS's, and your current DNS services. Here's what some of the benchmark results look like.

Namebench is a Google "20% project" and is a free download for Windows, Mac, and the command line. The benchmark tests take several minutes to run, depending on how much data you throw at it, so be prepared to go make yourself a sandwich after you press the "Start Benchmark" button. When I ran Namebench, I didn't get full results because the alternate services timed out, but I'm pretty sure that's because of restrictions on my network. What about you? Does OpenDNS or Google Public DNS beat out your ISP's DNS servers? Thanks, Vince!
Namebench [Google Code]