Window glass decided to crack on its own few days ago. It started as a small crack on the left which spread across the whole window in a few hours.
Throttle Google Drive
Google drive is nice and cheap, but it brings down the internet. Google has acknowledged this and their official response is:
Currently we do not have an option to set an upload speed, but I can forward your thoughts about it to our team. You can ‘Pause’ the sync client if you’d like, and it will stop syncing until you resume. Pause by right clicking the Drive icon in the taskbar. It will be one of the options at the top.
However, there is a easy hack to go around this for OSX users by using ipfw to throttle uplink to google’s servers. It only throttles the upload bandwidth, so youtube and other services that ‘download’ data from google work fine.
Until google gets their act together on the issue, this is the only way google drive is usable. You can edit the script to change the bandwidth allocated.
Below is the script:
#!/bin/bash
# Usage: throttle_google_drive.sh <start/stop>
function start_ipfw_throttle() {
sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 100KByte/s
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 ip from me to 64.18.0.0/20
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 ip from me to 64.233.160.0/19
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 ip from me to 66.102.0.0/20
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 ip from me to 66.249.80.0/20
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 ip from me to 72.14.192.0/18
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 ip from me to 74.125.0.0/16
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 ip from me to 173.194.0.0/16
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 ip from me to 207.126.144.0/20
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 ip from me to 209.85.128.0/17
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 ip from me to 216.239.32.0/19
}
function stop_ipfw_throttle() {
sudo ipfw delete 1
}
function show_ipfw_status() {
sudo ipfw show
}
case "$1" in
start)
stop_ipfw_throttle >/dev/null 2>&1
start_ipfw_throttle
;;
stop)
stop_ipfw_throttle
;;
*)
echo "Usage: `basename "$0"` <start/stop>"
esac
For the Desi in you - introducing Video Mirchi for web and Android.
I am super-excited to announce Video Mirchi. You can access it at http://www.videomirchi.com.
Video Mirchi looks up the top charts every day and creates a continuously playing video channel powered by youtube. There is no login or signup - its just like a TV channel playing the latest bollywood videos.
You can use it on your computer, or download the android app.
Enjoy!
Crowdsourcing private data
There have been numerous startups and trends that use crowdsourcing to generate their desired results. Most of them rely on people to publicly share the (public) information, whether they are tweets, status updates, checkins or shared links and then aggregate this information to generate interesting results. This model works great for public content, but completely breaks for anything that is private and personal. There have been a very small number of products that exploit this facet of crowdsourcing properly.
Basically, the idea is simple: Get private data from users and present it to others in an aggregate, anonymous way so that it benefits them (users).
The company that has done this quite well recently is Mint.com. They hold tremendous amount of private, transactional data from their users which is not directly shared with anyone. Then, they mine this data to generate interesting stats that give users a new insight on their usage. Utility companies have started to use this to show comparisons to their users, like I recently got a letter from our city that we are using more power than our neighbors.
We use a similar model in my current startup TheIceBreak, where we provide insights that help users improve their personal relationships.
With any service of this kind, it is absolutely important to maintain the trust of users. Failing to maintain the privacy or trying to move beyond the comfort zone of what people consider private will work against the utility of the service.
The results from such a service can be quite fascinating, giving users an insight which they might never have had before. I am curious what other services will emerge in the future that follow a similar model.
Basically, the idea is simple: Get private data from users and present it to others in an aggregate, anonymous way so that it benefits them (users).
The company that has done this quite well recently is Mint.com. They hold tremendous amount of private, transactional data from their users which is not directly shared with anyone. Then, they mine this data to generate interesting stats that give users a new insight on their usage. Utility companies have started to use this to show comparisons to their users, like I recently got a letter from our city that we are using more power than our neighbors.
We use a similar model in my current startup TheIceBreak, where we provide insights that help users improve their personal relationships.
With any service of this kind, it is absolutely important to maintain the trust of users. Failing to maintain the privacy or trying to move beyond the comfort zone of what people consider private will work against the utility of the service.
The results from such a service can be quite fascinating, giving users an insight which they might never have had before. I am curious what other services will emerge in the future that follow a similar model.
