Over the last few months I have been helping out on a project that offers an elegant solution to the problem. The user simply clicks a bookmarklet on the page containing the torrent they want to download, and then clicks the link to the Torrent. The torrent is then downloaded on their remote computer. This way you can be away from your home, add a Torrent remotely, and have the finished download waiting for you when you get back.

Here’s how to get it up and running:

CONTROLLING TRANSMISSION FROM YOUR PHONE

Follow these steps to setup remotely controlling Transmission from your phone. Once done you can access the iPhone Web GUI from your phone to control and monitor your downloads, as well as being able to add new downloads from your iPhone.

1. Setup Transmission for Remote Access
In OSX: Open Transmission and in the Menu bar go to ‘Transmission’ > ‘Preferences’ > click ‘Remote’ tab > check ‘Enable Remote Access. Enter a username and password if you want. Take note of the PORT number (you can change it if you wish). You will need this later.

2. Assign your Transmission server a static local IP address and Setup Port Forwarding on your Router
This will enable web traffic to be forwarded to your local server so you can access Transmission from the Internet. You need to configure your router to forward the PORT above to your local Transmission server. You will need to make sure your server is assigned a static local IP address by your router. You can Google instructions on how to do this. For OSX users, I’ve done it for you. Go here.

Your public IP address can be found here: http://www.whatismyip.com/

You can also optionally setup a dynamic DNS service on your local server so you can access the machine via a URL rather than an IP address. This is useful if your ISP dynamically assigns you a new IP address each time you connect. One option is: http://www.no-ip.com/

The Web Interface for Transmission should now be accessible. To test it, turn off the WiFi on your phone (so you are using 3G/EDGE), and access this address from your phones browser:

http://yourserver.ip:port/transmission/web/

(Replace yourserver.ip with the public IP address OR server address set in above and port with the PORT number set in Step 1. Don’t forget the colon separating them.)

All okay? then continue…

Now you need the rather brilliant code found here. Go to the site and download the latest version of the files.

3. Install the Bookmarklet server files in the ‘web’ folder of Transmission
Copy the HTML files and images to the your Transmission client’s ‘web’ folder:

If using the native Mac OS X Transmission.app this should be located under “~/Applications/Transmission.app/Contents/Resources/web”. You can access these folders by right-clicking on the Transmission.app icon and choosing ‘Show Package Contents’.

The following files need to be copied to the ‘web’ folder:
- web/fetchtorrent.html
- web/installbmlet.html
- web/images/graphics/bookmarklet/* (All images)

4. Setup the Bookmarklet on your Phone

Go to the following page and follow the instructions. This page can be viewed on your Desktop Browser, iPad or iPhone.

http://yourserver.ip:port/transmission/web/installbmlet.html

Replace yourserver.ip with the public IP address OR server address that you set in Step 2.
Replace port with the PORT number set in step 1. Note the colon separating them.

The page has clear instructions on how to use the bookmarklet. You should now be able to remotely add Torrents from your iPhone. :)

Support for the bookmarklet can be found in the Transmisson forums here. Feel free to post any questions in the comments. I will answer what I can.

The picture on the website gives you some idea of what it’s like, but the thing I didn’t really take in was quite how small it is. It’s the same height as a busines card and thinner than the iPod shuffle. The display is also much better than I expected – I could see that it was smaller than the iPod Photo’s but had thought that it would feel squashed and be hard to read. However, the text is clear and even the album art is recognizable. I could be wrong about this but it seems the resoulution is higher than on a Photo which may have something to do it.

As I listen to it on my desk – I am continuously picking it up and playing with it – it really is one of those gadgets that seems somehow ahead of it’s time. They have taken all the features from the regular iPod and shrunk them to a quarter the size. Kudos to the Apple enginneers for a) squishing all those electronics into such a small design, and b) not letting slip to the public what they were working on all this time. News of this on the horizon would have hammered sales of the shuffle and mini….

There has been a lot of talk recently about how Apple’s honeymoon cannot last, and that there will be a backlash of consumers defecting to players from other manfacturers who don’t tie themsleves to such closed platforms. That may be true eventually but for the time being Apple are not going anywhere especially if they continue to innovate and produce players like this. Tempted?

The best tool I found for the job is called Exifer, is free, and can be downloaded here. To adjust your photos here’s what you need to do:

1. First of all create a new folder and put a copy of all the photos you wish to change inside it – it is better to work from a backup copy in case something goes wrong.
2. Installer Exifer and run it. Browse to the folder containing the photos.
3. Select all the photos by Ctrl-A then right-click on an image and go to ‘EXIF/IPTC’ and click on ‘Edit’.
4. Click the ‘EXIF data’ tab at the top of the window that opens. The click the ‘Date tab below it.
5. Tick the box next to where it says ‘Incremental (formore than one selected image)
6. You can then specify the number of days/hours/minutes to adjust all your photos by. Select the amount using the drop down menu and click okay to adjust your photos.
7. Check the photos carefully before deleting the originals.

There are times that the EXIF data may be corrupted meaning that you can no longer change the data but generally this should work without any problems.

See Also…

You my also find these tools useful:

World-Wide Media eXchange – This tool will not only let you adjust the time and date of photos, but also let you add the geographic location where they were shot.
Exiv2 – Exiv2 is a command-line only EXIF and LPTC manipulation tool. Download it here. You can adjust the time and date of a group of photos by running it from the command line. Something like:

exiv2.exe -a-3 *.jpg

to adjust the Exif times in the images by -3 hours. See the output of exiv2 -h or visit this page for more details.

Download it here.

Getting started with Shareaza

Here are some helpful links to get you started if you are new to P2P software. The Shareaza website contains a step-by-step tutorial to get you started with Shareaza. You can also view the Shareaza Quick Guide 3.2, an animated guide to the software that runs in your browser (a downloadable version is also available).

Shareaza Firewall Configuration

If you use a router and/or are behind a firewall you will need to configure it to have Shareaza work correctly. You need you have to open only one port for Shareaza – configure port 6346 for both tcp/udp. To find out how to configure your router please visit portforward.com. Shareaza website also contains some troubleshooting information if you are having problems. Once your firewall is configured you can test that it is working correctly by visiting this website.

Shareaza and Windows XP SP2

Windows XP SP2 introduced a limit on the number of simultaneous connections that can be made to the Interent, which unfortunately affects Shareaza’s performance – more info here. To solve the problem you need to download and install the patch available here.

Note – this problem affects all P2P software and not just Shareaza.

If you still can’t connect to the network…

Shareaza Wiki has an article to help you with this. If you need more help the two best places to look are the Shareaza Forums and the Shareaza Wiki.

Until recently it only allowed for syncing between Outlook and Outlook Express on Windows machines (although there is a web based version as well), but at last they have now begun to expand their support for other platforms such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Yahoo & AOL/AIM which means that a significantly broader user base can now connect to the service.

Plaxo recently announced the beta release of its Mozilla Thunderbird plugin (available for download here) which finally makes Plaxo avaible to Mac & Linux users who previously could only use the online service. This also now means that you can keep your address book in sync between different types of computer and software – e.g. between Outlook on your PC in work and Thunderbird on your Apple at home. Finally, I can ditch Outlook at home in favour of Thunderbird.

Secondly, they have announced a beta release of a new Plaxo Toolbar for IE which will enable Yahoo users to synchronise their address books and calendar items with Plaxo. It also puts all your contacts within easy rech in the IE toolbar. This means that if you use Yahoo at home and Outlook in work you can now be sure that your contacts, calendar entries, tasks and notes will be kept perfectly in sync. Hopefully more web-based email services such as Gmail will be supported in the future.

Finally, a recent Plaxo / AIM Partnership will soon make Plaxo available to the 30M or so AOL Instant Messenger users, which should help to dramatically increase the number of people connected to the network. If you use Plaxo and ou connect to someone else who also uses it, then your contact information is automatically updated if you make changes to it. By tapping into this massive user base, all Plaxo members should discover an increased number of people in their address books whose information is automatically updated.