There are all kinds of public DNS providers out there that claim to be the fastest available, and personally I've always gone with using Google's DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4). I've always been under the assumption that given their size they would probably have the best response times for me, but I never ran any tests to confirm that.
Update: As "lexus" pointed out in the comments, this is not actually freeware like I originally assumed. The site led me to believe that this was freeware, and I didn't see any indication while using the app that it was shareware. It is $30, and for that much I do not believe it is worth it.
I love services like Pandora and Slacker because they let me listen to music without having to take the time to compose my own playlists. Recently, however, I've also been getting back into using online radio stations, and in doing so I stumbled across a pretty cool app called StreamWriter that packs an impressive set of features for recording Internet radio stations.
Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about.
File sync services like Google Drive and Dropbox will only sync the files and folders that are placed within their app-specific directories.
In Windows 7 Microsoft made it so that multiple windows from the same application are grouped into the same icon, and when it comes to Internet Explorer it treats each tab as a window. That means if you have two tabs open in Internet explorer the Taskbar icon will show two previews when you click on it (like the screenshot above).
Yesterday we walked through how you can backup and restore individual apps on your iOS device, but we can actually take things a step further for those who didn't take the time to make the individual app backups. As long as you have an iTunes backup of your iPhone/iPad/iPod and it is unencrypted you can actually extract the app files as well as photos directly from that.
Like a lot of people I'm not a huge fan of iTunes, and occasionally I like to backup some of my most important apps to my local PC so that it would be a breeze to set it up again should I ever need to. With iTunes and iCloud you can't choose to perform an on-demand backup of a certain app, and that's why I turn to the free iExplorer.
Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about.
So after weeks of XBMC-focused posts we are wrapping it all up with a summary of all the guides we wrote, along with some helpful posts from the official wiki and forums pages.
People have a hard time believing that since I own both an iPhone and an iPad that I decided to build a few home theater PCs (HTPCs) with XBMC rather than getting a few Apple TVs. I was looking for customizability and versatility, which is something the Apple TV doesn't provide.
XBMC has a built-in web interface that you can use to control media playback on any of your XBMC instances. The nice thing about the web interface is that it lets you quickly navigate your media library to see what you have available.
The XBMC developers added AirPlay support in version 11, and this is one of the features that really drew me to the software. One of the very reasons I contemplated getting the Apple TV was because of the streamlined AirPlay support, but with the addition of AirPlay support to XBMC 11 I thought that it would also fit my needs.
Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about.
A lot of people assume that using an application like XBMC means that you are pirating all of the material you are going to watch, but there are plenty of legal video streaming solutions available as well. There are a bunch of developers that have put together plugins so that a lot of online video streaming sites can be accessed directly through add-ons in XBMC.
While XBMC is a versatile piece of software there are always a lot of things that advanced users wish they could configure, but the developers can't possible cram it all into the XBMC interface. That's where the advancedsettings.xml file comes into play.
Now that you have XBMC set up and configured it's probably good to run through a test to see how well your system performs. I've been able to run through a 1080p flawlessly when I followed all of the buffering recommendations we covered yesterday. Not all videos are created equally though, and as a result you may find that some 1080p videos work fine for you while others don't.
Almost all of the videos that I watch on XBMC are streaming over the network from a central computer. While the idea sounds great that means that my home network becomes yet another component that can lead to performance issues in XBMC. I'm going to share my experiences so that you can get your system working smoothly with as little effort as possible.
Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about.
In XBMC one of the things that is probably the most important is to get the software hooked up to your personal media. This includes media from all of your various collections like videos, pictures, and music.