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Move Half-Finished BitTorrent Downloads to Another Drive [BitTorrent]

Posted on April 16, 2009
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If you’ve ever run your drive out of space while a long-running download is still going, the Online Tech Tips weblog writes up a simple solution to change your download location to another drive.

The solution is easy enough: With uTorrent, just stop the torrent, change the download location to another external drive, and then move the half-finished files to the new downloads folder. Once you choose to restart the download again, uTorrent will detect the half-finished files and pick up where it left off. It’s a simple solution, but might come in handy.

Hit the link for the full walk-through, or for more on BitTorrent, check out our beginner’s guide to BitTorrent, go through the intermediate guide, and then check out our top 10 BitTorrent tips and tricks.

On the other hand, if you’re on OS X or Linux using Transmission, this process is even easier. Just click the folder icon for your current download and select the Move Data File To option, choose where you want it to save, and you’re done.





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Use a Different Color for the Root Shell Prompt [Terminal Tip]

Posted on April 2, 2009
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Linux only: Reader Chris writes in with an excellent tip that changes the prompt to red when using the root account from the terminal—as a reminder to be more careful.

Using the tip is relatively simple—just edit the /root/.bashrc file and add in the following, preferably commenting out the existing lines that set the color, though you can simply add this line to the end of the file.

PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}[33[01;31m]u@h[33[00m]:[33[01;34m]w[33[00m]$ '

Once you’ve added this line, anytime you switch to using the root shell you will see the prompt in red with white text for the command line. Chris takes it further, with a line that turns the prompt green for regular users, which you can enable by adding the following to your ~/.bashrc file:

PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}[33[01;32m]u@h[33[00m]:[33[01;34m]w[33[00m]$ '

This tip can really come in handy if you have a bunch of terminal windows open at once, so you can tell at a glance which ones are using root mode and which aren’t. Thanks, Chris!

For more tips on powering up your terminal, check out how to display your public IP address, show a list of only subdirectories, or make any directory into an ISO file.





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Create Smarter Keyword Bookmarks [Firefox Tip]

Posted on March 25, 2009
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If you are a fan of Firefox’s keyword bookmarks, you might have noticed that using a search bookmark without a search term will typically lead you to a "No Results Found" error page—annoying, but fixable.

Reader Rupert writes in with an excellent tip that can be used to create smarter search bookmarks—but requires a little bit of javascript editing. The general idea is that the javascript can be used to detect whether or not you entered a search term, and navigate to the home page of the site rather than the search page.

For instance, to search Lifehacker by using "lh <keyword>" in the address bar, your keyword bookmark location would normally look like this:

lifehacker.com/search/%s

If we don't have a search term, though, we want to just navigate to the home page instead, so we just plug this javascript into the location box—the little bit of "if" logic in there is where the magic is, as it detects whether the %s parameter has been passed into the keyword bookmark.

javascript:if('%s') location.href='http://lifehacker.com/search/%s';else location.href='http://lifehacker.com/';

With this solution you can search Lifehacker in the address bar with "lh <keyword>", or just use "lh" in the address bar to navigate directly to the site—the same technique could be applied to any bookmarklet. Thanks, Rupert!

If all this keyword bookmarking is new and Greek to you, you can check out our guide to Firefox and the art of keyword bookmarking, grab our 15 Firefox quick search bookmarks, and then get really productive by creating keyword bookmarks to Gmail labels.





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