Poromenos' Stuff

If you're like me, you start too many prologues with the phrase "if you're like me". Apart from that, you probably own many movies but hate getting up and reaching for the DVDs when you want to watch one. Well, you're in luck, because I'm about to teach you how to copy them to your computer and compress them using XviD so they take up less space.

I recently bought a Linksys WRT-54GL router and a DSL router/modem so I could have a good network setup for my home computers/server. I must admit that configuring all that is rather hard if you don't know much about networking, so I decided to write this "Networking essentials" guide so people could have an idea what all these terms mean.

Shameless plug: If you want a free online financial management app, you could do me a favor and visit www.moneygement.com, see if it's to your liking. Thanks.

If you've ever wondered how internet radio stations work and/or wanted to create your own, this tutorial will show you how. It is actually very easy, and you can set up your own radio station and begin broadcasting songs in about 10 minutes.

I recently bought a new USB flash drive (USB 2.0, if you must know), and since I don't feel comfortable with entering personal information on shared computers (you never know what's going to be left there when you're done) I decided to install a copy of Opera on it.

If you don't know it, Opera is the best browser out there, very fast and very light. It has integrated mail, news and IRC clients and it's free (not open source though).

Shameless plug: If you want a free online financial management app, you could do me a favor and visit www.moneygement.com, see if it's to your liking. Thanks.

If you've heard about BitTorrent and want to download files but don't know how, this tutorial is for you. All you need is uTorrent and you're ready. Watch the tutorial and leave a comment with any questions/feedback you may have.

If you're using POP3 for your e-mail, you have probably encountered the following scenario: Someone has sent you a huge email that you don't really want, and you have to download it or you won't be able to get any of your other emails. If you're on dialup, this can be a real annoyance.

Luckily, deleting the offending message is very easy. People that use webmail just click it and press delete, and that's what we're going to do, in a way. The way your client (Outlook, Thunderbird or whatever) talks to the server is by issuing simple text commands.

Note: If you are new to uTorrent and don't know how to download files, see this tutorial.

Another note: It appears that some users (probably only Azureus) are being asked for a username/password for authentication when opening the torrent. Just clicking "Cancel" on that window seems to work fine.

I am becoming increasingly paranoid about transmitting my passwords unencrypted over the internet, especially when I'm away from home and I have to access my PC, so I thought of making an SSH tunnel from my laptop to my PC, and it turns out it's actually quite easy. In case you don't know what tunneling is, it goes like this: Say you want to connect with your browser (running on your laptop) to your home web server, but you want to do it securely.

Shameless plug: If you want a free online financial management app, you could do me a favor and visit www.moneygement.com, see if it's to your liking. Thanks.

Preliminary fluff

So, you want to learn the Python programming language but can't find a concise and yet full-featured tutorial. This tutorial will attempt to teach you Python in 10 minutes. It's probably not so much a tutorial as it is a cross between a tutorial and a cheatsheet, so it will just show you some basic concepts to start you off. Obviously, if you want to really learn a language you need to program in it for a while. I will assume that you are already familiar with programming and will, therefore, skip most of the non-language-specific stuff. The important keywords will be highlighted so you can easily spot them. Also, pay attention because, due to the terseness of this tutorial, some things will be introduced directly in code and only briefly commented on.