Freeware

In my ongoing quest to get an free, lightweight and fast download manager with remote access ability for Raspberry Pi. I settled for Transmission to get torrent downloading and pyLoad for ftp/http downloading, however both of them have issues under limited resources of Raspberry Pi and had frequent crashes now and then.

After, a lot of research, tweaking and testing - I had finally found the best option for a perfect lightweight download manager on linux as "FatRat". Despite the name being FatRat, this open-source download manager for Linux is written in C++ and is slim on requirements, fast on performance and comes with all the bells and whistles one would need from an modern download manager including Segmented HTTP(S)/FTP downloads, FTP uploads, torrents and a super-fast web-ui for remote access.

Linux file-systems like ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, jfs and xfs are used both for compatibility and performance reasons. To access these Linux formatted partitions on other platforms like Windows and Mac, we can easily setup an Networked File Storage Server (NAS) as we did using Samba share on Raspberry Pi running an Debian image.

However, in-case you need to directly plug and read/write onto these Linux file-system formatted disks on windows computers - you will need help of third-party utilities as Windows does not natively support these file-system formats.

pyLoad is an excellent cross-platform download manager with support for one-click file hosters, captcha decoding and excellent web-interface for anywhere remote control over internet.

After installing transmission torrent client on Raspberry Pi, pyLoad is an suitable choice to take of the other downloading needs like handling links from One-Click-hoster's, container formats like DLC, video sites or just plain http/ftp links. Here is an step-by-step guide to get pyLoad installed and working on Raspberry Pi.

BitTorrent is without a doubt the most popular file-sharing method out there, Peer-2-Peer (P2P) torrent downloading requires a computer which runs a torrent downloading client to fetch content from other users sharing it. Torrent downloading can be slow as speeds depends on swarm sharing the content, this means you need to have your computer powered-on consuming electricity. Luckily, we can now use our ultra-cheap Raspberry Pi to get the job done 24x7 - consuming just 5w of power.

After completing the basic setup of the Raspberry Pi, networking it to internet, attaching an external HDD and configuring it to work as an Network Attached Storage (NAS) we all all set to install the cross-platform Transmission Torrent Client of the RasPi to get our cheap seedbox working.

Surprisingly this fall we got three brand new Apple gadgets, the iPhone 5, iPod touch 5 and 'Renanoed' iPod nano 7. Before buying one or more of them, have you thought about how many Apple devices are already in your family? If you and your families have a bunch of iPhones, iPads and iPods, probably you'll get big headache to manage them upon one single computer.

The root cause of this inconvenience is iTunes, an application that takes on almost everything, e.g. iDevice media (and app) management, purchase, and playback jukebox, and much more. Apart from constant updates, slowness, source-consuming, complicated settings and limits, iTunes also leaves the media and app management part far away from desired. We have reviewed the best Apple iTunes alternative PhoneTrans earlier, well it got better and now features an brand new user-interface and supports synchronization of music, Apps, movies, music videos, TV shows, podcasts, ringtones and eBooks.

One frequently met situation is that Adding a single HD movie to iPad may take about half an hour and risk losing all apps along the way. Besides, iTunes will also fill up hard drive with tens of gigabytes of iOS apps that can easily be downloaded from Apple. Syncing apps frequently may also destroy folders and make apps disappear. Another problem is Managing multiple devices on one computer with no way to move music, movies back to PC hard drive.

We have shared quite a few good Partition Managers for Windows like Paragon Hard Disk Manager, AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro and EASEUS Partition Master Professional, all of which were free under a promo for a limited period only. However, MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition is a much powerful and advanced utility for the job and is absolutely free.

MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition is a free partition manager software supporting Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 (32/64bit). Main features include - resizing partitions, Copying partitions, Create partition, Extend Partition, Split Partition, Delete partition, Format partition, Convert partition, Explore partition, Hide partition, Change drive letter, Set active partition, Partition Recovery.

The software also features the ability to format partitions in popular Linux filesystem ext4 (3/2/1), this feature is missing in majority of the other Windows based partition managers.

A good multi-part download manager is the basic necessity for any PC user who downloads from internet, we have free utilities like Flashget Mini, Microsoft Download Manager, pyLoad and Tucan but new download manager DownTango is not only functional and efficient but also beautiful.

DownTango is a free download manager for Windows offering best features of existing download management utilities with an easy to use, beautiful interface and support for features like CAPTCHA and remote/web-based download job management.

If you own multiple computers, hard disks and removable drives it would make perfect sense to have an universally accessible combined data storage pool. Free utility software Greyhole does exactly that.

Greyhole uses Samba to create a storage pool of all available hard drives, allowing users to create redundant copies of there files preventing data loss when part of their hardware fails. Users can add and configure as many disk drives (internal, external, USB, e-Sata, Firewire) as they wish in their storage pool whose resulting size will be the sum of total free space in all the included disk drives.

Users are allowed to keep many copies of each file which will be stored in a different hard drive, this strategy acts like an automated backup solution preventing data loss in-case a disk-drive failure occurs.

Basic picture resizing feature is available in most image manipulation utilities, apart from the ordinary image resizing there exist an smart resize feature in which intelligent image processing algorithms resizes the image with minimal impact to main content.

Free windows utility Image Resize Guide Lite offers an easy to use solution to this traditional image resizing where all objects are equally reduced which results in difficulty to recognize people and objects in the photo. The utilty offers users an smarter option which keeps focus on the subject utilizing it's "smart" picture resizing algorithm. This results in smaller, resized photos with just unnecessary portions removed.

With usage and time, Apple iOS devices iPhone, iPad and iPod touch accumulate long-term caches, temp and off-line junk files generated by Apps or due to failed iTunes syncs. Apart from taking up space on your device, they may devour memory resource and slow down the iPhone when launching Apps.

PhoneClean provides users with an fast, simple and free iOS device cleanup solution. The utility will clean App caches, cookies and off-line files; sweep off media temp files and reclaim other storage space on all your iOS devices.

To confirm wasted disk space on your device, Open iPhone (or iPad) Settings > General > Usage > And you’ll see as below:

Another way to check this wasted space is by using iTunes, open iTunes and connect your device via USB cable you will see the exact amount of wasted resources under "Other" heading.