Make your idle computer work for you
Since you’re not sitting at your home computer all day, (you have a job right?) your computer is probably available to become your personal productivity/fun slave. The following are five ways to make use of your idle computer when you are away.
Legally download (good) music for free
If the whole copyright issue surrounding free music irks you, and if P2P clients aren’t your bag (Limewire, BearShare, etc.), don’t worry because there is still a way to download mainstream MP3s, legally, for free. A lot of bands have jumped on the free music band wagon recently, but these tend to be smaller, “underground” bands. I’ve reached the point in my life where this no longer excites me. I don’t have the time, energy, or motivation to listen to a bunch of crappy bands just to hear one or two good songs. I just want the mainstream stuff that I know I will like.
That’s where StationRipper comes into play. StationRipper is a free Windows program that allows you to set your computer to download streaming radio over the Internet. Remember the good old days when your favorite song came on the radio and you quickly put a tape in your boom box to record the song? This is the exact same concept except StationRipper grabs every single song, and rather than creating one long MP3 file, it parses the file according to the meta data. StationRipper comes fully loaded with tons of Internet radio stations. The total setup time is less than 5 minutes. After an hour or so, you will have around 15-25 MP3s perfectly named, tagged, and ready to be enjoyed by you. Let StationRipper go all day and you’re talking about 200 - 500 songs.
Linux users can grab the sister program Streamripper which is widely available in the repositories.
Setup your own personal DVR
If you’ve got a TV card for your PC, you are just one step away from having your own personal “Freevo” (Free TiVO). In the matter of minutes you can have your PC setup to record all of your favorite shows. Many people are familiar with the extremely robust Linux DVR software known as MythTV. Unfortunately for some, MythTV can be a bear to set up. Windows has a fantastic alternative called SageTV (it has a one-time cost of about $80). SageTV is perfect if you are not extremely technically inclined. What I like most about SageTV is that their API is available and many addons are available. One addon that you will not want to miss is the SageTV web server. You can use SageTV and the SageTV web server to setup your recordings and stream live TV over the Internet. The setup is extremely easy even for the non-technically inclined.
SageTV has versions for Mac, Windows, and Linux — pick your poison!
Hate paying for software? There are several free DVR software packages that may catch your fancy. Give MediaPortal and Yahoo! Go a try.
Automate your downloads
I am a digital media and graphic art pack rat. I often scour the web downloading interesting media and graphic art. A great tool known as Wget does this for me. Lifehacker has an excellent introduction to Wget. If you want the short story, you can setup Wget to grab updated content from around anywhere around the web. For example, if you have an MP3 website that gives you a free download everyday, but you can’t remember to go to the site, you can setup a simple Wget script and download the daily song without ever thinking twice about it. Or if you wanted to backup your website everyday, you could do it with Wget. If you’re wondering how I like to use Wget, I download the daily Dilbert comic over night and I have a script setup to turn the image into my desktop background. Every morning when I wake up I get my dose of Dilbert. You can setup Wget for your favorite comics, also.
Donate to charity
You can use your computer’s processor to contribute to medical and scientific advancement through distributed computing. Distributed computing allows millions of people to install a program that runs when your computer is idle that will solve many small problems. This program communicates with a supercomputer and uses the small problems your computer solved to solve very large problems. Standford University has an impressive and important project known as Folding@Home that is working to cure cancer and Alzheimer’s. I have been happily running it for several months. This is a great way to donate to charity without your wallet taking a hit.
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project — people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.
Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.
Turn it off!
No surprises here, but if you want to save a few bucks when it comes to the electric bill, just turn the thing off! I’ve heard people say in the past that it is bad to turn your computer on and off all day, so you might want to avoid this if you’ve got a really nice computer (due to the wear and tear on the hardware). But if you’ve got an el-junko, go ahead and pull the plug and save a buck or two per month.
How do you put your idle computer to use? Do you have the ultimate automated setup? We want to hear about it in the comments!
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Comments
Craig M says on April 11th, 2007 at 11:57 am
I have a script that I use to automate a series of downloads called “wget-queue” (http://decafbad.net/projects/scripts/). I create a “todo.txt” file in my downloads directory, and wget-queue does the rest.
There’s also a program called “dailystrips” which will download not only Dilbert, but many other comics for your morning perusal.
Hope this helps!
Cameron says on April 11th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
I hate to break it to you, but recording copyrighted music over the radio is technically illegal, as is recording over streaming audio. The main difference between this and filesharing networks is that the law generally isn’t enforced as strictly, and since you’re not redistributing, the penalties are not as stiff. But I definitely wouldn’t call it a “legal” option. Any time you’re taking copyrighted material without paying for it (or getting some kind of license for it), it’s illegal.
Chris says on April 11th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Well my home computer is used as a place to load/use the programs I do nothave access to at work… I just setup either a vnc or remote desktop session… with the appropiate ports opened on the BlackICE and my router’s firewall you can use just about anything.
cuacuab says on April 11th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
“Donate to charity” does cost electricity which affects your wallet
l3utterfish says on April 11th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
i have the emule 24h.. :D
Eric says on April 11th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
While MythTV and StreamRipper may be in a gray area legally, there is no way for someone watching your Internet or cable connection to know you’re using them. This makes them safer alternatives to p2p apps, which don’t exactly hide.
Nik Kurkov says on November 1st, 2007 at 8:22 am
Background Optimizer is an easy-to-use tweaker that can boost your computer performance by defragmentation, clean it from junk and do antivirus check. Background Optimizer automatically optimizes computer while it’s idle.It will start to clean disks, install updates, defragment - everything that usually requires specialist to complete and uses additional time and requires unoccupied computer.
Download:
http://www.b-optimizer.com
mark says on June 28th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
i am in the usa at the moment . and have had 3 years expriance building and repairing computers in the uk . windows 311 , windows 95 , windows 98 , windows melenium , windows xp , windows vista. where in florida can i get sponcered , have experiance,but no degrees
Yogesh Arora says on October 23rd, 2008 at 6:32 am
I make my computer work for me by giving it the job of rendering fractals in my absence. Yes it may cost me electricity but the beautiful images it generates at such an amazing resolution which is worth the electricity.
randall7 says on October 30th, 2008 at 2:37 am
Crashplay is another storage play, but with a strong focus on backup. Unlike services like Mozy and Carbonite, where you pay a fee for access to centralized backup servers, with Crashplan your backup exists on the PC of someone you know (and vice versa; you can back up your mom at your house and set her machine to back up on yours). Since the Crashplan company doesn’t have to pay for either storage or bandwidth, it can offer a lower-cost service: a $50 one-time license sets you up; most online backup services charge a monthly fee. Since our previous coverage, CrashPlan has added new features like Web access to your files, business accounts, and a “seeded backup” option: you do your first backup on a spare drive on your local machine, then install the drive on a friend’s computer across town, after which only file additions and changes need to be transmitted.
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Jason says on January 21st, 2009 at 3:00 am
Just a comment about the on/off cycle of PCs. It’s much better for your PC to be shut off for long periods of time (while you’re at work) than sitting idle, spinning fans, wearing out bearings, resistors, and all the other MTBF components of your machine. Not to mention that the poor machine won’t be on the grid if anything catastrophic happens like a lightning strike or a brown-out.