Tunes - Tuneflow

Reader ST discovered that aging data backup CDs he had burned had become unreadable, so now he uses QuickPar to make recovering data on disc with bad sectors possible. Here's how he does it. ST writes:

You just hit the power button your PC, and now you've got enough time to brew a fresh pot of coffee for the entire office—because that's how long it takes for your computer to go from "on" to "ready to work." If your PC's bogged down by a bunch of programs that automatically start up when it does, it can take forever to get started every morning.

Although AT&T will eventually offer an iPhone tethering plan so that you can use your iPhone's data plan on your laptop (yay!), there's one major catch: They're also planning to charge your an extra $30/month to do it (boo!).

The Hackosis blog notes a contentious conversation thread between Linux creator Linus Torvalds and a programmer who finds that disabling the atime option, which writes a last-accessed time to every single file that's accessed by a Linux system, nets some significant performance improvements.

On its face, a tool that gives you remote control over your jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch seems kind of pointless. If you're sitting at a computer already, why would you need to use your tiny touch screen computer?

Reader Justin writes in with a clever idea for quickly launching downloads with the popular command-line download manager, wget. His method: Make wget available to Launchy, then pass the URL of the file you want to download to wget through Launchy. Here's how it works:

Whether you're on Wi-Fi or an EDGE/3G cellular connection, many web pages would load up a heck of a lot faster on the iPhone's Mobile Safari browser if you weren't stuck waiting for "LOWER YOUR INTEREST RATES NOW" and the like to push through on Mobile Safari. If you've jailbroken your iPhone or iPod touch, however, there's a none-too-hard hack you can make to block a good number of ads from slowing down your page loads.