Tame your browser
If you’re happy to switch to an alternative
browser, consider Opera. Turning on its Turbo option will offload a lot of the
data processing onto Opera’s servers that will deliver a compressed version of
your requested pages that should appear more quickly in your browser and use
less bandwidth in the process. Omni web, meanwhile, gives you the option to
turn off images. This might be heavy handed especially if you’re reading an
image heavy news site but its alternative option to turn off just background
images should have less of a visual impact while still reducing your downloads.
Also consider using a Flash blocker to save
yourself from downloading bandwidth-hungry Flash-based ads.
If
you’re happy to switch to an alternative browser, consider Opera.
Smarter shopping
The web may be the world’s biggest shopping
mall, and prices are often cheaper online, but heading out to bricks and mortar
shops could save you more in bandwidth fees than the equivalent cost in petrol.
Take your memory card to Jessops, Boots or
an alternative high street developer with a self-service developing machine
particularly if you’re in the habit of uploading everything on your 4GB memory
card without first filtering out your dud shots.
If
you do insist on shopping online, then at least consider buying second hand
physical media on eBay and Amazon’s New and Used listings
If you do insist on shopping online, then
at least consider buying second hand physical media on eBay and Amazon’s New
and Used listings. As an example, you can pick up the full 61-disc box set of
The X Files for around $75. That sounds like a lot until you realise that it
runs to just over 151 hours, not including the extras! At 3GB an hour for a
high definition iPlayer stream you’d have to download a whopping 454GB of data
to watch this box set on demand. Even on a broadband deal with excess fees as
low as $1.5 per GB, you’d end up paying nine times the retail price and have
nothing physical to show for it by the time the credits rolled on the last
episode.
Using little snitch to identify
bandwidth hogs
1. Download Little Snitch
Little Snitch helps you identify and
optionally block unauthorised applications from accessing your broadband. It’s
an effective defence against malware that may be using your broadband
connection to attack remote computers or sending logs of your keystrokes and
personal data to criminals’ servers. In this instance, though, we want to use
it to identify which applications are the most frequent consumers of our
limited bandwidth and see what effect it would have on our day-to-day Mac usage
if we shut them down or blocked them. The 30.-day trial version can be
downloaded from obdev.at/products/little snitch.
2. Allow or deny Internet access
Little Snitch flashes up a notification
each time an application tries to access the internet, and asks you to confirm
or deny access once, until you log off, or forever. Close the window you saw in
step 1 you can ignore that forbidding interface as Little Snitch walks you
through its configuration app by app and use your Mac as normal until the first
alert pops up. In our case it was triggered by Dropbox trying to synchronise.
We’re going to allow it once in this first instance so that we can see how
quickly it tries to update again. Too often, and we’ll uninstall the Dropbox
client and do everything manually through the browser interface instead.
3. Teach Little Snitch the rules
You’ll see lots of notifications when you
start using Little Snitch, but it soon starts to quieten down. A little bit of
time spent training it in the early stages really pays dividends. Our second
notification concerns Google Updater. This is something we couldn’t have
disabled through System Preferences or a menu bar icon like Adobe Updater, so installing
Little Snitch has already paid dividends. Wed rather update our Google apps
manually by downloading new versions, so well click Forever and Deny to block
access here. If you change your mind, you can delete rules through the Little
Snitch Configuration app in your Applications folder.
4. Has Snitching made a difference?
After a day or so Little Snitch should know
enough about your network usage and which apps are allowed to go online, so
requests for authorisation will quieten down. At this point you can tweak its
preferences to turn off the automatic display on network activity to stop any
further requests popping up and disturbing your work, little Snitch will keep
you protected until the end of the trial period, which should be enough for you
to judge whether Its network-block on selected apps has made a difference to
your bandwidth consumption and you can decide whether to pay for a licence to
keep your connections under control.
