Google recently came up with their own public DNS servers to “speed up the web” even more (see my analysis of their strategy and my initial impressions on my blog here). What they do is they give you a single IP address that’s routed to a Google DNS server near you and they heavily cache all the results. Basically, it should speed up your web browsing.
Of course, Google’s service is not the only one. You can also try the well-known OpenDNS or the quite fast UltraDNS to see which one is better but it can be hard to determine which one is really faster.
The answer is surprisingly easy to find thanks to a free, open source tool from a Google employee (Gotta love those “20% projects”). NameBench is a little tool that will run tests on a random set of sites using public DNS servers and local servers (your ISP, others nearby etc.). It takes about 5 minutes to run and will tell you what DNS servers you should be using.
Quick, Easy and Free. That’s my kind of solution!
Networking, Software
dns, macosx, Networking, performance, Software, speed
To continue on the wireless posting on Nokia’s N95, it is as Mac friendly as they come. First you have to install a plugin for iSync that you can obtain here. You obviously activate Bluetooth (in Tools, Bluetooth) and have to pair the device with your Mac, the usual way by entering a number that could have been made much shorter. You’re ready to sync to your heart’s content. You can and probably should use USB instead.
The N95 is so Mac friendly that there is also multimedia transfer application that you get here and that allows you to easily transfer music, video and pictures to and from your Mac. Voilà, let the artist in you express wirelessly.
Networking, Productivity
We invest a lot in hardware, network gear and connection to the Internet but we often leave out one essential aspect of browsing: domain name resolution. I recommend that you use OpenDNS to gain more control over an essential part of your network. It’s very easy to set-up and creating a free account will allow you to configure settings for phishing prevention, typo correction and browsing statistics. OpenDNS caches a lot of Internet domain names so accessing them is much faster. The more you use the service, the more your favourite places are cached. Now if someone could get me fiber optics, we’d be off to the races.
Networking, Productivity
browsing, dns, dns caching, free account, Networking, opendns
