And one and two and three... voila it's Smith!

Not really sure how this first ever guest post on GottaQuirk came up. Actually I do, it was an email from myself to Rob telling him a great idea for a blog post, only to find it bouncing back to me with the canny observation that I should do it. I now see why he is the Capo di Tutti Capi Quirk.

               Smith                

I have just returned to these sunny shores from Mudisland, or the land of bandwidth plenty, (I mean it comes bundled with your cell phone) to the bandwidth desert of South Africa. Let's just say ones surfing habits have to change. No longer the 4gbs per day of "documentaries", no no - those are long gone. Not knowing my ADSL from my IBURST to my 3G, I decided best I work out how to minimise my bandwidth usage. Otherwise I may find myself working at Seaworld. Again.

I have worked out a 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4 Step list to bandwidth Nirvana! It's basically divided into 2 steps, one for browsing, and one for email. The whole point is to give you control over what you see, not some twit on the other side of the world, who doesn't give a fig about bandwidth!

Step 1) Download the Fox. Firefox 3 is the latest flavour, available at all good terminals now. If you really wanted to be smart you could locate yourself a Freedom Toaster and get yourself a whole heap of other open source goodness.

Step 2) Install, and reboot FF. All good, now surf to add-ons at FF. You are now, as we say in the capital of India, Durban, going to "himprove" your browser! You are going to be restarting your browser a few times, but it will be worth it!

Step 3) Add-ons you need to install

• Ad Block Plus - This will take care of those ads and banners that take forever to download. Once installed, you must subscribe to some blocking lists. This means you don't have to write code yourself, and that's a definite plus! Install this one by surfing to Known Adblock Plus, subscriptions, and click the EasyElement + Easy List subscription , and Adblock plus will do the rest.
• Flashblock Plus - Blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves placeholders on the webpage that allow you to click to download and then view the Flash content.
• Stop Autoplay - Disable the autoplay of the embedded music and movies, making that great music stop before it blast out over the office is another added bonus.
• No Script - Various scripting languages can add traffic volume to our measly connection. Stop them like Gauteng traffic with this add on.

Once these are installed, reboot FF, and you should be on a step to bandwidth nirvana. You should also have Search Status and Forecast Fox installed. It's just the right thing to do.

If you are a serious band width ninja, you could also do the following, thanks to Martin at Ghacks.net.

• Disable Images - You can tell FF not to load images, so a huge bandwidth saver, Click Tools --> Options under the Content Tab. Look for the little box called "Load Images Automatically"
• You can also disable link prefetching, stop auto update, and stop FF trying to auto update your search plugins. Martins post has more about how to do this.

Step 4) Email.

Eish. How many of us have friends that send "Weekend Sales Reports" only to find, ahem, you have just eaten up some bandwidth for some NSFW images? Let's kill that right here! You need to work out what your email set up is and go from there.

The easiest option is to download Thunderbird, the email client brother of the Fox. In Thunderbird, when you are setting up an account, you have an option not to download emails over a certain size. Install, set up an account as per the instructions you find here, then go to the account settings and tell Thunderbird not to download anything over a certain size.

That should take care of things. However not all of us are on Thunderbird, I am on Gmail Imap and Apple Mail, so I have had to come up with another option.

I basically tell Gmail to filter all attachments of a certain type, and not to put them into the inbox, but rather the archive. You do this by creating a filter. In Gmail, open the offending email, and click on the filter assistant like this screen shot.

When you click "Filter messages like this" you will be presented with this box. Make sure the from field is empty, so you catch all the messages with the same filetype, tick the "has attachment" box and insert the filename: wmv or what ever the offending file you are trying to trap is.

Now click test search, this should bring up all previous emails in your Gmail with nasty bandwidth eating attachments. If it's working, click next step.

In this step you tell Gmail what to do with the mails, I created a label, so I know where they all are, and most importantly told it to skip the inbox.

And that's it, you should be well on your way to reducing some bandwidth expenses! If you are running an IMAP on AppleMail also follow G's instructions for optimising your connection.

If you are using Outlook, well I pity you. No I am just kidding - this site has some ways of doing it. If you have some other ways, especially for Outlook, please let me know in the comments.

S.mithcannotbelievehetypedsomuch