Payton Place

Web-based travel planning service GoPlanit attempts to take the solo and tedious act of itinerary planning and inject it with a social element. Upon signing up for the service and selecting a destination city, GoPlanit can roll an itinerary for you. I told it I wanted to go to New York and I had no idea what I was doing. GoPlanit provided an instant travel itinerary I was able to tweak based on how active or low-key I wanted to be and how much money I had to blow. Have a few things planned you want to do, but a whole lot of downtime to go with it? GoPlanit has a “fill in the gaps” function on its planner which will suggest fun and interesting things to do in between other commitments. GoPlanit also offers support for mobile devices (including an iPhone-optimized mobile site) and a microblogging tool to journal your trip adventures.

Post Origination: LifeHacker

Right now there’s no easy way to sync your office documents back and forth to Google Docs (uh, hello Google?!), but if you’re comfortable at the command line, developer site Webmonkey details how to automatically back up your files to Google Docs using a Python script. The universal Google data backup and sync app is a long time in coming?someone build it, please!

In the face of internet service providers like Comcast instituting bandwidth-capping, the Simple Help weblog details how to use a router running the open-source DD-WRT firmware to monitor your bandwidth. It’s actually very simple to do, requiring no work on your part aside from installing DD-WRT on your router. DD-WRT automatically tracks bandwidth, so from there it’s a matter of knowing where to look. If you’re running the user-friendly Tomato firmware (we also showed you how to install Tomato), you can easily access your daily, weekly, or monthly bandwidth as well.

Like DD-WRT, Tomato automatically tracks bandwidth usage for you, so all you need to know is where to look. Just log into the Tomato interface, and then click on the Monthly link under Bandwidth in the sidebar (or, if you’re using a default configuration, just follow this link). You’ll get a simple table displaying your bandwidth stats for the month. Tomato also displays bandwidth use by week, day, and even in real-time if you’re interested.

I’ve used DD-WRT and Tomato exclusively over the past few years, so I’m not really sure what the status is for bandwidth monitoring on most default router firmware. If your router supports bandwidth monitoring, let’s hear about it in the comments.