Technology

Useful Mac Applications Part 2

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I had so many new apps that where so cool I had to make a part 2 to my new and notable Mac software.

Skype & Gizmo are both relatively free VOIP clients. Skype is proprietary and very popular, and the Gizmo Project is an open source project. Both allow me to make and receive calls directly from my Mac without a phone. I have had a skype phone number for about a year now, and I just went out and bought the Gizmo number. I don’t use either service as much as I would like, but they both are fantastic. When I travel (not as often as I used to) they are great. I can use my bluetooth headset paired directly with my Mac for a long calls. For $20 I bought a USB handset for Skype that acts like a normal phone handset. It is very cool. Now that both apps are Universal binaries I am happy on my work Powerbook or my home Mac.

Unison is a universal binary Usnet News reader. I go into and out of phases where I use Usenet. I am currently loving Unison’s ease of use. It does bog down my Intel Mac when it is downloading lots of headers, but other than that it is a good all around app.

Rename4mac is a useful program that I have actually been using for a while but I wanted to throw it in. It takes any batch of files and allows you to rename them all in a new format. This is great for me since I can’t stand the format that my digital camera uses.

RDC Menu is a little freeware app that takes Microsoft’s Remote Desktop app for the Mac and lets you access it from the Menu bar. What is really does well is allow you to run multiple instances of RDC so you can have multiple remote sessions at the same time. You can do that with the windows version but until this app you couldn’t do it with the Mac one. For work this is helps out so much.

RPG is a freeware random password generator. It is a universal binary and it even lets you select some characters not to use in its random passwords. For my job it is great to be able to just wip up a few random passwords when I need them. I had a windows app that did the same thing but I finally found a replacement for it with RPG.

SnapNDrag is not as good as snagit for windows (or that is how I feel so far) but it is a great full screen capture program. It also lets you take snapshots of just one window, and more. It is very helpful for documentation. It is a helpful addition to my list of apps.

I will add more as I come across worthwhile software.

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Roundup of Useful Mac Applications

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Every few months I go through a phase of looking for new programs that improve my day to day work experience on the computer. Not sure why I do it in phases, but it always seems when I switch to one program I am getting 5 more. Some end up being really cool and I continue to use, and others are just a fad and I forget about them quickly. Below are quick reviews of the several new applications that are all around great apps!

Growl I something that I installed last year but stopped using it when I switched computers. I guess you can call it a unified application notification system. It gives you alerts and events from several apps as a single system. it can get annoying if you have it notify too much stuff, but once I tuned it I got it working great. I like that it tells me the itunes songs I just started playing, or that I have new email and gives a quick flash of who sent it and the subject.

Rapidweaver is a simple but feature filled web-page and site authoring program for the Mac. Since I started using the Mac I full time over Windows XP I have been lacking a good web editor. I used Dreamweaver for basic page edits, but I never liked it. I always ended up going back to my XP box for Frontpage to do web work. Now Frontpage isn’t that good either but I was used to it, and I didn’t find anything better. That was until I saw a review for RapidWeaver. It does have its limits, but for the home page I have, I was able to redo my entire site in RapidWeaver in a few hours. All 300 megs of photos and all. RapidWeaver is not perfect. I all but can’t use it on my Intel iMac (universal binary version coming soon or so they say), so I use it on my Powerbook. That being said this software was worth the money I spent on it!

HandBreak is a free utility that will take a DVD and convert it for use in iTunes or on your iPod (aka makes a Divix or H.264 format). It takes a while to run, but it works great! I can convert a bunch of DVD’s to my iPod and watch them on the way to and from work!

iSquint is another great program that lets me convert media into Divix and H.264 file formats for use in iTunes and my iPod. iSquint takes existing video files such as MPEG-2, or AVI’s and will convert them. iSquint is fast and easy to setup. With it I can take any TV show I record with my DVR and put it on my iPod to watch later or when I am traveling.

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Apple Has Got To Be Kidding!

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I am a fan of the Mac, but sometimes really stupid engineering is really stupid engineering. So I have a Mac Mini (PowerPC G4) and I just got an intel Mac Mini to test dual booting and virtual machines. All was fine for the first 2 days until I had to unplug both of the mini’s to move them around on my desk. Little did I know I mixed up the power adapters. If I noticed at the time I would say who cares. Identical power adapters in identical computers. No problem, right? Not really. Turns out the power bricks for the intel & powerPC mini’s are physically identical, but the voltage is totally different. To add insult to injury the plug is identical so you can plug in the wrong plug to the wrong mini. What does that yield? A mini or two that won’t power on.

According to apples support website they put up a KB article about the difference in power supplies. They show the nice difference in the power supplies. It is a light grey wording on the side of a white device that physically look the same. Yeah everyone will notice that difference! They say it is hard to confuse the two. BS!!! COME ON APPLE. DEC back in the mid 90’s had this issue with laptops we had at my old company. You plug the wrong one in and it fries the computer. Why make 2 devices physically identical when it can cause harm to your equipment if you use the wrong one? According to the same KB article, they say: “While using the incorrect power adapter won’t hurt your Mac mini, it could cause unexpected behavior, most notably an inability to turn the computer on!” Can someone tell me how that is NOT hurting the computer? I cannot believe a computer company that tries to be so consumer oriented like Apple can screw something up like this?

Screwing the adapters up was a stupid mistake, but one that should been made impossible by good design. I haven’t done more troubleshooting, but I am told that you can get the machine to recover from this. I just haven’t worked on it long enough. I really don’t want to have to call the unit in.

I am still like Apple hardware, but in my book they just dropped down a peg or three.

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People Actually Read This!

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A funny thing happened when I was looking at this sites statistics. I found people finding my site from an unlikely source, VMware’s blog site. Looks like someone over there found my March 27th post about a P2V. I thought that was very cool. Especially since I don’t get tons of hits to the site. I think they have great products, and I don’t mind telling people about them. I will just as easily say really bad things about bad products. See previous posts for really bad rants! Knock on wood, that P2V I wrote about is still running perfect after several weeks. Allot of people where skeptical about the Windows server not performing properly after the conversion to a virtual machine. My group was confident, but it was a hard sell to some. Now the skeptics are glad we did the conversion, and don’t worry about the app anymore.

The reference on the VMNT Blog got me wondering why in recent months after I changed the site’s URL why am I still having allot less page views than in the past. I used to have 5 times as many hits with the old domain name. I gave google a while to spider me and still no change. Kind of weird. I don’t mind that much since I write this stuff more as a journal than for recognition. In many ways I go out of my way for anonymity!

In other Virtual news for me I have Parallel’s Beta 4 installed on a brand new Intel Core Duo Mini at work. So far that VM product looks great. I can’t wait for a final version to come out. Anything to let me run Windows on my Mac without rebooting. I am still holding out hope that VMware will make a Workstation product, and maybe a management console for GSX & ESX server. Until then I think I will get by on Parallel’s, but one can dream for the future!

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Parallels Beta 3

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In the week since I first wrote about it Parallels Workstation for the Mac is now on beta3. So far it is shaping up to be a great product. I can’t wait for it to be gold and have the ability to use USB devices. I will wait until a final version before I start making Virtual Machines like I did with VMware workstation, but once it does go gold I will be making a bunch of the most widely used OS’s that I use so I can have them on my Mac. Very cool.

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Parallels

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As if they read my blog last night Parallels has released a beta of their Virtual Machine Workstation for Intel Mac’s. This is the product I have been waiting for. If it works, I will spend the money and buy it. As I write this entry I am installing Windows XP (SP-2) on my Core Duo iMac. So far the install has moved along quickly. That is a good sign, since that is how VMware installs of OS’s go when running from an ISO disk. Since VMware and Virtual PC are my only products I can compare it to I will. Virtual PC always took forever to install on a G4. I know Virtual PC was emulating, and this is a VM. I understand the differences, but I can be thankful for the speed!!!

I get to hopefully play with this once the VM is finished installing. Ironically I took the day off today to relax. Oh well, playing with a new toy or software is sort of relaxing!

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Boot Camp

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Every news site on the internet is talking about Boot Camp. It is an awesome idea. It really is, but since I am very picky I will be honest when I say it is not what I wanted! Really. I think having Windows on a Mac is a necessary evil. I just don’t want to have to dual boot. I have 2 Windows XP desktops at work (as of today, that number does change week by week) to augment my Powerbook for things like MS Access, Visio, Active Directory tools (when I am lazy and don’t want to use remote desktop), and other Windows only software. I honestly don’t use those machines very often. The main reason I use Windows at work is to run Vmware admin tools for my ESX and GSX servers, and Workstation to test desktop software installs. For home use I use Windows for 1 thing (not counting my dvr) and that is Quicken. I can’t stand quicken for the Mac. To dual boot for one or two applications would be a pain.

What would really be fantastic is a virtual machine running in OS X that would load up Windows. Lets face it, you own a mac for reason. I don’t want to deal with Windows if I have to, but I don’t want to run it all the time. Having a virtual machine that you can turn on and do one or two things with, and then turn off would be better to me than rebooting into XP. I tried virtual PC 5, 6, & 7 on the PowerPC, and it was so slow. Now that Apple has an Intel chip a virtual machine could be a viable option. Don’t get me wrong, Boot Camp is a great idea. I just think there are better things to come, I hope!

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Mac Linux Tools

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Yesterday’s issues did have one positive (well sort of) piece to it. I had the need to install a bunch of network monitoring tools on my powerbook. I know that allot of software from Linux/Unix has been ported over to the mac. I have used a bunch of it, but when you actually go looking for stuff and almost everything you try to find has been compiled to work on the mac you have to think, cool!

Some of the new tools on my Powerbook are now: NMAP, XNMAP, Etherreal, MTR, and more. I of course have the Darwin Ports install on the computer, but I honestly haven’t even cracked the surface of what I can run on it.

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Powerbook #5

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Today I got my a new powerbook. I know I just got one back in December but when you get the opportunity to upgrade you take it. Someone in my group was getting a laptop and he was going for a powerbook. He was going to be happy with any Mac laptop so I had the chance to go to the same 12″ powerbook I had but get a bigger hard drive. I figured why not. Now I have a maxed out 12″ powerbook with 1.25 gigs of ram and a 100gig hard drive. I should be ok for a while! Andrew is also happy sporting my old (4 months) 80gig model. This new computer is my 5th (if I counted correctly) 12″ powerbook, and most likely my last since the Macbook Pro’s hopefully will have a smaller model soon.

Moving to this Powerbook was a breeze. I have upgraded mac’s before (as you can tell by the number of Powerbooks I had), but I never used the migration tool that Apple has when you register the computer. This time I figured I would give it a try. Man will I use that tool again. All you do is plug in the old computer to the new one with a firewire cable and it copies anything and everything you want from it. It got all my applications, my user profiles and settings, misc files on the hard drive, and anything else I could think of. The only issue was 3 applications required re-install’s. Besides that it worked flawlessly. And it took about 2 hours to copy 50gigs of data. It was amazing. Yet another reason I am a Mac fan over Windows. Wow, a few years ago I would never have believed I would say that let alone put it in writing.

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Visiting The Parents

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I was at my parents place today to finish my dad’s computer upgrade. My mom had me come out there earlier than I originally planned since she was worried that the work would take too long. Boy was she wrong. Since I did most of the loading of software and moving files at my apartment on Saturday we were done setting everything up in like 45 minutes. I ended up just hanging out in my dad’s La z Boy watching an old Bond film waiting to go out to dinner. Man can you fall asleep in those chairs. I almost did like 3 times, then I couldn’t walk for 15 minutes since my legs where so relaxed (and blood deprived) from being reclined for 2 hours. It was nice and comfy.

We ended up meeting Carrie and Morgan in Forest Hills for dinner at this little restaurant on Austin street. It was decent food and I got to see everyone except for Michael. I am just glad that the whole computer upgrade is completed. I hopefully wont have to worry about that again for another 2-3 years!