May I introduce to you – my menu bar. I thought it might be nice to share what I put up there, what it does, and where you can get it.
The setup varies from time to time, some items are new, some have been there for a long time… anyway: Let’s get to details!
- Coconut WiFi: Tells you at a glance if there is free WiFi around. Great for the connection-seeking traveller. Here at home it is my FON-hotspot that makes the light green. Just got a major update, which caused me to try it again. Free.
- Plazer: Propagates your current location on plazer.com and lets you keep track of the places you go (and go online). They recently released a facebook plugin, too. My profile is here. Free.
- DesktopManager: I can’t live without it anymore: Virtual desktops on my mac. Currently I have five of them, through which I can scroll via shortcut or mouseclick. Great to avoid window-cluttering and seperating tools for different workflows. Freeware.
- Twitterific: Desktop application for Twitter, the mini-blogging site. Automatically shows you incoming messages from friends and people you follow and allows you to quickly twitter news yourself. Freeware. Me on twitter (used rarely)
- AudioScrobbler (last.fm client version): Connects to iTunes and sends the songs you listen to to last.fm – you can see my most recently played music on the sidebar right on this page! Freeware.
- Mozy: Online backup, see this post. The agent automatically keeps your online backup up to date. Sign up with this link for a free account, and we both get 256 MB free storage extra!
- Aurora: Sophisticated alarm clock for the mac. You can set multiple alarms, play iTunes playlists, set fade-in, sleep, recurrency, etc. – I love waking up to it rather than some annoying beep. Freeware.
- YouControl Tunes: Control iTunes from everywhere. A dropdown menu lets you quickly manipulate what is played, lets you rate songs, look through your whole iTunes library and more.
- SlimBatteryMonitor: More options and flexibility than the system setting’s battery monitor. Freeware.
- Quicksilver: One of THE most useful tools on the mac. I use it mostly as fast application starter, but you can do real voodoo with this gem. Free.
- Menu Meters: Great set of dials that give you important data. Somehow I do feel better when my mac does not respond and I have visual confirmation that the CPU is maxing out. Bandwith monitor another must for me.
- Scripts Menu: Does anyone know how I can get rid of this?
- OSX System settings: I use the keychain menu to quickly enable the screensaver with password when I leave my computer unattended for a moment with other people around, the rest should be known to you.
What is on your menu bar?
Summer has our little village in tight grip this week. Great thing – but it is a pain to have the good aluminium G4 sitting on your lap in this heat.
Comes to the rescue: G4 Fan Control! For G4 iBooks and PowerBooks. A little freeware tool that lets you modify the temperature thresholds before the fans go on. Having it set to something between 40 and 50 degrees celsius really makes a difference.
Today I’ll give you a quick rundown of some software that is a potential (and proven) ass-saver.
Lets go from little twitch to “costs me all hairs left on the head”-seriousness.
- Attachment Scanner Plugin for Mail.app
This little gem scans an outgoing message for clues that you refer to an attachment (in multiple languages!) and asks your confirmation if it does not find attachments. Great for reducing the amount of “oh, sorry, forgot the file, here you go”-mails. Free.
- SuperDuper!
It makes a complete, bootable backup of your harddrive. Put it on a Firewire drive, and you can boot from the external drive in case your internal drive has issues. Up and running in no time. Basic functionality is free, for smart backup (that only copies changed files since last backup), sandboxing and a whole lot more (scriptable!), you pay 28 bucks.
- dd – for the tough cases
The link gets you to a tutorial on macosxhints.com that tells you how to get data off a faulty disk using the Unix program dd. With some luck, this helps you rescue your data. Free. Of course, had you been backing up, this would not be needed in the first place.
- SpinRite – for the bad bad cases
This software is referenced so often when it comes to “last resort in being able to get a drive to work again”, there must be something to it. Mac users even have to be willing to move their drive to a windows machine – but hey, we will not tell anyone. Comes a hefty 89 bucks, so a new drive is cheaper – if you can afford losing that data!
Today I faced the task of printing out over 30 documents. First I thought – well, this is gonna be tedious. Then I thought – wait! Maybe there is a way to do this easier! Of course, on a Mac, there is.
Automator is a tool that came with OSX 10.4, and I have not really used it before, albeit knowing its potential mightyness. Today was the big day. I opened Automator, added two Finder actions, and boom – I had a small script that asked me to select files, and then printed them to the desired printer. Like a charm. Best: I have saved it as little standalone program:
That now just waits to be used to save me some time again 
Oh – and by the way: This picture was made, edited and uploaded in one nice swoosh by Skitch. I just got into the beta – and what can I say: This might just be the PaintShopPro on web and mac steroids that I ever dreamt of! It is great to use, and most importantly, fun to use as well. Integrates with flickr, too, but for the first pictures I chose to go with “mySkitch“, their picture sharing site that comes with the software (at least now, in beta). Great stuff – I can’t wait to explore Skitch some more in the breaks between summarizing roughly 150 pages of text in the next two days (yep, the thesis knows no weekend!)
Speaking about breaks: Later today, my landlord has scheduled FOUR people/families to have a look at my apartment. Thank god I did not dare to mess it up the slightest bit since the last visit. But come on, two hours showtouring on a Saturday? Give me a break!
Technorati Tags: skitch, automator, myskitch
I officially claim: The people at OmniGroup can read my mind. Today, I saw that iGTD has released yet another update. Coming from kGTD and having followed the creating of OmniFocus, I had seen but so far ignored the roaring development of iGTD with its growing fanbase – I had even withstood the fact that they integrate with my newly licenced copy of MailTags2.
Still… today I felt that I have to get back to being more organized, and that means using a trusted GTD system again. I had been slow on keeping my kGTD up to date – it just did not feel natural enough to work in it, as good as it is, and just knowing that people are already using the OmniFocus alpha made me wonder why I still have to put up with its ancestors.
So I did two things: First, I updated my copy of iGTD, pulled it out of the trashbin, and tried to like it (for the tenth time, at least). Did not work. I tried to add some tasks, and it gave me options that I did not want to have, it did not click with me at all. Second, I tried to find out if there is a chance that I have been already selected as alpha-tester from Omni, but did not notice – I was hoping they sent me a message that my spamfilter caught. But no – only the regular Viagra, Pornsite, Stock-trading boredom. I checked for their status of the invitations (they are working their way down the OmniFocus-mailing list chronologically) – and it said that they are up to the day BEFORE I signed up. Which made me sigh, search all email folders again, and get back to work – knowing that I will jump up and down once I can get my hands on OmniFocus, and knowing that I really don’t click with its alternatives.
Guess what happened minutes ago: I got my sweet invite. Omni can read minds! Now – I know, for most of you out there it is not imaginable how happy one can be to be allowed to get an alpha version of some piece of software. Alpha means pretty much it is under heavy development, unstable, crashy, changing every few hours / days and nothing is for granted. But still – this is not just any software: I have been reading up on 43folders and kinkless.com, later on omnigroup.com about its development, I have drank up every blog post, and watched every screencast. It was almost there, just not quite.
Now, folks, I got it. It installed my kGTD without major problems (only ignoring hyperlinks, but that is fine with me), and it is syncing well with iCal – it seems. Now all I have to do is force myself to go back to work.
