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• 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.

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. 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!
   

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

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.

Did I really see that? My database was down! Just the minute I wanted to write a post! Unbe-f*ing-lievable! Not that anybody would care, but still.

I thought the best way to end the day would probably be putting some words out for you. What has happened today? Aaah, not that much. I discovered that it is totally impossible to watch US television without going mad. I thought the program/advertising ratio in Germany would be bad… was I wrong! I also discovered that my body seems to build up some resistance against fastfood… even thinking about another visit to Sonic this evening made me kinda sick. Threw in one of my new multivitamin tablets to make myself believe this would make up for the lack of real, fresh food on my menu.

Akamai, one of the worlds biggest provider for high-scaled data transmission (like streaming the WWDC keynote from Steve Jobs) has got an interesting site online: It is the Net Usage Index for News. What this basically does is measuring the amount of visitors to the numerous news websites hosted by Akamai per minute worldwide. Updated every five minutes, you can see how many people in total view news sites online, either worldwide or by continent. You can also see the difference from the medium traffic in percent. This is sort of a global-scale measurement for interest in news – the more people looking up news, the more likely it is that something important is going on. Akamai also offers nifty looking Widgets for both Dashboard (Apple OSX) and Konfabulator (Win & OSX).

Oh no, I am tech talking again! Ok, enough of this now.

I have seen two movies today that I can not recommend:

• Me and You and Everyone We Know:
  Slow, disturbing, little interesting. No real beginning, no real end. Deserves being called “indy” through and through, but that is the best I can say about it.
• The Complete Guide to Guys:
  The offspring of the same named book, this is a collection of little situation-based scenes that shall describe the behaviour of guys in a funny way. Well, it made me laugh a few times, and it had the inevitable “oh yeah, that is so me!”-moments. But unfortunateley it is just not well done at all – there is no choreography, there is no style.
  

technorati tags: Akamai, Net Usage Index

I have heard this word – bandwith – so many times today, I guess it is worth an entry. Or at least worth being the title of this post

I heard it from Leo Laporte on the podcast of his KFI radio show. The guys on Digital Life TV said it. They said it on MacCast and on TWiT (This Week in Tech) – oh, that’s Leo Laporte again. The point is: I watch and hear a lot more content that is distributet over the internet than on “old” media like radio or TV. I actually watch very little TV right now – only the “must see” Mythbusters on wednesdays really catches my attention. This content flowing over the internet needs bandwith. One episode of TWiT? 50MB. One of the MacCast? 50MB. One of Digital Life TV? 250MB (as it is video). Since I came here, I downloaded about 8GB only in Podcasts. Azureus, my BitTorrent client, tells my I have downloaded over 30GB during the last 12 days it was running.
To give you a short comparison: The harddisk in our first computer at home had 120MB. And that was enough! (Until, of course, I wanted to install that cool new adventure game that needed 20MB of space – unheard of these days!). I fill that up in under 10 minutes now with what comes over the Internet. My Laptop has 100GB capacity – and I can hardly save all the stuff fast enough to DVDs to keep some space free.

Transferring these huge amounts of data causes some problems. For me as an enduser it is nothing to worry about: I have a flatrate, which means I can transfer as much data as I want for a fixed price. For these who offer the data, it is not that easy. Leo Laporte had a 5000 USD bill from the company where he hosts his website last month – just for the data that has been downloaded from there. (Until, luck for him, they offered to jump in and cover the bill for a favourable mention in his show). Makers of podcasts and videocasts all over the place face the same problem: Once their shows get popular, they need a LOT of bandwith. Just a thousand subscribers to TWiT makes 50GB transfer per weekly show, makes 200GB a month. And they, as one of the most listened to podcasts worldwide, have a lot more than just 1000 people listening to them.
So – how do they get the bills paid?

• Sponsorship: As I mentioned, getting sponsored by the company that hosts the data is one of the most convenient ways. It transfers the risk to the hoster, and they in return usually get mentioned in the show and on the website. It does not happen that often for obvious reasons: It has to pay out for the sponsor, and this tradeoff is hard to calculate. The value of the free advertising versus the bandwith the company has to cover. At least if the hoster would need to invest in infrastructure, i.e. faster servers, bigger backbones, switches, etc. (stuff that is pricy), this concept is likely to fail in the long run.
• Donations: A lot of podcasts rely more or less on the donations of the subscribers. Since payment services like PayPal have made small transactions cheap, secure and fast, asking for a little donation in exchange for focussed, up to date and advertisement-free content works better than ever. Still it is very hard to solely rely on that source of income: Donations are, by definition, voluntary. This on the one hand forces the maker to provide something with real value for the subscribers, which I consider a good thing, but on the other hand puts the maker in two risks: First, to pressure the audience to donate to keep the podcast alive – which then quickly has both the notion of despair and greed, even if not intentionally. Bad thing. Second, donations are uncalculable for the biggest part, which means that long-term planning (like buying or renting faster equipment for example) is impossible. Not to forget the bottom line: A majority of the internet users does not want to donate for something they get for free – there is no incentive for them unless the podcast made them in some way dependent by providing them with something they do not want to miss anymore and cannot substitute by something else. The fast growing podcasting world makes it hard on the substitute part. For nearly every show, especially the tech related ones, there are ten others trying to do more or less the same.
• Ads: There  are two types of ads related to podcasts: Ads on the website and ads in the show. Ads on the website are easy to get once a certain level of pageviews is reached – Google AdSense for example- , but there are two major downsides: Most people do not go to the website but subscribe to the podcast using some sort of podcast directory, like the iTunes Music Store in iTunes, PodcastAlley and others. Second, ads on websites do not spit out that much money. It might be enough to keep the website running, but when it comes to high traffic costs, the website would have to be even more popular than the podcast itself. That leaves advertisement in the show, either as mention of the moderator (i.e. “thanks to XYZ for hosting our podcast on their server”) or as advertisement block, like you know it from your radio. These ads are generally harder to get unless the podcast is really popular, and the topic the podcast deals with is another important factor. Don’t forget that podcasting is still a really new trend: There are no official statistics (and most propably never will be), and outside the tech world podcasting is not as widely known and used as people like me often assume. (It shocks me every time when I talk to someone who does not know what a podcast is). The good thing is that they tend to pay better, especially when the topic is focussed. There are some ads on Inside Mac Radio for example, and of course they all deal with Mac stuff. With enough subscribers, this in fact is a really attractive advertising model, but as mentioned, in the moment mostly limited to tech.
• Podcast hosting services: Unlike the aforementioned points, this does not help paying the bandwith bills but helps preventing them. Over the last year some services have come up that provide hosting services that are tailored to the needs of podcasters. Free bandwith and automatic generation of the RSS feeds are the starters. Growing disk space is another fine point: Instead of assigning a fixed amount of disk space, you get a monthly amount of space for your podcasts. It grows every month by that amount, so you never run out of space. One of the services I know of right now is Liberated Syndication, another one is Podhost (a german service). They take over the risk of the bandwith they need to provide for a fixed price, which makes me suspicious in an instant: As a business you don’t take such risk if you cannot control it. Well, most of the podcasts hosted on that services will never grow big and require a lot of bandwith, and this base will in most cases cover for the peaks that some successfull podcasts generate. Still, a look into their terms&conditions is advised.

technorati tags: bandwith, podcasts, advertising, hosting

Mac

• a beautiful software, especially useful on small displays, is Desktop Manager. It adds virtual desktops that can be accessed by a simple shortcut, and it even does some nice transition effects… some more eye-candy to get Windows user to “aaaa!” and “oooh!”. I have five desktops right now: One main window where I handle files and everything new opens up, one for the internet where I have all the browsers (right now I am simultaniously using Firefox, Camino, Flock and Safari – Opera was cool in the 90s, and Internet Explorer is only on my disk to make fun of it from time to time), one desktop for mails and iTunes each, and one workspace where I have everything open I need for the work I am currently on. This way I don’t have to switch back and forth between applications like mad, the desktop does not get cluttered, and I have fast access to everything I need. Sweet.
• Why does the administrator panel of my blog work correctly in every browser but not on Safari, the one that comes from Apple itself? Weird.
• Flock gets better fast: Right now it is out as 0.4.11, still heavy beta, but in the week I’ve been using it they already integrated the category feature of WordPress (aka, my blogsoftware), which was one of the main things I had missed. They seem to come along really good!
• On a Mac there are so many tools increasing productivity – it is mindblowing. Owning a Mac for about 8 months, I am now so much faster than I ever was on a Windows machine! The general workflow is great. I never have to do any work on the operating system. Updates are easy. Installing or deleting programs is easy. No viruses. No spyware. I only had two crashes where I had to reset – both when I did something I knew would be likely to crash the machine. I nearly never have to restart – close the display, it goes to standby, open it again and in three seconds I can continue working where I was. And this just works, every time. No hoping and cursing like on Windows

Music

I said it before, I’ll say it again: Music is one of the finest inventions ever nature and then us humans could think of. I have my Shure’s plugged into my ears and all the disturbing sounds surrounding come to a halt – the A/C, the rumbling train, the police sirens – being replaced by great music, like some bigband sounds from Maynard Ferguson, the new album of the Black Eyed Peas or the refreshingly different tunes from The Streets.

My weekend

This weekend was great. We rocked the presentation on Saturday and handed in the paper. I think we will get a pretty good grade. It was really interesting listening to the other four presentations: There are a lot of really experienced people in this course. Should be, as it is the Professional MBA course. You can really tell how much experience someone has in giving presentations: While some people are relaxed and easily deal with distractions or little problems, others totally freeze when something happens they did not expect. When it was my turn during our presentation I suddenly realized that the content of the slide was not was I was supposed to talk about… well, I hope I am more towards the first category, at least I did not freeze Then we got something to eat, went home… and at 1pm it already felt like a whole day had passed. Was I wrong! In the evening Michael convinced me to go out with Brittany and him. She brought a girlfriend of hers, and together we first hit a bar at the Vista and then went home to get some more drinks. It really was a fun evening, but I have to admit I was a bit tired when I went to bed at about 9am. Following this eventful Saturday, Sunday was reeeeeally mellow. Watched some Scrubs, slept long into the afternoon, got something from Sonic… most productive thing was writing some emails and this entry, I guess.

After three power days at USC I wanted to finish off the week with dutifully attending a conference call this morning at 11am. To give you a better idea how hard it was to get myself going there, let’s just say I was still drunk from the halloween party yesterday when I woke up. I realized that when I tried to climp down from my indoor-terrasse and nearly fell down head first. Somehow I managed to get dressed and on my way, and I even was quite on time – 4 minutes late. The only problem: There was nobody there. Not fully trusting my memory in that state of mind I asked some people in adjoining offices if they knew something about a telco – and they did. It had been cancelled. D’Oh! Double D’Oh when you consider that I had received two mails from my teammates only 40 minutes earlier confirming the now-cancelled appointment. So I had a nice one-hour walk, half drunk, totally overhung, but at least the sun was shining.

Slightly demotivated I went back to bed, and voilà, two aspirin and some hours later I was as good as new. Maybe with more stubble in my face, but OK. I decided to make this day a multimedia day then – means: Get the hell into the internet. I think surfing the internet is for sissies and low-techs. I dive the internet, and hell yeah, you can even get the good old narc out of it, tunnel view included.

No idea what I’m talking about? Well, come on, get out there and learn diving! It is the most fun ever, and one of the few sports that actually open a whole new world for you! When diving deeper than 25 meters or 80 feet (which is quite close to the advised limit for recreational divers of 30 meters or 100 feet), one is likely to experience nitrogen narcosis. This happens when due to the pressure conditions at that depth more nitrogen than usual gets dissolved in the blood. This leads to a narcosis that gets worse and worse with increasing depth. The effects are manifold: People get giggly, start laughing about the most absurd things. They get careless and more daring than usual. They react more intense to emotions – positive and negative. They fail to assess situations: Life threatening situations can be seen as unimportant, unimportant things might be perceived as utmost important. The field of view narrows down to the area right in front. In greater depths even halluzinations can appear. This said, the nitrogen narcosis itself is completely harmless. The things people do when under nitrogen narcosis are not, and in fact a good share of divers died this way. For example, when they found the regulator in their mouth disturbing and decided to spit it out. Unfortunateley, the regulator is the thing through which one breathes under water. You do the math.

But I got off topic again. So I went diving the internet, once again all stuff mac that interests me, as well as the newest stuff in web application development (keyword Ruby on Rails right now). I came across

• MacZealots.com , a news, articles and reviews site for the mac, whose creator just organized the “An Evening at Adler” event (go to the site to find out what the heck that is)
• Worldwind, the NASA Software that presents an interesting alternative to Google Earth,
• Digital Life TV, a downloadable TV show that deals with all hot news all about computers and the digital life (as the name says),
• Ecto, a software for Win and Mac that lets you do your blogging offline and with loads of helpful features from a application on your desktop,
• I found out (after using my blog software for over 5 months) that I can activate a little plugin here in my blog that makes it SO much easier to write my entries and give them some better structure… it is so embarassing… but I am reeheaaheeaheeeeally (to say it with Dr. Cox) happy I finally opened my eyes wide enough to notice that.

Then I watched “National Treasure” (again), got me some “hungry man” food from Sonic and now the people in Germany get up and start IMing me. As I said, multimedia day. Stay tuned!

Did I post them before? Anyway, point made. The new Quad-Processor PowerPC powers up to 2 30″ Cinema Displays. Or up to 8x 23″ CD’s. That’s wicked stuff. University was fun today, but not that much happened. Except from International Management, where I was the only one to guess right what the outcome of a case would be… out of a total gut feeling. Which felt good. In the guts. no really – it’s nice to see that somewhere I have at least a hint of an idea of a feeling for that stuff.

(To be honest, i could go on and on and on about how I made the right decision in an PROFESSIONAL MBA CLASS and all the others did not, but hey, I’m not that kind of guy.)

Did I already mention…. ah, you know it. OK. Won’t happen again.

By the way—– gotcha! Just checking.