kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Tag Archives: Utilities

MacUpdate Bundle Promo – 90% Discount!

The folks over at MacUpdate are doing it again.  They’ve bundled together a ton of apps and are selling them off for one low packaged price.  The deal is set to expire this Tuesday, December 12th at about 20:00 PST.

The software included in the bundle is:

Full retail cost for the bundle is nearly $600.00, and the bundle will be going for about $50.00 USD until Tuesday.

Project “Gutsy Gibbon” — Adventures with Ubuntu

I’ve been running a Linux machine at the house for some time now, experimenting with trying to use it for a central file server where I can get at things like music and pictures from any of the computers in the house, and in some cases from over the Internet.

I’ve tried using various incarnations of Red Hat including the Fedora Core (5 & 6) series, but eventually I hit some kind of a wall and give up. After all the technology is supposed to be there to serve me, not the other way around.

'A Grid'
Photo Credit: IO_Burn on Flickr

Last week I listened to the second episode of the Knightcast. This was the continuation of the series “the Grid”. The main focus of the episode was getting started using Ubuntu as a “power-station” in a home or (very small) business network.

I listen to most of my podcasts in the car, so the first time I listened to this episode, I was driving around the city on my daily commute and it gave me lots of time to think about just how useful this type of “home server” might be. When I got home, I pulled the podcast up and went through the first part of it again, the bit that explains some of how the server could be put to good use. Most of it is pretty common sense stuff. The “power-station” server machine allows for a central place in your home where documents, media and other files can be stored and it provides a mechanism for making that data remotely accessible.

Knightwise also discussed a couple of options for remote administration, which is always a good thing. I’d much rather be able to addess and deal with my server by way of my MacBook from the deck (or the bedroom) instead of tromping all the way downstairs where the (very noisy) desktop machines have been relegated.

Almost immediately a few new possibilities began rolling to mind…

For some of the software development that I do, it would be very handy to have access to a SubVersion repository that I could use to manage the code from anywhere on the Internet. Oh sure, there are other services like SourceForge and GoogleCode which offer similar services, but it never hurts to be able to have full control over your machine, and your information.

With a built-in server, adding FTP (or better yet SFTP) capability makes it that much easier to share specific files or data with friends and colleagues. Again you could sign up for a service like X-Drive or Box.net for this, but why not take advantage of owning all your own data. If done correctly, the self-hosted model can be much more secure.

Add to this the fact that my router, by way of it’s spanky new DD-WRT firmware, supports several free DDNS services, and I have a new server set up to serve my content on the web or anywhere else. And I don’t even have to remember my IP address (which admittedly hasn’t changed in the over 2 years I’ve had my service… thank you Mr. ISP!)

It sounds like there are going to be some more great tips coming up in future Knightcast episodes featuring “the Grid”. I wonder what else my 6-year old P4 desktop will be able to do for me!

Take it with you — Portable Apps

I realize that for some of you, this story isn’t exactly news.  To be honest, even I’ve known about PortableApps for quite a while, but I’ve never put it to use until recently.

PortableApps is a series of applications which have been built and configured for the sole purpose of running from an external device such as a flash drive, memory card or external hard drive.  This allows you to port not only your data from PC to PC, but your applications as well.  You can keep your email client (Thunderbird), web browser (Firefox) and many other tools and applications on the USB key and run them on any computer with Windows and a USB port.

How is this useful you may ask?  A recent example:

I have been doing some presentations at work last week we had a laptop whose Powerpoint application refused to open (read: Runtime error every time it started).  Admittedly a reboot probably would have fixed the probem, but I couldn’t take that chance.  I had to get another laptop, (wait for Windows to boot), and get it all set up.  This wasted about 15 minutes of everyone’s time.

A perfect solution to this would have been to use the OpenOffice slideshow application Impress and run the entire thing from my USB drive where the presentation was stored.  So over the past couple of days, I’ve been trying out my new setup (Firefox, KeePass and OpenOffice) in the office to see how it runs on various other computers.  So far, so good.

Have a look at the PortableApps suite.  There are tons of great applications for this technology, and I’ll probably cover some more examples in the coming weeks.

Mac Lab Rat #10 – Global Geek Podcast

Well here we are, the 10th edition of the Mac Lab Update for Global Geek Podcast #65!

This week’s first tool is a Dashboard Widget called Delivery Status that will allow you to track packages from over a dozen different companies. This quick and dirty widget allows you to quickly hunt down that pesky new Wii, iPhone or eBay package that you’ve been waiting for without having to remember which website you need to find to look it up.

Some of the packages it can track are:
- US Postal Service & CanadaPost
- Posten in Sweeden & Norway
- FEDEX
- Apple
- Nintendo
and several others…

Not all services are are available in all countries, but it’s a really good start. There’s even compatibility with Growl to notify you when a package’s status changes.

Download Delivery Status from Mike Piontek‘s website.

Second on the block this week is a set of scripts for Apple’s Mail and Address Book apps. The scripts were written by Andreas Amann and are a collection of AppleScripts that are used in conjuntion with the standard OS X mail application to add many new features, and enhance some existing ones.

The API available to AppleScript and Cocoa developers for most of the built-in apple applications provides a myriad opportunities for elements of the applications to be scripted, or to combine them together.

Some of the scripts provided by “Mail Scripts” are:

- Add addresses: Not just the sender, but any email address contained in the header of the message (to, from, cc etc…) (Integrates with Address Book to store contact information)

- Create new Mail rules based on the selected message. this saves lots of tedious data-entry

- Schedule Mail Delivery for a later time/date. This allows you to write and pre-send a message, and then let the Mail application deliver it to its target at the appointed time. (integrates with iCal for scheduling)

There are several other scripts as well. If you’re a regular Apple Mail user, and find it lacking any of these capabilities, download Mail Scripts.

Third up this week is SketchBox, developed by Germany’s OMZ:Software. Sketchbox is a desktop-sticky application for the Mac which allows you to either draw or type notes to yourself. The sticky notes have two separate layers, a drawing canvas and a text input box.

The stickies can be deployed on your desktop, and will each occupy a space like a separate window, and can be managed while the main window is closed. The application will also allow the stickies to have alarms set on them, but they’re set in a timer format. You set the number of days, hours & minutes until the alarm goes off, instead of setting a specific time. At the appointed time, a cell-phone like ring will remind you of the task at hand.

Finally, Sketchbox provides support for tablet devices, allowing you to sketch to your heart’s content without even reaching for a keyboard. It’s in this context that the pull-slider interface for the alarms makes the most sense.

I’ve never really been a fan of Stickies type applications, and in some ways there’s quite a bit of polish missing from SketchBox. I’d love to see this type of functionality implemented as a dashboard widget instead. Still, the freehand drawing ability is pretty cool and I recommend at least taking a look at Sketchbox.

Last up this week is some tips for making use of a great built-in OS X feature called Aliases. This is a blog post from MyFirstMac.com which outlines some “killer-app” possibilities for what most consider at first blush to be a pretty innocuous feature of an OS.

The tips range from simple productivity gains for automatically reconnecting Network Drives, to workarounds for FrontRow’s limitation of not finding content outside of your Movies folder.

There’s a discussion started after this post with a few bonus tips as well, definitely worth a look for any Mac-Switcher’s out there, or those who just want to learn all they can about their mac.

Go and check this post out!

NinjaWords – Quick definitions

Zutter Bug tipped me off today to one of the greatest additions to the Web 2.0 space… a new free dictionary service called Ninja Words. Launched in November 2006 by Phil Crosby, it’s an Ajax-based dictionary site which pulls all of it’s information from Wiktionary and the Princeton WordNet.

It is (for the moment at least) lightning fast and has been able to find all of the words and phrases I’ve thrown at it so far, including:

The tool will also correct spelling (I forgot the second “m” in grammarian), as well as distinguish between common and proper nouns (note the two spellings of Enterprise).

This tool also comes with the ability to have a Windows Tray application, though the link to the OS X widget is broken. Hoorah!

Jing – Screencasting your world

A few weeks ago on the GGP, Dave and Tim did a review of a project called Jing which is a image and video screen capture and screencasting tool for both Mac and Windows.

A couple of days ago I was asked to create a tutorial at work for a new project we’re working on instead of having to continually do training sessions for my team.  I’ve given Jing a shot, and the early results are extremely encouraging!

I’ve been able to capture video segments (with audio!) of the training material, and will be able to produce it into a full length e-learning “howto” so that the team has something to work with when I go on holidays.

The tool produces .SWF files by default, but there are several video conversion apps out there which will manipulate your SWF’s into a more universally recognized format.

Check out the Jing project, and give it a try for yourself.

MacPorts: Subversion setup

In trying to upload my first WordPress plugin to the subversion servers at wp-plugins.org, I found that I didn’t have Subversion installed on the Macbook yet. So I turned to my first source for all Mac tools which originated in the Linux/Unix realm and that’s MacPorts.

MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts) is a package manager for Mac OS X which can handle the installation, removal and updating of many tools. The vast majority of these are command-line programs. They run the spectrum from development tool like Subversion or Ruby on Rails, to network tools like bind or arpwatch.

Typical syntax for installing a MacPort is:

sudo port install some-application

A quick note about the Subversion install: you may need to ensure that your MacPorts install is up-to-date. I needed to run a “self update” of MacPorts before my subversion install would complete. See the transcript below to see what I mean…


titanium:~/Projects/WP-Plugins kdmurray$ su root

titanium:/Users/kdmurray/Projects/WP-Plugins root# port install subversion +tools
Error: Unable to execute port: wrong # args: should be "proc name args body"

titanium:/Users/kdmurray/Projects/WP-Plugins root# port selfupdate
DarwinPorts base version 1.400 installed
Downloaded MacPorts base version 1.5
Configuring, Building and Installing new MacPorts base
selfupdate done!

titanium:/Users/kdmurray/Projects/WP-Plugins root# port install subversion +tools

If you’re working with command-line tools on your Mac, and trying to compile linux tools from scratch, give MacPorts a shot. It will quite literally save you hours of time and frustration.

Applescript: Text to AIFF

I recently had a need to quickly and quietly encode some text to an audio file on my Macbook.  I found a very short, simple and effective Applescript file right on the Apple website which does just that.

The script will prompt you to choose one of the built-in system voices, then produce your file.  If you need an MP3, just open it up with iTunes and convert the track.

Sheer Brilliance!

PS: Those of you who watch Command N should try out the Zarvox voice. ;)

PowerTray 0.9 Beta Released

Well after several weeks of trying to work on things (and 10 days of waiting for SourceForge) I’ve managed to get the first Beta-build of PowerTray published and available for download.

The initial version has a few interesting features:

  • Plugin-based architecture to allow for future feature development
  • XML configuration file to allow for assignment of Hotkeys
  • Plugin for Google Search
  • Plugin for Wikipedia Search (english only)

This project can be downloaded from the SourceForge project site. Please leave your comments and thoughts on future enhancements.