Friday, 17 March 2006, 08:36:32 EDT
It has been a little over a year since I bought my PowerBook, my first Macintosh. One of the deciding factors in my purchase was the availability of free software; either Free Open Source Software (FOSS) or plain old freeware. The FOSS movement is still gaining ground in the Mac world. But those developers that haven't quite succumbed to the FOSS philosophy, are mostly offering the fruits of their labor as freeware. In fact, the free software movement is growing so much that there is a website, freemacware.com, dedicated to reviewing the best free software available on the Macintosh. Which brings me to the point of this post. Freemacware.com is having a contest regarding freeware and this is my entry. I am going to cover five of the programs they have listed, which I use regularly, if not on a daily basis. So, let's get started.
The first I want to cover is Coconut Battery. This is an awesome program which keeps track of your laptop's battery life. It reports the current battery charge, maximum battery charge, current battery capacity, and the original battery capacity along with a percentage left thereof. It also reports the number of load cycles the battery has gone through. All of this information can be saved and reviewed later. For example, my current battery capacity is 3430mAh out of an original 4400mAh; or, 77% of the original battery life. I intend to buy a new battery when I get to 50% original life and this program makes it very easy to determine when that will be.
Second, is Cyberduck. Cyberduck is an FTP/SFTP client with a builtin bookmark manager. I covered this program briefly in my Quicksilver write-up. I don't think I could get by on a Mac without Cyberduck. I do a lot of transferring via SFTP and Cyberduck makes this very easy with its full drag-n-drop support. One really awesome thing about Cyberduck is its integration with various freeware text editors, such as Smultron. This integration makes it super easy to edit remote documents "locally." Basically, you select the remote document you would like to edit, click the editor button in Cyberduck, edit the file like normal, and then save in place — Cyberduck takes care of the rest.
Next up is Disk-Inventory-X. This is a port of a KDE program. With Disk-Inventory-X, you can quickly find the largest files and directories on your hard drive. This makes it super easy to reclaim disk space when you suddenly find you are out. The program is difficult to put into words. You just have to try it to understand it. Yes, there is a Windows port.
Another neat application is Paparazzi!. It's not a program I use a whole lot, but it is definitely handy to have around. Paparazzi! will take a "picture" of any given website (provided it isn't password protected). You can save specific regions of the site, e.g. the region you can see in a standard web browser viewport, or the whole thing. A good example of the latter option is this atrocity of a Covertte that I found on eBay a few months ... (view rest)
Friday, 17 February 2006, 09:43:03 EDT
How about some Apple stuff to break up the silence?
If you are using OS X, you owe it to yourself to check out Quicksilver. Quicksilver is one of the applications that convinced me to buy a Mac. Just reading about it, I knew I would love it. The application is hard to describe, though. It is sort of a local search engine for your computer; one that learns your query habits. But it can also be a file manager, or hotkey engine, or whatever. It is very powerful and very fast. I mostly use it to launch applications. I don't like digging through my filesystem to find the application I want to run and then double clicking it. Typing the first letter or two of the application name and then pressing enter to launch it is much faster. I have been expanding my knowledge of Quicksilver past using it for an application launcher, recently.
I've added the shelf, a couple of triggers, and some application specific searches to my repertoire. The shelf is great for moving files in conjunction with the Finder. Using a trigger that I defined, I can pull up the shelf at any time, drop some files (or really anything) onto it, navigate to the location I want to place the files, and then drag the files from the shelf to the new location. It is much easier that using drag-and-drop in conjunction with Finder's "spring loaded folders." And using Quicksilver to immediately go to my Cyberduck favorites is awesome. Instead of using Quicksilver to launch Cyberduck and then open the favorite from its sidebar, or using the slow Spotlight search to find the favorite, I can use Quicksilver to directly launch Cyberduck to the FTP/SFTP site I want to open. Absolutely wonderful.
That description of Quicksilver doesn't even scratch the surface. The program can be used for much, much more. For some better descriptions, and tutorials, check out the Quicksilver Tutorials Round-up post over at The Apple Blog. The first tutorial in ... (view rest)
Monday, 20 June 2005, 20:12:26 EDT
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A couple months ago I purchased an iRiver ifp-899 portable music player. It had a couple quirks like restarting or even turning off randomly when playing MP3s. Since I didn't play to listen to many MP3s with it I was willing to let that slide. There was one problem that prevented me from keeping the device which I will get to in a minute.
I bought the device because it is capable of playing Ogg Vorbis files, my preferred music file format. Ogg Vorbis support is important to me because every audio CD I own is ripped to Ogg Vorbis at quality setting five; yes, I am that picky about it. After my MP3 drive's head crashed for the second time I swore off downloading music and only keeping rips of compact discs that I actually, physically, own. Ogg Vorbis had just reached a stable 1.0 release at that time so I decided to drop the non-free, aurally inferior, MP3 format in favor of Ogg Vorbis. As a result, I have a rather sizable Ogg Vorbis collection and am not keen on reconverting the whole of it to MP3 just so I can use a portable music player. So, if a portable audio player doesn't support Ogg Vorbis it will be slightly hard to sell it to me.
Most of the music that I listen to requires gapless playback support. Listening to something like Richard Humpty Vission's "Damn That DJ Made My Day" without gapless support will drive a person insane. This means that any music player I get needs to support gapless playback or I will have to convert all of my rips to single files instead of track-by-track rips. I prefer ripping albums track-by-track because it makes it easy to skip to specific spots in the album. If the rip is a single file then you have to hold down fast forward until you get to the section you want to listen to — that is just annoying. So, not only does a music player need to support a file format that is just starting to get some press it also needs to play back the files seamlessly. Such a combination is very difficult to find; especially in a well designed device. In fact, no such device currently exists. There are a few [older] players that play MP3s seamlessly but none that play Ogg Vorbis files seamlessly. The lack of gapless playback is what prompted me to return the ifp-899.
I mentioned that Ogg Vorbis is a little known format that is just starting to get some attention. Technically, it is a superior format to MP3 in every way but it doesn't have the mindshare that MP3 has. Here is a good little article that talks about this problem. Another problem is that the format usually has to be supported by individuals with the know-how and time. Linux, of course, is very well support and Windows is a close second. Mac OS X, however, is only supported through third party applications that don't use the Quicktime system to play audio as of Quicktime version seven. Once Quicktime 7 was released the Ogg Vorbis plugin for Quicktime became obsolete and will no longer work. Any application that tries to play an Ogg Vorbis file through the Quicktime plugin will crash if Quicktime 7 is installed.
Since I acquired an Apple Powerbook I have been usin ... (view rest)
Tuesday, 19 April 2005, 14:11:34 EDT
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I have started making a list of the things I want to write about in my experience with my Apple PowerBook. I want to cover everything and I want to make sure that what I write is fairly accurate. That is why I haven't made much mention of it since I acquired the machine. I don't want to do one of those "month with a Mac" or, as OSNews thinks to be relevant, "two days" with a Mac article. Thus far though, I am really digging the system and find more reasons to like it every day; in fact, I just found a neat trick using Exposé while composing this post. It will be a while yet before I write my article. I just ordered the next version of OS X and I want to include that in my article.
Here is a differentiation problem that I think is really neat. I just worked it out and realized I got it completely wrong the first time I worked it about a month and a half ago.
Let ƒ(x) = (x - 1) ... (view rest)
Tuesday, 15 March 2005, 16:31:42 EDT
There is one thing that has disappointed me about OS X: there is a complete lack of truly useful wireless tools. I figured with the fact that there is basically one wireless card for the Macintosh that there would be some better utilities availble for it. It seems I was wrong; sure, there is Kismac and a couple of other tools but they don't do what I need. When I am walking around campus trying to diagnose specific access points I need to be able to figure out which one I am connected to. I used to be able to use iwconfig to determine the MAC address of the access point that I am connected to. Well, there wasn't a ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 09 March 2005, 11:48:30 EDT
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Yes, it has been a while since I last updated. I was sick last week and have been too apathetic since then to really do anything. That includes fixing my email server. If you have sent me an email in the past couple of weeks, and it has been returned, I am aware of the problem. You should probably go ahead and update your address book with a new address for me any way. Nine out of ten emails that I receive via the broken email address are SPAM and I am probably going to retire the address. The address I have been using recently is james dot sumners at gmail dot com (spelled out to reduce harvesting attempts); I will update the contact information on this page soon(ish).
I did receive my PowerBook on Tuesday of last week. I have been using it almost exclusively since then and can truly say that I am pleased with the machine. It is exactly what I was looking for in a laptop. Th ... (view rest)
Friday, 25 February 2005, 07:36:12 EDT
I am sure that by now you have figured out I have a hard time resisting shiny computer stuff. If you have that figured out then you probably knew the instant that you read my last post that I would be purchasing an Apple PowerBook. Well, I did so yesterday morning; however, I did not use any of my tax refund money to make the purchase. Instead, I used my tax refund to pay off other things like textbooks and Christmas presents and will be using a large majority of a student loan(s) to pay for the laptop. Such a move is in line with my reasoning behind buying the laptop.
As it is right now, the laptop that I have is issued to me through the school for work purposes. If I were to get a new job I would have to return my laptop to the school. But, I do not use the laptop for work only; I also use my laptop in classes to take notes or whatever else I might need it for in class. Aside from it being a requirement that I have a laptop at CCSU, it is very important that I have a laptop with which to take notes. My handwriting is absolutely wretched and I write no where near fast enough to keep up with many of the professors. For example, I had a mid-term worth 40% of my grade in my history class this past Tuesday. For this mid-term I had typed sixteen pages of notes. Each lecture session was non-stop typing from the minute the session started to the minute it ended. There is no way I can write like that.
No, I don't intend to get a new job any time soon. But, if something unforseen were to happen where I would have to then it will be good to know that I am prepared. There are other reasons why I decided to get the laptop but the school issue is the biggest, and most important, one.
As you may also know, I don't make such purchases without doing at least a little bit of research first. Well, during my research on the PowerBook I read on Apple's site that any purchases made via their online store before the shipping carrier stops picking up parcels for the day would ship on the same day as the order. I also read that it would be possible to choose between regular, free, ground shipping, second-day air, or next-day air. None of that was the case for my purchase. When I placed my order yesterday, at 7:39AM PST, the only option for shipping was the free ground shipping and the estimated ship date was within four to six business days. A couple of hours later my order was confirmed and noted to be be shipped "on or before 03/04/2005." So, it may be the end of spring break before I am able to even begin working with the machine. I would like to be able to use it during spring break to get accustomed to the system and be ready to use it in class the next week. Oh well, hopefully it ships early next week and not late next week.
One other thing. During my research I found an ap ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 09 February 2005, 07:57:26 EDT
Monday evening I sat down and did my tax returns instead of homework. I did it all through http://www.statetaxfreedom.com/ because, since I am poor, it did not cost anything to electronically file my federal return nor my state return. Basically, Intuit, the company that produces the TurboTax and Quicken software products, donates their web based TurboTax services to people like me who just need to get the stuff done and can't really afford to pay someone to do it for them. It turns out that I will be getting a rather nice return this year, mostly because I bought a new vehicle in 2004.
What is wrong with getting a good tax return? I start thinking of ways to spend it. The smart thing for me to do would be to use the return to take a year off of my car loan. However, as I have stated before, I am really interested in getting an Apple Powerbook. Recently, Apple updated the Powerbook line by increasing the memory, upping the hard drive, adding some extra features, and lowering the price. Three days before they updated them I priced the cheaper version of the 15" at about $2,300 with a student discount and the Apple Care service plan. The day they updated the Powerbook line I priced the more expensive 15", with one further upgrade, at about $2,100 with a student discount and no Apple Care service plan. With the tax return that will be deposited in my bank account in a couple of weeks I could pay for more than half of the price of the Powerbook.
In an effort to make a more informed decision, I decided to read the Apple Care service plan and compare it with Dell's Complete Care service plan (the links are to the PDFs for each plan). Read Dell's plan; in particular, read section 2 subsection A and the prices for laptops on page seven. Now, read Apple's plan. The ... (view rest)
Thursday, 03 June 2004, 22:36:22 EDT
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I dislike laptops. I generally find them to be slow and cumbersome. It is mostly the hard drives that tick me off because they lag really badly. I am used to being able to let an `apt-get upgrade` run in the background downloading and upacking new packages while I compile applications, like MPlayer, or just use the machine in general and that is not possible with every laptop I have ever used. But, today I find myself wanting something I never thought I would want — an Apple Powerbook. Last week I installed Windows XP in Virtual PC on a student's Powerbook 15". I was chatting with the guy and a friend of his, who evidently works where I do, about the machine and how it sucks that all the software written for textbooks and for use in school is written for Windows. The guy with the Powerbook loved the thing, he eschewed Windows and everything about it because he finds it cumbersome and does not like the applications written for it. While I loathe Windows as well, I expressed my ineptness with Macs and my preference for Debian.
Reading that you may be thinking to yourself, "So how does that relate to you wanting a Powerbook?" Well, read on.
Today I read an article written by an ex-Microsoft employee and later a weblog entry on his web site. This guy's enamoration with his Power Mac prompted me to reflect on my experience with the Powerbook last week. Their design is absolutely amazing; you would have to actually operate the lid on one to know why I am talking about but, the thing is structurally solid and operates better than any Dell or any other PC laptop I have ever used. The keyboard is a little light but I could get used to it. And the screen, oh man the screen is delicious. And, amazingly, the thing is light considering size of it; the 17" is only 6.9lbs and that is amazing. I could live with 6.9lbs when the screen is a wide 17". I would also like to give Mac OS X more of a chance. I have cursed it quite a bit at work trying to use the Mac we have there but I was t ... (view rest)