The Author – Bart Busschots
Creative Commons
Unless otherwise stated, the content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works 3.0 License
Nov
17
What’s In Your Menubar?
Filed Under Computers & Tech | Leave a Comment
I like to make a clean start from time to time. When you make a clean start you soon realise what applications you actually need and use and what’s just wasting space on your system. I decided to use the arrival of Leopard as an excuse for a long over-due clean start. A few weeks have now passed so it would seem like a good time to take stock and see what applications I’ve actually re-installed. It would take me for ever to write about all the apps I’ve installed so instead I’m just going to talk about a sub-set of the most visible of all apps, menubar apps. It should be noted that all the items in my menubar are either a part of OS X or free.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Menubar apps[/tags]
Nov
17
I’ve been a huge fan of the various iStat products for years. I don’t feel at home on any Mac unless iStat Nano is installed. I used to use the command line tool top all the time to see what programs were hogging resources when ever my machine slowed down, now I just bring up my Dashboard and check iStat Nano. This is great but there are some things I want to keep a permanent eye on. In particular I like to keep an eye on my CPU temperature (particularly on the MacBookPro) and the network bandwidth I’m currently using. iStat Nano can show me these things but it’s not really that practical to constantly keep switching to the Dashboard. I guess that’s why Menu Meters is such a popular application and why you see so many people using it. Personally I’ve never liked it. I always found it looked very cluttered and messy. I just don’t like the way it prints graphs in the menubar and takes up way too much room.
[tags]iSlayer, iStat, iStat Menu, Apple, OS X, Menubar app, freeware[/tags]
Nov
17
As someone who produces a fair few contributions to various podcasts I find myself having to switch audio devices a lot. I’ve always found it to be a terrible pain to have to open up the System Preferences app and then navigate to the Sound applet and then finally have to go through both the input and output tabs to make my changes. Then, when I was done, I had to go through the same procedure again to change everything back. I found it so annoying that I actually gave serious consideration to learning Objective C just to write a simple menubar app for changing audio sources quickly and easily. It would seem that the guys in Rogue Amoeba shared my frustration and since they are a software company it was easy for them to actually implement the idea. They did an excellent job, and what’s even better is that they chose to release the result, SoundSource, for free. You can get it on their freebies page.
There’s not really much to say about this application, it does one thing and it does it very very very well. The screen shot below says it all really. The only thing that remains to be said is that I’ve tested this app on both Tiger and Leopard and it works perfectly on both.
[tags]Apple, OS X, SoundSource, Rogue Amoeba, Freeware[/tags]
Nov
15
Another one of my iPod Touch gripes has been fixed by Apple with the release of the new 1.1.2 firmware for iPhone and iPod Touch. You can now add calendar events from the iPod Touch. For some insane reason the calendar app on the Touch was re-only before. Since the iPhone has had a full calendar app since the start it just never made sense to me why Apple had removed that feature from the Touch. Maybe it was an oversight or something. What ever the cause was, it’s fixed now anyway.
[tags]Apple, iPod, iPod Touch[/tags]
Nov
9
Comet 17/P Holmes Update
Filed Under Science & Astronomy | Leave a Comment
With the Irish weather being what it is it’s been quite a while since I’ve managed to get a good look at the periodic comet Holmes. Since my last post about the comet I managed to observe it just twice, once on the 28th of October, and this evening. I didn’t bother posting on the 28th because conditions were poor and not much had changed since my last post. However, today, I got to observe the comet with good observing conditions.
[tags]Comet, 17/P Holmes[/tags]
Nov
8
Apple Care Update
Filed Under Computers & Tech | 3 Comments
Yesterday I reported that I’d made my first ever call to Apple Care and that they had promised to get a new battery to me within three working days. That was at about 3:15pm. By 11:30am the next day (i.e. today), my new battery arrived along with a return shipping label and instructions for calling UPS to pick up the old one for return. That’s less than 24 hours, you really can’t do much better than that!
[tags]Apple, Apple Care[/tags]
Nov
7
About two weeks ago the battery in my MBP started to behave strangely. It would work normally till it got to about 50% and then die instantly. The battery would die so quickly that the machine would not have time to enter sleep mode and just die. This was starting to annoy me and I was thinking of putting in a call to Apple Care anyhow but yesterday evening it became urgent. While packing up my machine after giving a presentation I noticed that the battery had swollen and warped it’s casing. This was obvious because the better no longer sat flush with the base of the laptop and the metal skin on the top had separated from plastic body of the battery (See pictures below).
[tags]Apple, MacBook Pro, Battery, Apple Care[/tags]
Nov
7
When I got my iPod Touch I started by outlining in detail all the little gripes I had with it. I did note that most of these little things could be fixed by future software updates. When I wrote that I envisioned these updates coming in the form of firmware updates to the iPod itself, I hadn’t expected that something as simple as an iTunes update could make any sort of change. Today Apple proved me wrong.
Probably the biggest gripe I had the with the photos feature was that the iPod Touch ignored the new Events feature added by iPhoto 7 (the version of iPhoto in iLife 08). This has now been fixed in a trivially simple way. When iTunes imports your photos it adds each event as an album. This is a very simple hack that is near-perfect. The only minor drawback it has it that it’s not possible to tell which albums are real albums and which are events. But, like I said, that’s a very minor thing. I’m really happy with this update as it makes photos much easier to find on the iPod but if I could really have my way I’d change one more thing. At the moment events are sorted with the oldest events at the top of the list and the newest at the bottom. I’d flip that the other way round.
P.S. This is my first test post with MarsEdit. I’ll be reporting on how I get on with it soon.
[tags]Apple, Mac, iPod Touch, iTunes, iPhoto, iTunes, iLife[/tags]
Nov
1
There’s a lot of buzz around the place today because something we all knew would happen eventually, has finally happened. There is malware out there actively going after Mac users. Is this malware exploiting some flaw in the Mac OS? Nope, it’s exploiting the innocence of many Mac users when it comes to security matters. The exploit actually requires the user to not only run an installer, but also to enter their password to give the installer administrative privileges! The only way this could ever work would be if there were a lot of naive Mac users out there so convinced of their security that they’ll happily install any random crap from internet. Uh oh ….
[tags]Trojan, Apple, OS X[/tags]
Oct
31
A Big Day for the IEDR
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech | 1 Comment
Those of you who have been reading my blog for a long time may remember the battle I had with the IEDR to get my name as a .ie domain. I should probably explain at this point the the IEDR are the people who control the .ie top level domain (or TLD) and that they manage very differently to the .com TLD. They only give out domains in line with very strict policies and generally require a lot of documentation before approving a domain. Anyhow, I was very miffed with the IEDR for not serving anyone but business and government properly. Individuals could not register their name but were instead only entitled to two initials and a number. Needless to say I made it my mission to find a loop-hole and did. Then, when I had my domain, I dedicated one of my first posts on the domain to pointing out in great detail everything that was wrong with the IEDR (The Problems with the IE Domain Registry). Today, for the first time, regular people have the right to register .ie domains. That’s right, after many years the IEDR has finally seen sense. Prices are also starting to come down so credit where credit is due, I really think things are finally changing for the better in the IEDR. Well done lads!