The Author – Bart Busschots
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Jun
22
ByteController – Turn Any Keyboard into a Multimedia Keyboard on OS X
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 22, 2007 | Leave a Comment
On all my desktop machines I have nice ergonomic multimedia keyboards from Logitech so I can always shut-up iTunes with the stroke of a key when the phone rings or someone comes in to talk to me or something. This is something I really miss on my MacBook Pro. Today I found a free and simple solution, ByteController which you can download from bytetastic.com.
This program does two things, it gives you iTunes controls in your menu bar, and it lets you define your own hot-keys for controlling iTunes. The default look of the menu bar controls is very minimalist and looks like something Apple would do but you can customize the look at lot. You can go from the totally understated default up by flashy and on to downright gaudy. I’ve opted for something in between as you can see from the screen shot below. This program does have one limitation though, it’s only for controlling iTunes. It does let you set hot keys for controlling volume, but this is iTunes volume, not the system volume. However, if, like me, you use iTunes as your media player this app is a real God-send. It’s yet another small simple app that does one this very well.
[tags]ByteController, ByteTastic, iTunes, OS X, Apple[/tags]
Jun
17
Bwana – Easier to Read Man Pages on OS X
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on June 17, 2007 | 1 Comment
Bwana is a very simple app that allows Safari to render Unix Manual Pages (man pages). The man pages are rendered as HTML making them easier to read with the addition of some simple text formating and allowing easy linking to other related man pages. Installation is also trivial, just download, expand, and drag and drop into the Applications->Utilities folder. Then, by some OS X black magic URLs of the form man:[command] (e.g. the man page for the ls command will be found at the URL man:ls) will start working in Safari. It really is that simple! To make things even sweeter this app is free and open source (released under the MIT License). There really isn’t anything more to say about this app, it’s yet another example of a small, simple, OS X app that does one thing perfectly.
[tags]man pages, OS X, Open Source, Freeware, Safari[/tags]
Jun
15
Hosting365 – I Think I’ve Finally Had Enough
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 15, 2007 | 32 Comments
Another day and another Hosting365 disaster. You can read the ongoing saga on their outages blog. No one can deny that Hosting365 are expensive. You pay above the odds for them but previously my rational for doing so was:
- They are local – so fast from within Ireland
- They are local – so tech support during MY business hours not American business hours
- Good customer care
- It’s nice to support Irish companies
However, there is only so long that you can put up with ever poorer customer support and a sub-standard service before you start loosing customers and your hair! I am now actively looking for a new hosting provider.
[tags]Web Hosting, Hosting365[/tags]
Jun
13
WWDC 2007 – Bit of Damp Squib Really
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 13, 2007 | 2 Comments
Some of the Leopard stuff was cool, but much of it was old news, and the iPhone bit was down-right insulting. Not really a WWDC that will stand out as one of the greats. In fact, things even went backwards on one front, ZFS does not appear to be in Leopard at all, not even as an option, despite having been in some of the earlier betas! However, at least one of my predictions came true, Leopard has a new look. Just not sure that’s all good news, that transparent menu bar looks terrible!
[tags]Apple, Steve Jobs, WWDC, Leopard, iPhone[/tags]
May
18
First Light of my New Nikon D40
Filed Under Photography on May 18, 2007 | 5 Comments
My new Nikon D40 Digital SLR arrived today. My first impressions of the camera are excellent. It is easy to use, ergonomically well designed, and it takes great pictures. What more could you want from a camera!? Because I bought it over the net the only manual that came with it is in German so needless to say I haven’t read it! But, TBH, I saw no need to read it because in just a few minutes I was taking pictures as if I’d owned the camera for years. The UI guys obviously did something very right with this camera.
Needless to say I just had to put the camera through it’s paces so here are the results of my first experiments (not original resolution obviously).
[tags]Photography, Nikon, D40[/tags]
May
13
A Look at the NoScript FireFox Add-on
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Security on May 13, 2007 | 2 Comments
I have been warning of the dangers of JavaScript on the web for quite some time now (see related articles at the bottom of this article). I have also always said it is unrealistic to expect people to turn JS off completely. Hence, my advice has been the same, use FireFox, and use the NoScript add-on. However, I’ve never actually done a proper review of NoScript, until now.
May
2
Three 2.0s of Note
Filed Under Computers & Tech on May 2, 2007 | Leave a Comment
This seems to be the time of year for 2.0 releases. Three pieces of software I use on a daily basis have gotten their big 2.0 update recently. Mozilla Thunderbird, the dashboard widget Pakze, and the iStat family of tools from iSlayer. (I discussed both Pakze and iStat in my post on Dashboard widgets for Techies.) In all three cases the most obvious change is a new coat of proverbial paint. Thunderbird and iStat in particular have really benefited from the addition of a little more polish to their interfaces. However, there is more to these upgrades than just looks.
[tags]Mozilla, Thunderbird, iStat, Pakze, Dashboard, Widget[/tags]
Apr
20
Caffeine – Stop Your Mac From Sleeping
Filed Under Computers & Tech on April 20, 2007 | 3 Comments
Apple laptops have very impressive battery lives. My MBP can run for almost 4 hours if I’m not doing anything too intensive on it (e.g. playing Solitaire on a plane). A big contributing factor to this great battery performance is very aggressive power management. If you have the back-lit keyboard turned on it turns off after a minute of inactivity, after only a few minutes of inactivity the screen dims to about half it’s regular brightness and so on. This is all good and well until you start doing something on your Mac that involves no user interaction but that goes on for a long time. The best example of this would be watching a video. You have to keep jiggling the mouse or the screen will dim. Good media players like VLC automatically stop this happening but many players, including Apple’s QuickTime, don’t. Also, with the popularity of sites like YouTube you often don’t use any media player to watch videos, just your browser. So, what you need is a simple piece of software that will prevent the power saving features kicking in while you’re watching videos. The answer – give you Mac Caffeine!
[tags]Caffeine, MacBook, MacBookPro[/tags]
Apr
20
Create PDFs for Free on Windows
Filed Under Computers & Tech on | 1 Comment
On the Mac you can turn anything you can print into a PDF for free right out of the box because the standard OS X Print Dialog has a button for making your print job into a PDF. Now you can get the same level of functionality for Windows for free with no strings attached (released under GPL) with PDF Creator. This works by providing a special printer driver that saves your print jobs as PDFs.
[tags]PDF[/tags]
Mar
25
PasswordVault2Go – A Great Shareware Tool
Filed Under Security, Computers & Tech on March 25, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Passwords are an annoying fact of life in our modern electronic world. If you’re any sort of regular computer user you’re going to start building up quite a collection. You could use the same user name and password for everything, but that’s very insecure. Also, you often don’t have a choice of user name, or you can run into very restrictive password policies, either way it’s unlikely you’ll manage to get the same user name and password everywhere even if you tried! Remembering the details for things you log in to every day is never the problem. It’s the passwords for the things you only use a few times a month or even a year that cause the problems. Saving passwords in browsers can help a bit but it makes things even worse when you try to use another computer and of course your browser isn’t going to be any help when it comes to remembering your domain password at work or your FTP password for that website you only update every few months. On top of all your passwords you also have software registration codes to keep track of and your browser certainly isn’t going to help you with that. Inevitably you end up getting locked out of sites or services and having to re-buy software you’ve bought before because you can’t find your registration key.
[tags]PasswordVault, PasswordVault2Go, Lava Software[/tags]