• carbon copy cloner

See the entry on backups, this application allows you to make a bootable backup of your hard drive. Superdooper, a newer program, seems to be a more popular backup program and simpler to use, but it’s not free so I still use CCC.

• skype (voice over IP)

Skype allows you to speak to other skype users anywhere in the world for free over the internet. Simply download skype, create yourself a ’skype name’, this is your unique skype name, and you are away. You don’t need to pay any money unless you want to make a call to a normal phone number. If you have an imac or a powerbook or ibook you can use the built in microphone and speaker, but for better results use a headset microphone which will stop any ‘echo’ you may experience. Your friends need to have their computer on when you search for them in skype for the first time, or skype will not find them.

• textwrangler

A great little text editor, like textedit, but many features such as search and replace on multiple files without opening them, automatic formatting for html, compare two different text files and show the differences, open and edit text files over ftp, if you’re not sure why you’d need those features, stick with textedit!

• mac the ripper

Allows you to capture a DVD from your DVD drive, then view it in quicktime. Good if you just want to watch one chapter of a DVD, or if you want to watch a DVD in the car without running your laptop battery flat - it uses much less power to watch a DVD from the hard drive than from the DVD drive.

• quicksilver

Fantastic application, hard to explain how to use it and what it does, but I use it probably at least 20 times a day. It allows you to do many things at the press of a key, like a shortcut, but without you having to remember what key does what, because it guesses what you want to do by what you type in, and it learns, very clever. It takes a bit of learning, but the time you save after learning it is well worth it. http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver

• combine pdf’s

As it says, allows you to combine multiple pdf documents into a single pdf documents. For example, combine a single page pdf from pages with a pdf printed from a screenshot with a pdf from illustrator all into one document of three pages.

• Cocoa booklet

Cocoa Booklet takes a multi page pdf file (eg 16 pages long), and makes it into a booklet by moving all the pages into a different order so that when you print it double sided and staple it into a booklet, all the pages are in the right order - like Microsoft publisher does on the PC. You can reduce the size too, ie make an a5 booklet from a4 pages.

• Audio hijack

Allows you to record any sound from your computer (skype conversation, itunes song, streaming audio, movie soundtrack etc) to an mp3 file. THIS IS NO LONGER FREE.

• LAME engine for itunes

See separate entry under music, this imports your itunes songs at a better quality than the itunes encoder.

• Online Bible

A free piece of bible software, easily the most simple to use, now available for OS-X as a beta release. Does searches on words in english, or greek/hebrew. A good cross reference system. Allows you to paste bible text into any application (eg Pages) with a hotkey.

• Audacity

A full-featured audio recorder. It can record audio with a level indicator, then process the audio (speed it up, slow it down, raise or lower the pitch, compress, normalise etc) and then export to mp3 or other formats. Stick with the simpler ’soundstudio’ if you don’t need these features.

To submit your site to google go to:

http://www.google.com/addurl/

Add your web address, then wait a couple of days.

do the same for yahoo, msn etc

To see if google already knows about your site type site:http://www.yoursitename in google search

If you want your page to go up in the search results, you need to have other people link to your site from their site.

To see how many sites link to your site type link:http://www.yoursitename in google search.

The more entries here, the higher you will be in the search result, basically that’s a simplified version of how it works.

1. Go to your utilities folder.
   (Click on your desktop anywhere so that the finder is active.
   Hold down apple-shift-U, this will open your ‘utilities folder.)
2. Open ‘Activity Monitor’
3. Press apple-1 so that the main window of Utility Monitor is open.
4. Click on the ‘System Memory’ tab at the bottom of the window. This will display a little pie graph of how much memory you are currently using.

There are two important items to take note of ‘Free:’ and ‘Page ins/outs:’

Free tells you how much free memory you currently have, the higher the better, and
Page ins/outs tells you how many times your computer has had to slow down because it has run out of memory and needed to use the hard disk to ’switch’ some of it’s memory in our out of use. This really slows down your computer.

If the page in/out count is increasing as you watch it, your computer is struggling along and not performing as well as it could. This is not good, it means your computer has run out of free memory, and so temporarily is using the hard disk as memory. The faster the page in/out count is increasing, the worse the problem. You need more memory.

If you have had lots of free memory since the last time you restarted your machine, the Page ins/outs count will be 0/0. This means your computer had enough memory and has not run out. You dont’ need more memory.

It may be that your Pagein/outs count is high, something like 50431/10850, but steady and this and not increasing. What this means is that some time in the past when you opened a lot of programs, you ran out of memory, but now you have enough. Reboot, check the Pagein/outs count again. It should be 0/0. If it is not 0/0, have a look at it while you open a program or two and see how fast it increases, the faster, the worse your system performance will be.

Here is a screen shot of my computer. My page in/out count is quite high - 66825/697, but I still have 189 MB free, and the page in/out count is not increasing at the moment. This means that sometime since the last reboot, my computer ran out of memory, but currently it is OK. If I reboot the page in/out count will return to 0/0, and stay there unless I go crazy opening lots of programs. I don’t’ need more memory.

To quote from apple:
Moving data from physical memory to disk is called paging out (or swapping out); moving data from disk to physical memory is called paging in (or swapping in)… Extended periods of paging activity reduce performance significantly; such activity is sometimes called disk thrashing.

This Logitech presenter is great. After using the ATI remote wonder for a year or so, and a Microsoft cordless mouse also, I’ve done a bit of research, and came up with these little units as the as the best in my opinion. They are $79 at Officeworks and have all the features you need…

• a long range.
• works with keynote or powerpoint.
• the battery display indicates that the remaining battery life with little bars, so you’re not caught out with a flat battery. 
• the forward and back controls click, so you can feel that you have pressed them.
• if you have a time to end by, eg you are presenting to a group on a timetable, you can set up the timer, it gives you 5 min and 2 minute vibration warnings.
• It has volume up and down which automatically work on the mac with no setting up.
• the usb receiver stows away in the transmitter, and it all comes in a little padded pouch.
• it doesn’t need any drivers for Macintosh, it just works!

 Unfortunately, because it doesn’t need any drivers, you can’t program the keys to do what you want them to do, and the blank screen key doesn’t work. You can download the shareware program USB Overdrive to re-map the keys to do anything you want.   The side view shows volume buttons.  the ATI wonder remote is still better as a remote control for the DVD player  and itunes applications, as it has more buttons, but this Logitech unit is more reliable and simpler.

Ever since I first used Dragon Naturally Speaking Version 4 in 2000, I have been waiting for it to be released on the Macintosh.  Well  it’s finally arrived, it’s called “MacSpeech Dictate”, and it’s powered by Dragon. Unfortunately there are still a few hiccups. My advice is if you have been using speech recognition already - Viavoice or Ilisten, then make the switch - it’s an improvement. But if you are not currently using speech recognition, wait a little longer. It’s not quite there yet, and the adjustment to speech recognition combined with some bugs makes for a steep learning curve.

I was an early adopter of speech recognition. As a mac user, I purchased a PC which I used just for speech recognition! I would copy the dictated files to a thumb drive edit them on my Mac. Not too long later, Viavoice arrived on the mac, and while not as good as dragon, it was usable. I’ve been using IBM ViaVoice to dictate all my sermons for the past 6 years, but ViaVoice is frustrating. Its accuracy is not as good as Dragon NaturallySpeaking and I used to spend as much time correcting the mistakes as I did dictating.

In terms of dictation and recognition, MacSpeech Dictate is absolutely fantastic. The accuracy is impressive  and it does not take much training.  In fact I think I was reading stories for about five  minutes and then I was ready to Dictate. It’s a very stable application,  unlike IBM ViaVoice which was frequently crashing.

It integrates very easily so that you can dictate into any Macintosh program. IBM ViaVoice was meant to do this but in reality whenever you were dictating into anything other than the ViaVoice speakpad it was tediously slow.

So why is it “not quite as good as Dragon NaturallySpeaking”?  A few reasons. The most annoying is that there is a bug in it so that if you correct anything with your mouse and keyboard, it gets out of sync and loses it’s place, and you can’t keep dictating. So you must dictate by commands, which is tedious to say the least.

One of my favourite features of Dragon NaturallySpeaking was the correction window where the program automatically taught itself from your mistakes. When it misrecognised a word you could say  ”correct that” and type in the  correct word, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking would automatically train itself so that whenever you spoke that word again it would get it right.  

When  Dictate  makes a mistake it just keeps misrecognizing the word, and you can’t re-train it.  The manual promises that this correction feature will come in an update - let’s hope it’s soon.   

If you have been using ViaVoice or iListen, then you will be blown away by the accuracy of dictate. On the other hand, if you have come across from Dragon NaturallySpeaking you will be taking a slight step backwards due to the lack of automatic correction, and the buginess of the manual correction.  

I had one small hiccup installing because I made the wrong selection of microphone, and I went looking on the support pages of the Australian and American resellers - none of them were particularly helpful, but I ended up finding the answer in the installation manual!    If all else fails read the manual I guess.

Purchasing.    

With Dragon NaturallySpeaking the only option was to purchase it in Australia because there was a special Australian edition which was made using the Australian accent. 

With Macspeech Dictate, the US version comes with Australian accent,  so you can buy MacSpeech Dictate from the US for about $180, $110 less than the cheapest price in Australia. 

In conclusion, it’s a very nice piece of software. With it’s current lack of features and bugs, it’s really should be a beta version. In my opinion, it’s worth $100, not yet worth $200, and at $300, I think you’d only buy it if you really needed it.   

O dear, this is a tragic topic. Nevertheless, I just installed Windows XP on my Intel Macintosh and it was easy! Windows XP set me back $115, but innotek VirtualBox, the program that let me run windows, was free. It’s pretty fast - it takes about 20 seconds to start Windows (that’s faster than my OSX boots!) and about 6 seconds to turn it off.
Why would you ever want to run windows on a Macintosh? Well I can think of two reasons.

1. The Australia Tax office does not put out a version of their tax return software for Macintosh.

2. If you are a web developer, developing on a Macintosh, your sire will probably look great on every browser except for Windows Explorer. That’s because Windows Explorer has lots of bugs in it and doesn’t display things properly. For this reason, it is a must that you test your websites in Explorer. Seeing as Microsoft have stopped supporting Macintosh, the only way to run Explorer on a Mac is to install Windows. What a shame!

So with that by way of excuse, here’s how to do it…

There are a few options to run Windows on an Intel Macintosh. Boot Camp, Virtual Box, Parallels and VMware Fusion. The first two are free. If you just want to run Windows totally separately to OSX, turning off the computer between OSX and Windows, then go with Boot Camp, it works well and it’s free!

Parallels (click here to download) is better if you want Windows applications more integrated with mac - you can drag and drop between windows and OSX! There is also a program called VMWare Fusion (click here to download) which is like parallels but there doesn’t seem to be as much hype about it - I’m not sure why. It’s meant to be faster than Parallels. You can download both for a 30 day free trial and work out which one you like.

With Bootcamp, Microsoft Windows takes over the whole computer. With Parallels Windows runs inside a window. So Parallels is better for integration, (eg you want to run one or two windows programs easily) but Boot Camp better for performance (eg you want to play games).

I decided that I’m certainly not a serious Windows user, so I downloaded VirtualBox. (click here for download page and select binaries - OSX) It downloads and installs like a normal mac program. When you run it, it comes up with a menu, I selected new, and it asked what kind of machine I wanted to make:

I chose Windows XP. It tells you to put the install disk in your CDROM drive, it asks a few questions, like how much RAM and so-on. I just picked the default answer every time. Then before you know it Windows is up and running. It automatically worked out all the settings. I didn’t have to put in any network settings, or load any drivers or anything. It just worked! I clicked on Windows Explorer and it’s surfing the web.

And here it is, Windows running inside Mac OSX….

Here are some of the settings. As I said, I know nothing about windows so I just used all the ones it suggested.

Oh, and don’t go with Vista, reports are it’s a mess. You can buy Windows XP second hand off ebay. I got a Windows Professional Service Pack 2, whatever that means, for $115.

I just ordered some prints and it said they will be delivered in 2-8 days.

Under ’source’ select the title and chapters that you want. You can work out the chapters by opening DVD player and looking in the information window. To verify them you can check the duration. Click ‘toggle presets’ in the toolbar and this will give you a pull out window where you can select the output quality that you want. AppleTV is better quality, iPod is lower quality and a smaller file. I made my own settign called phone, which makes a very small file. I used: MP4 file, MPEG-4 Video/AAC Audio. Video was 320×240 and 15 frames per second and 350kbps. Audio was 128 kbps and 24khz. This was as small a filesize as I could make with still an OK quality. Select a destination directory (eg desktop) and press the start button. It can take quite a while, allow a few hours!