Quickbitz – Wireless and O2 UK

O2 UK are now offering the iPhone 3GS and no I won’t be upgrading the iPhone 3G I got in August 2008. Partly because I don’t feel the need to upgrade yet, and partly because of the quite frankly eye watering prices O2 is demanding. And what’s with this tethering charge? It’s free in Oz and yet UK customers have to pay the equivalent of another mobile broadband contract. If you’re interested there’s a Twitter petition here – one of those signatures is mine!

Talking of wireless, I read recently that Symantec have been touting the dangers of wireless keyboards. Some mean cyber-crim will sniff your wireless keyboard signals and promptly steal all your passwords and bank account details, so you have been warned. Better have your tin foil hat at the ready in case they steal your thoughts while they’re about it. I use a Bluetooth keyboard with my Mac and the signal seems to drop off at about 10-12 feet. So if someone wants to pinch my details then they’ll either need to be standing in my garden outside the study window, or they’ll have to break in next door and drill a hole through the wall to poke an aerial through. Hmmm… I think I might notice.

Netgear DGN200

Oh and still talking of wireless, I recently replaced my ageing D-Link G624M wireless router with a Netgear DGN200 and have to say I’m really pleased with it. The D-Link would crash all too easily if stressed, but no such problems with the Netgear. What’s more, it is working fine with my Airport Extreme daisy-chained off it, plus the XBox 360 and my (quite frankly horrible) ThinkPad T60 work laptop both talk to it without a problem. Even my recalcitrant Mac Mini in the bedroom happily connects to it. I may put up a more detailed post about it, but work is so hectic at the moment finding the time is tricky. Still, if you’re a Mac user then I’d heartily recommend this router for your wireless needs.

Gadgets – Great and grrrrr….

Like most Mac users, I’ve accumulated my fair share of gadgets over the years – some good and some, errrr… not so good. So as a little departure from all things Mac, and because your head is probably still full of WWDC 2009 stuff, here for your entertainment are a few of my favourite and not so favourite things.

iPhone 3G (great) – Needs no introduction. It’s been great not because it’s a cool phone, but because of the apps that extend it. It can find out where I am and how to get somewhere, find the nearest cash machine or petrol station, check live train times, see what’s on at the cinema or on TV, take notes (and sync them to my Mac), check mail and my calendar, remote control my Mac, track blood sugar readings, watch Twitter on the go, translate phrases into another language, surf the web, identify music and of course play a variety of great games… to name just a few things. It’s a real ‘enabler’.

TomTom One (great – mostly) – Satnav is an absolute blessing. I can drive places and not worry about getting lost, I even navigated across France with it. There have been a few occasions over the years when it’s refused to switch on without being reset first, thus losing all my settings, favourites, etc., but for the most part it’s been an excellent purchase. Added bonus is that I can update it easily using the Mac version of the TomTom Home software.

Canon A720IS (grrr) – Got this camera to replace my Canon PowerShot S50 which had become faulty. The A720IS sometimes takes great pictures, but all too often they come out blurred or over exposed – even on automatic and with image stabilization turned on. The flash is over-enthusiastic and the delay between shots can be irksome.

Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M (great) – the best way to de-clutter your life and get rid of years of paperwork. Seems to handle whatever I throw at it, plus it’s quick, scans in colour and does duplex scanning. Brilliant!

Canon ip4000 (great) – Had this printer since my Window days. Document print quality is fine, it does duplex, photos look superb and it even prints on CDs/DVDs. The Mac software could be slightly better and the ink is expensive, but it’s got to be a few years old now and still going strong.

IBM ThinkPad T60 (grrr) – My work issue laptop, running Windows XP SP3. A solid performer, but marred by flaky wireless performance, hopeless battery life and generally sluggish. (I have the Core Solo version).

Samsung 2493HM (great) – The 24″ monitor I use daily. Great colour. Great clarity. Great price. ‘nuf said.

Samsung 226BW (great) – The 22″ monitor I also use daily (in my dual monitor setup). Another rock solid performer.

Pure Sonus 1-XT (great, but…) – My bedside DAB radio and alarm clock. On the plus side the sound quality is lovely, reception is good, and you can’t beat the (very realistic) dulcet tones of the lady telling you the time or what you’re listening to. My only criticism is that setting the alarm can be a little fiddly.

Topfield TF5800 PVR (great – mostly) – Dual tuner Freeview hard disk recorder. For the first two years, this has been a terrific purchase. Good pictures, dead easy to use and you can extend it with 3rd party apps. Everything was sweetness and light – until the last firmware upgrade. Now it’s a recalcitrant dog of a machine. It takes 60 seconds to come online, freezes every so often, forgets the time of day generally misbehaves. I either need to revert to a previous firmware or think about moving on. Maybe FreeSat is the next thing?

Logitech MX Revolution Mouse (great) – Ok it’s starting to show its age and the finish is getting a little flaky, but for comfort and control it’s hard to beat.

Logitech diNovo Edge (great, but…) – The Windows version of Logitech’s superb keyboard, marred only by dubious Logitech driver software on the Mac.

D-Link G624M (great, mostly) – Have had this wireless ADSL router for many years now and on the whole it’s been a good performer. A lot of its issues could lie with my ISP (British Telecom). Also, it does have an issue with Vuze (will disconnect if I don’t limit Vuze to <200 connections), but usually does what it does quite well.

Airport Extreme Base Station (great) – Does what it says on the can, plus it’s dual 2.4GHz and 5GHz and sports gigabit ports. Shame it only has 3 ports and not 4 and it does get a little warm, but great performance nonetheless. I have this hooked up to the D-Link G624M which just acts as a DSL modem for the most part.

Logitech Z2300 (great) – Ok, this speaker setup is only 2.1 and is not exactly cheap, but sound quality is fantastic. Real floor shaking bass to scare the neighbours, and the top/mid range from the desk mounted units is… well just as fantastic.

Grado SR60 (great) – You cannot buy a better pair of headphones at the price. End of story.

Logitech Harmony 525 (grrr) – A universal remote that was supposed to help me do away with the other four or five remotes I have kicking around. Good points are that there is a Mac version of the software to update it with your devices. Bad points are that the buttons can be fiddly, you often have to scroll to get the function you want, the screen often lights up of its own accord and then drains the batteries, and you have to be very accurate with where you point it.

Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 (great, but…) – Quality of this webcam is excellent and it works well enough with the Mac although you obviously lose the extra features that would be enabled via the Windows driver and software. Works beautifully with iChat and Skype. My main criticism is that the built-in mike doesn’t work with the Mac’s speech recognition.

Panasonic SDR-H280 (great) – I am no video buff by any stretch of the imagination, but for the basics this ticks all my boxes. Great quality sound and pictures and works a treat with iMovie. Definitely the sort of gadget that will spur me on to bigger and better things (i.e. High Def – when I can afford it!).

Wacom Bamboo (great, but…) – Always wanted a pen/tablet and the quality is good enough. Trouble is the unit is just too small for my requirements and going any bigger will cost a king’s ransom! The new Intuos4 tablets look lovely, but the price – ouch!

Proteam Remote Control Sockets (grrr) – These are these remote control plugs that let you switch off devices from a little hand held remote. Saves me crawling around behind furniture to do my ‘green’ bit every evening before turning in… well that was the theory. I bought the three pack pictured and two of them have stopped working within a few months. Good idea though and other makes may be fine.

Voyager Q (great) – Docking station for external 3.5″ and 2.5″ SATA drives with a quad interface. Works brilliantly with the Mac.

D-Link DNS-323 (great) – My first NAS, a two-bay JBOD affair that I’ve popped two 500Gb drives into. Works really well although the little blue LED for one of the drives packed up a year or so in, although the drives still work fine. Interface is a little basic compared to the Synology unit, but the basics are there.

Synology DiskStation DS108j (great) – Really neat single bay NAS device, I just added my own 1Tb SATA drive. Lovely interface and hugely configurable. My only gripes are that it refuses to accept a firmware update so it’s running at quite an old level (Synology tech support have fixed the problem!), plus AFP performance is S… L… O… W…, although ordinary Windows shares work just fine for the Mac. Styling is a little, err… ‘retro’.

XBox 360 (great) – Ok I’m not a huge games player, in fact I only own two games (Halo 3 and PGR4, and I’m rubbish at the former). Great fun though and with Connect360 running on the Mac it doubles up as a wireless media extender. My first XBox 360 suffered the RRoD but (touch wood) the replacement has been fine.

Nintendo DS Lite (great) – I must confess, another gift and all the software I’ve got is aimed at keeping my brain ‘fit’. A great distraction!

iPod Classic 80Gb (great, but…) – The iconic iPod, I got this when my 3rd Gen iPod died. This one has behaved oddly on more than one occasion, and battery life isn’t as good as I’d hoped – leave it in a drawer fully charged and 2 weeks later it’s flat!

These last couple ain’t exactly gadgets, but here goes anyway…

Audi A3 SE 2005 (grrr) – Well hardly a gadget but I thought I’d throw it into the mix. Got this as a company car and thought I was getting a posh VW Golf. Four years on and 55,000 noisy, rattling miles later it seems not all Audi’s have great build quality. Would I buy another? No! Talking of cars – best two I’ve owned were – Lexus IS300 (written off when a woman rear-ended me on a motorway) and a Lexus Soarer 2.5 VVTi (monstrous performance yet whisper quiet). The worst two? Well any of the four Renaults and Citroens I’ve owned.

Zanussi WDJ104 (great) – A washer/drier that’s worked flawlessly for 20 years? How many gadgets these days would do that?

That’s all for now. Any gadgets you swear by (or swear at?)

What’s in the dock?

Following my post on OS X uninstallers, Matt asked about what applications are in the dock in my screen shot. So here’s a quick run down of the extra apps I’ve got in the dock, plus what’s loaded and showing in the menu bar.

The Dock (from left to right)

Path Finder – I use this instead of the default Mac OS X Finder for most of my file management on the Mac, mainly because I can open it with two panes visible and drag & drop between them, but it’s got a whole host of other file management goodies besides.

OtherInbox/Fluid – OtherInbox is great for managing my mail and an absolute must in the fight against spam (I wrote a separate post about it). Here I’ve got the web interface to it bundled as an application using Fluid, so I can quickly launch straight into it from the Dock.

NetNewsWire – the best way to keep on top of all those RSS news feeds. I’m a bit of a news junkie (hmmm, might even post about what feeds I follow at some point), and NetNewsWire makes it easy to get my daily fix, oh and it’s free.

Microsoft Messenger – After moving to the Mac I still had a lot of friends using Messenger, and the Microsoft client gave me the best compatibility even though it lacks some of the features of it’s Windows counterpart (like audio & video in the personal version). I do like Adium as an IM client, but for some reason keep going back to Messenger. Old habits die hard!

VMware Fusion – If there’s one indispensable app on my Mac, this is it. It’s neck and neck with Parallels when it comes to running Windows on your Mac, and I typically run three Windows VMs side by side during my working day. VMware has been rock solid and we use it at work so I can move VMs between machines if need be.

1Password – I keep all my logins. passwords and secure notes such as software licenses in 1Password. Browser integration makes it a snip to quickly and safely log in to web sites, plus with the iPhone app I’ve got all my passwords safely backed up on the phone.

Pages 09 – This was my first choice for word processing on the Mac, although I had to add MS Word later.

Word 2008 – I bought MS Office 2008 for the Mac simply because so many of my colleagues use Word on their Windows machines and this gave me the best compatibility for sharing those docs.

Excel 2008 – Not much of a number cruncher but have written a couple of complex spreadsheets in Excel 2007 for Windows which I use weekly and Numbers 09 had a few issues handling them, so Excel 09 was the natural choice. Even so, there’s still a couple of compatibility issues between Excel 07 and Excel 2008 – ahem, thank you Microsoft.

EyeTV – how else to get my daily fix of pulp TV without leaving my Mac? Bought an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid and this is the software that came with it. Works brilliantly and dead easy to use.

Spotify – The revolutionary music streaming service that everyone’s talking about. A good range of music to suit all tastes, and relatively unobtrusive adverts for the free service.

Last but not least, there’s an icon in the dock that lets me quickly connect to my Mac Mini (standard built-in OS X screen sharing stuff).

The Menu Bar (left to right)

Skitch – Superb for capturing screen shots and then editing/annotating them. All the text and arrows in the screen shot at the start of this post were done using Skitch. It also lets you easily upload and share the fruits of your labours.

Evernote – Great dumping ground for all those notes I would otherwise be scribbling on bits of paper, plus I can sync my notes between computers, and with an iPhone version I can sync notes to that too.

DropBox – Another great way to share files between computers, and even with friends. 2Gb of online storage for free!

OpenDNS Updater – I’m a great fan of the OpenDNS service, keeping me safe from dubious websites, phishing attacks etc. I even wrote a blog post about it a couple of months ago. The OpenDNS updater is a free little app that syncs your IP details with the OpenDNS service.

GMail Notifier – A handy way to keep tabs on new Google mail. This was Google’s own version, but I’ve since switched to the leaner GMail Notifr app.

Yahoo Widgets – A hangover from my Windows days, thousands of widgets to put on your desktop, and I like the fact that you can change the transparency of any widget.  I know OS X has the Dashboard for widgets, and with a little hack you can put Widgets on your desktop, so it’s horses for courses. (To be fair, I think Yahoo Widgets are on the way out as there’s fewer and fewer new widgets appearing these days).

Smart Reporter – A little menu bar app that monitors the SMART status of your drives – green is good. I’ve got four drives in this Mac Pro, so any early warning of an impending failure is a plus.

Mozy – Online backup tool (this is me and my backup paranoia again). Mozy offers a good balance of functionality and cost (just $4.95 a month for unlimited storage).

Little Snitch – I was actually quite happy with the built-in OS X firewall, but I got Little Snitch as part of a MacUpdate Promo Bundle. I installed it and found that it’s nice to have that little extra bit of control and information about what your firewall is up to.

iStat Menus – An assortment of useful menu bar indicators for various aspects of your system. Here I’m using the memory meter to keep an eye on how much of my 12Gb has been gobbled up by my VMware virtual machines.

MobileMe – Apple’s online service needs no introduction. I keep this in the menu bar simply to give me quick access to go and check up on it or force a quick sync.

On the desktop there are two Yahoo Widgets visible. The one on the right is the standard Yahoo Weather Widget that comes bundled with the app. You can see it here at around 50% transparency so it blends into the background. The one on the left is something called Neon Gauges which will give you a graphic representation of various aspects of your system. Here I’ve used circles to indicate CPU and disk usage and have blended them in with the shapes on the background wallpaper.

There you go, a lightning tour of what’s on my OS X desktop. Obviously I’ve done the rebuild since taking that snapshot, but I still use most of those apps, so hope this gives people a few ideas. This has given me a few ideas for other posts I might do in the future, like:

• What news feeds I’ve got in NetNewsWire
• What’s on my iPhone
• A sum up of what’s in (and around) my Mac Pro

Fun with customized folder icons on Mac OS X

How often do you come across a piece of software that does exactly what you want it to do? Well it seems that iconCompo has provided me with the means to do something I’ve wanted to do ever since getting my Mac. Now I actually quite like Leopard’s minimalist cool blue colour scheme for it’s folder icons. I ust wished there was a way to ‘emboss’ selected folder icons with something that gives a clue as to the contents so that I don’t have to scan the labels underneath. I still want the folder icon to be clearly visible so that I know it’s a folder (rather than an app or an archive for example), but some extra visual cues would be nice.Similarly I don’t want anything too colourful as that can be distracting.

So it was almost by accident that I ended up downloading iconCompo. I was looking at another icon editing app on MacUpdate and I happened to look at the ‘Other People Suggest’ where someone had mentioned iconCompo. A few minutes later I was staring at a very simple interface with three boxes on it thinking ‘what comes next’? Well the premise is very simple – box #1 represents one layer, box #2 represents another layer and box #3 represents the result, which is the essence of how you come up with a customized folder icon that combines the image you want with Leopard’s standard folder icon, as the picture below demonstrates.

iconCompo

So for example, to create a customized folder icon for the folder where Email Backup Pro stores backups of my mail file, I pasted the Mail.app icon into box #1, the default folder icon into box #2 and hey presto…! However, the capabilities of the program don’t end there. You can resize and reposition images, as well as changing the hue, saturation, brightness etc. I wanted to stick with Leopard’s blue colour theme so I altered the top layer of each of my custom icons to give it a blue hue, and I’m pretty pleased with the results.

Start small, then go for it!

I then decided to have some real fun and create custom folder icons for TV shows I have recorded through EyeTV. You could just as easily create custom icons for your favourite bands, or anything else.

How about folder icons for your favourite TV shows?

iconCompo has a lot more features than I have described here. For example you can alter the pitch and angle of each layer, you can add text (written in any direction), and of course you don’t just have to create custom folder icons – you can combine any two images you like. Your imagination is your only limit.

Auo-renewal… they’re at it again!

After the aggravation I went through when Webroot wanted to auto-renew my Webroot SpySweeper license, I thought I had said goodbye to all of that. Well now PCTools is on my case to… yes you’ve guessed it, automatically renew my license for Registry Mechanic.

“We hope you’ve enjoyed your subscription to PC Tools Registry Mechanic and trust it has been a valuable tool in protecting your privacy and security in the past year. We’ve made some significant changes to Registry Mechanic in the last 12 months. To read about all the benefits and features available for Registry Mechanic click here. To ensure you have the latest version of Registry Mechanic, click here.

We see from our records that your subscription to Registry Mechanic is due to end on June 22, 2009. Based on your current auto-renewal status, we will renew your subscription to Registry Mechanic using the account information you provided. This is scheduled to occur approximately on June 02, 2009 and there is no further action required on your part.”

Great! However, nowhere in the email does it even mention the fact that I might not want to renew! So off to the website I go, and login to my account. After ten minutes of searching – nothing. The FAQs tell me everything except how to cancel the auto-renewal. Nowhere is there a button or a link labelled ‘Click here if you wish to cancel your auto-renewal’. I mean it would be so simple to do, but I guess they’d rather make it difficult by either leaving details of how to cancel off the website altogether or burying the information so deep you stand little hope of finding it.Closest I got was a page showing me my Registry Mechanic license details, with a promising field labelled ‘Subscription status:’ followed by the words ‘Active – auto renewal set (modify)’ and the word modify was a link… great! Oh… all it does is take me back to the page showing me the license details. Dead end.

As of today – Saturday May 23rd at 15:30 GMT I have posted a ‘general enquiry’ using the form on the PCTools website, asking them to cancel the renewal. Let’s see how this one goes.

So, if you are switching to a Mac, make sure you get on top of any automated renewals for Windows software you’ve purchased in the past because the general approach these companies take seems to be to make it difficult or at least very onerous to cancel. If you are one of said companies, then PLEASE do two things:

1. Make ‘automated renewal’ an opt-in choice, rather than forcing people to sign up for auto renewal when they buy your software.
2. Make it clear, easy and straightforward for people who do want to cancel.

Now why do I get the feeling that last plea will fall on deaf ears…?

UPDATE

Hats off to PCTools – they emailed me within 24 hours to confirm that they have cancelled the automated renewal as follows:

After reading your email, I understand that you wish to cancel your automatic renewal for Registry Mechanic.

We have now processed your request to cancel the automatic renewal for your subscription. For your records, your Registry Mechanic subscription is active until 22-Jun-2009.

Please note that you may receive a reminder notice via email towards the end of your subscription period regarding renewals.

Note:  Should you wish to renew your subscription manually, you may do so by following the link below:

If you require further assistance on this specific request, please reply to this email.

Kind Regards,

Sure it would have been nice if there was actually a ‘cancel my subscription’ button somewhere on their website, but at least they responded quickly and I would have no hesitation in recommending them to Windows users who need such software.

Do unto others as you would be done by…

There’s at least one company here in the UK that will sell you a choice of PC’s with a choice of Linux, Windows or OS X pre-installed, and they openly advertise this on their website. One assumes that they’ve at least had a brief look at Apple’s license agreement for OS X and have chosen to ignore it because they see a market for selling PCs with OS X installed. Ok, so let’s get this straight – they have presumably purchased OS X, taken delivery of the OS X media from Apple and have decided that they, the buyer, don’t see why they should honour the terms under which it is sold to them.

Fine, that’s their decision. But it’s not difficult to find a link on their site to a page called ‘T & C’, and guess what’s on that page? Yup, you’ve guessed it… Terms & Conditions that you the buyer must agree to in order to buy their products. So let’s get this straight. When you buy something from them, they expect you to adhere to their terms and conditions, however when it’s them buying something from someone, they don’t expect to adhere to any terms and conditions.

Now whether or not you agree with this whole business of 3rd parties flogging computers with OS X pre-installed, it does make you wonder – if they’re the sort of company that ignores the terms & conditions when they buy stuff, what’s to stop them doing the same when they sell stuff?

The juicy goodness of OS X applications

Snow Leopard is fast approaching (well I hope it is) and I’m actually thinking that it might be an opportune moment to rebuild my Mac Pro from scratch. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve tried hundreds of applications since Feb 2008 when I first got my Mac and despite this, OS X is still stable and running sweetly. No it’s just the tinkerer in me that thinks if I install Snow Leopard from scratch rather than upgrading from Leopard, then I’ll end up with an even better system. There’s also the fact that if I do a rebuild I’d sooner be giving it a go when I’m well prepared and not under pressure, rather than in a panic after something blows up!

So in preparation for this big event I’m doing three things. Firstly I’m making sure all my backups are up to date so that I can retrieve every scrap of personal data. Secondly I’m building a list of the applications I really want to keep, together with their licenses and configuration data where necessary. The second bit is the interesting one because of all the apps I’ve tried, it really only boils down to a limited number that I’ll be installing straight away on my fresh build. So what has made it on to my short list…?  (In alphabetical order)

1Password – there is no handier way to store all your logins and a few secure notes like license details besides. Sync’ing with the iPhone is an added bonus! I have been playing with the LastPass Firefox extension and it’s pretty cool, but to guarantee my logins etc. are safe, 1Password takes some beating.

A Better Finder Rename – with my backup paranoia I not only import my photos to iPhoto but also copy them into a separate folder structure which I backup manually. This tool is great for renaming hundreds of photos at a time given the pretty useless names my camera gives them. There’s a gotcha if you’re using a Logitech keyboard mapping, but that would appear to be entirely Logitech’s fault.

Calgoo Connect – still the most controllable way to keep my iCal in sync with my gCal!

CleanApp – yes I know it can be prone to hosing files you want and I’ve blogged about that in the past, but with a bit of care and caution it still seems to be the most thorough uninstaller available. Plus you can archive apps instead of deleting them in case you change your mind. Perfect!

Connect360 – if you have an XBox 360 and you don’t have Connect360 then you’re missing out big time! By far the easiest way to get at media on your Mac from your XBox, and rock solid – it does what it says on the tin.

CoolIris – Ok some call it eye candy but the immersive way it lets you stroll around media on your Mac and on the web is just beautiful. Bye bye productivity!

DropBox – No round up of Mac software would be complete without it. In fact it’s a bit like the mobile phone, how did I manage without it before? If you work with multiple computers then this is the best way to keep your important stuff safe and to hand. If you want to share a few things with friends then DropBox makes that easy as well.

Email Backup Pro – great because I know that every day at 9am my Apple and Entourage mail is safely backed up and can be recovered at the click of a button.

EverNote – gone are the reams of post-it notes and scraps of paper. Now all that info that had no other home to go to is safely stored in Evernote. Plus I can get at it on the iPhone plus whatever other computer I’m on. Sure beats writing on your arm with a biro!

EyeTV – despite the 32″ LCD sitting in the lounge, there’s something about watching and recording TV on your Mac. Ok, so Freeview gives you endless channels of pulp TV (not a fan of soaps and reality shows), but what there is that’s worth watching is faithfully thrown at me courtesy of this and my EyeTV Hybrid stick thing.

Firefox – I wouldn’t be without it. Safari is cool, and I’m liking the look of Safari 4 beta, but it’s the extensions that make Firefox so useful. Gmail and gCal look terrific with Google Redesigned installed.

Flickery – at last, a Flickr desktop client for the Mac that works! I’ve never been a fan of the sometime quirky Flickr interface, and with Flickery I rarely need to set foot inside the Flickr web interface to upload. manage or browse photos.

goSecure – it’s simpe and safe. 256-bit AES encryption for individual files or whole folders. Drag and drop, enter a password and your done. Ain’t no crim gonna get in to my secret stuff!

LittleSnitch – OS X has a pretty good firewall built in, but like a lot of Apple software it assumes you don’t really want to know what’s going on under the covers or to take fine control over it. Little Snitch protects inbound and outbound connections for you and makes it easy to manage.

MS Office 2008 – a necessary evil perhaps, and I’d happily stick with iWork ‘09 if I had to. But for the best compatibility with the people who insist on sending me Word & Excel documents, this is the best compromise. Just a shame that when I think of Microsoft these days the image I see is of Steve Ballmer’s grinning face. Eeek!!

Mozy – more backup paranoia, but I know that even if my house burns down then so long as I wasn’t engulfed in the flames, I’ll be able to get my important data back.

Nambu – My Twitter life began in October 2008 so I’m still a tweeting newbie. As such I’m still searching for the best Twitter client for my purposes, but I keep coming back to Nambu. It just seems to tick the most boxes for what I want. The iPhone client is pretty cool too, although Twitterific and Tweetie are also good contenders.

Onyx – I trust my Mac to keep itself ticking over nicely, but if I ever feel the need to do a little tidying or tweaking, then Onyx gives me that extra control and ease of use that I need. What’s more, it’s been around long enough to give me confidence there aren’t nasty bugs waiting to trash my precious data.

Skype – I drown in a sea of IM clients but Skype seems the best for video chat, given that most of the people I know don’t (unfortunately) own a Mac. iChat is great for video chat with Mac friends, and Adium is cool for chat but doesn’t yet support audio/video (properly).

Spotify – free and legal music, unobtrusive adverts and a pleasing interface. What more could you want?

SuperFlexibleFileSynchronizer – gives me minute control over exactly what data is backed up, where and how often. Superb flexibility, hmmm…. as the name says.

Super Duper – they call it “heroic system recovery for mere mortals” and they’re right. It’s the the belt and braces and it clones my boot partition every other day so that in the event of a disaster, I can almost instantly reboot off my cloned boot disk to how the Mac was a couple of days ago if I need to. Two things – 1) I’ve tried it and it works, booted off the cloned boot disk, no problem! 2) The interface makes it dead easy to use.

TrueCrypt - while goSecure is great for individual files and a few folders, everything is much more easily managed if you have a couple of TrueCrypt volumes. If you have a few gigs of data you’d like to protect, then TrueCrypt is ideal.

VLC – I don’t always want to fire up iTunes, especially if I’m listening to something I don’t necessarily want appearing in my library. VLC lets me play stuff without Apple’s behemoth jumping all over it.

VMware – and finally, what better way to run multiple virtual Windows machines, and even the odd Windows server or Linux machine? The Unity mode even lets you forget you’re running a whole virtual machine! Can’t wait to see what we get when VMware 3 arrives…

‘Only’ 8Gb of RAM in a 2009 Mac Pro

Is it just me or does anyone else think that the 8Gb RAM limit on the new Quad-Core 2009 Mac Pro is a bit of a retrograde step? I keep reading reviews saying what a wonderful machine this is, how fast it is, how easy it is to upgrade the RAM etc, but no-one seems to mention the glass ceiling at 8Gb?

I have an early 2008 Mac Pro, or a Gen 2 Mac Pro – whatever you want to call it. It’s the single 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon version and it currently has 12Gb of 800MHz DDR2 memory fitted. Yep, that’s twelve gig… and I use it. I work from home for a large part of the time, and part of my work involves supporting a variety of large corporate customers. For this I remotely access their systems using dedicated Windows XP clients which I run under VMware Fusion 2.x. Each virtual client machine has around 12Gb of hard disk space and 2Gb of RAM allocated to it, and with my current configuration I can run up four virtual machines simultaneously and get good performance out of each virtual machine, while at the same time run a pretty snappy OS X desktop for all my personal stuff. The ability to run multiple VMs at the same time and not have the whole thing slow down and start swapping is an absolute godsend, and I even run up a virtual Windows server at times for good measure.

So in the eyes of Apple, what would be my upgrade path? The new Quad-Core Mac Pro tops out at just 8Gb of RAM. Ok it has more grunt in the CPU department, but the 8Gb memory limit rules it out, and would require me to drop a whopping three grand or so on a new Eight-Core kitted out with 12Gb of RAM (obviously I wouldn’t be paying Apple’s silly prices for RAM).

I understand the 8Gb limit may be some sort of architectural limitation, but it does throw a spanner in the works when it comes to possible future upgrades. As it happens, the 2008 Mac Pro is a fantastic machine for running multiple RAM hungry Windows VMs, and unless I’m next in line for that big win on the lottery then this current machine is going to be my best option for quite a while yet. I have heard rumours that the 2009 Quad-Core will ‘unofficially’ support more than 8Gb of RAM, but I’ve yet to chase down some definitive answers.

Here’s a list of some interesting snippets I have come across. Not sure if there’s any truth in them but here goes anyway. (I’ll add to this list as I find more):

• Optimal memory configuration in the 2009 Mac Pro is three matched DIMMs, so 3 x 2Gb would be better than 4 x 2Gb.
• The limit has nothing to do with the architecture of the Nehalem processor, it’s artificially imposed by Apple as part of the EFI BIOS settings.
• Someone somewhere has added 4 x 4Gb sticks in to their 2009 Quad-Core, and it ‘works’.
• Apple doesn’t officially support 4Gb DIMMs in the 2009 Quad-Core.

By the way, have you seen the list price of eight 1066MHz DDR3 4Gb DIMMs from Apple? How does £4,880 (+ VAT) sound??!

That's something a 2009 Quad-Core Mac Pro can't "officially" do.

The elephant gun uninstaller

This morning I was served up yet another reminder as to why CleanApp can be such a dangerous tool in the wrong hands, not that I needed another reminder. However this example is pretty succinct in that it highlights one of the main issues with an uninstaller that offers any file an application touches, as a candidate for deletion.

You see a lot of applications will access your data files, whether that’s documents, spreadsheets or even mp3 files, and in the case of the latter if you go to uninstall an mp3 tagging application then CleanApp may offer to delete any mp3 files you’ve tagged with that application. Case in point The Tagger which I was trying out earlier to see if anything could ever replace my trusty Tag & Rename (which I have to run under VMware Fusion). After messing around with the tags in just two mp3 files, I decided that nice as The Tagger is, it’s not for me (mainly because I do a lot of bulk tagging and The Tagger seems more geared towards tagging a file at a time). So I go to let CleanApp do its thing and as you’ve probably guessed by now, it offered up the two mp3 files I’d edited as being files I should delete! In addition it suggested deleting something called cookies.plist which I am suspecting is a file accessed and updated by any application that accesses the web (The Tagger accesses the Discogs website). Deleting cookies.plist would I guess be the equivalent of purging all your cookies, given that the file does not appear to be application specific.

No... not the mp3 files!

In the end I kept the two mp3 files and the cookies file and let CleanApp do the rest. But just imagine the damage you could do if you edited a lot of data files with an application and then let CleanApp do its thing without a second look!

I still like CleanApp but think it really needs more features to help people protect themselves against accidentally deleting stuff they want. It already knows about protecting certain system files, but I think there are a number of ways this could be extended. For example, automatically protecting known Apple applications, protecting data files shared between applications, monitoring an app and protecting all the files it uses, or even protecting files of a certain type such as mp3 files.

While we’re on the subject of VMware (were we?!) I thought I’d install the latest Windows 7 beta build under VMware to have a look. The install went fine and after a quick Windows Update I even had sound working. Then I thought I’d install ESET Smart Security 4 rather than rely on Microsoft’s built-in anti-malware tools like Windows Defender. Result? Well see for yourself…

Windows does its thing

Well it is beta and no-one ever said ESET Smart Security 4 would work with it, but the effects are pretty dramatic. I’ll see if I can unpick the mess in Safe Mode, failing that I’ll just do a re-install. After all, it’s nice to keep an eye on what the other side is doing.  As it happens, I also installed Ubuntu 9.04 in another VM, but I’ve yet to make it fall over…

My brief encounter with Tweetie

I’m new to the Twitter phenomenon and with the small group of friends and other people/companies I follow, I am probably not what you’d call a power user. For one thing, while I can understand the power of the search feature, I still don’t get how you discover breaking news without already knowing about the news… before it breaks?! Anyway, as is typical with anything I do on the Mac I try to test out all the possible software options before deciding on which one suits me. I’m also fickle, so if something better comes along then I have no problems with changing, although there is one proviso… Adobe Air. I don’t currently have Adobe Air installed on my Mac and I don’t plan to any time soon.

Anyway, there are quite a few Twitter clients for the Mac and the number seems to be growing with the latest big thing  being Tweetie. Now I first became aware of Tweetie when reading TechCrunch and when they start waxing lyrical about a piece of software it’s usually time to sit up and take notice, so when it was released earlier this week I decided to give it a try. Currently my Twitter client of choice is Nambu, but if the Tweetie screenshots were anything to go by then it was already off to a good start – I’m a sucker for a nice interface (I think SnowTape is currently top of my ‘that looks cool!’ list).

With customary ease, Tweetie installs just prompting you for your Twitter username and password before presenting you with a neat list of tweets from people you’re following in what it calls the Timeline window. Icons down the side then let you switch between this view and Replies, Direct Messages and a search function, with slick transitions as you move around. Ok the basic views are there and they look nice, so how about the extras, the productivity features? The first thing I noticed is how nicely Tweetie lets you see tweets from others simply by clicking on their name in a tweet. Their tweets take over the Timeline window from where you can easily choose to interact with them (follow, reply, message) or simply navigate back to your own Timeline, and you can do this from any of the four views that Tweetie offers.

Tweetie also lets you use multiple accounts on Twitter, and while it’s not something I’ve needed I can see just how useful that can be to others. That sort of covers it as far as Tweetie features for viewing goes – so how about posting new tweets? Well again with the slickness you expect from this app, you click on the pen and paper icon bottom left and out pops a floating window ready to receive your 140 characters of wisdom. The first nice touch is that URLs are automatically recognised and it takes just a single click to shorten them using your chosen service. Next up it’s pictures and again it’s comendably easy to add a picture link just by chosing ‘Add image’ and bowsing to the image you want, which is then automaticcaly uploaded to the hosting site you’ve specified in the Preferences.

That pretty much covers it as far as the main features go. The Preferences let you tweak a few settings and set your default services for images and URL shortening and that’s about it. So it covers the basics well and has a pleasant interface that fits in well with the overall Mac OS X feel, but given that they’re asking $14.95 for the version that isn’t ad supported, I can’t help thinking I’d want a few more bells and whistles before parting with my money. Things like:

• Better notification of unread tweets – like a badge on the dock icon or menu bar showing a number.
• Audible notification of new tweets.
• More control over the interface, like a choice of colours or some transparency options perhaps.
• A way to see a list of links you’ve received in tweets.
• A way to see who you are following and who’s following you, and a way to group these users.
• The ability to store searches and come back to them later.

What exactly is the problem?

I could go on but maybe you get my drift. The final point is an obscure error that’s popped up once or twice and says nothing more than Error (null). I guess it’s still early days for Tweetie and there are still a few ghosts in the machine. So for now I’m sticking with Nambu on my Mac, because while Tweetie probably has a slight edge on having a slick feel to it and will suit a lot of people, Nambu is pretty good looking itself as a Twitter client and has those extra goodies that I use for now. Sure, Nambu doesn’t let you choose from a selection of URL shortening and image hosting services, it just gives you a standard two but I can live with that.

So, Tweetie is still on my list of ones to watch and if it starts to gain features on the Mac platform then maybe I’ll reconsider. But there’s one final confession I should make. The Twitter client on my iPhone is… Tweetie! It just so happens that I only want the basics on my phone and Tweetie is perfect for that.