Saturday 25 April 2009

µTorrent

For ages, µTorrent was only available on Windows, which made converts like me very unhappy indeed.


But luckily, it was recently made available for Macs. "So what makes µTorrent better than all those other torrent clients about?" I'll tell you what! To me, µTorrent just seems so much easier to use than all the other torrent clients about. It's lighter, faster, and comes with an inbuilt option to search through a selection of Torrent sites. Maybe it's the fact that I've become accustomed to it, but using µTorrent just seems natural.


µTorrent Website

Download it Now



Friday 17 April 2009

SuperAnalyzer



As I have probably said in some earlier post, I am an absolute stats freak. I don't care what the stats are about. Like bread and water for most normal people, pointless little tidbits of information form the base of my diet.

SuperAnalyzer is an extremely neat little Java Application that does exactly what its name suggests. It analyzes your iTunes library quickly and without fuss. Ever wondered exactly how many tracks you've played? At what time you play the most songs? Or hat your Top 10 most played artists, and Top 10 most highly rated artists are? Well wonder no more! Thanks to SuperAnalyzer, I can say that I've played 5,283 tracks, I play the most songs between the hours of 9pm and 10pm, my most played artists is Beirut and my highest rated artists is of Montreal. (Although the last one's a bit inaccurate because I don't tend to rate my music. I change my mind too quick.)

Wednesday 15 April 2009

Monolingual



Macs come with many different languages installed. You may be thinking: "Hooray! I can now use hundreds of the installed languages, and I'm not losing anything!". Well think again. All of these languages take up a large amount of space on your hard drive.

Monolingual is a nice little programme that allows to to get rid of these unwanted languages. Do you really need Klingon on your mac? Do you find that the Quenchua language is going unused? Then simply delete them with Monolingual. Before I ran Monolingual, I had about 46.35 Gigabytes of space on my hard drive. After deleting well over a hundred languages, I now have 46.58 Gigabytes of space. I saved about 230 Megabytes. It may not seem like too much of a great proportion of space claimed back, but I see it as space for four more music albums.

Wednesday 8 April 2009

coconutIdentityCard

Curiosity is a brilliant thing. It can aid you in discovering facts about pretty much whatever you choose.

Coconut Identity Card is a very good tool for quenching your curiosity-fueled thirst for knowledge. It's an extremely simple and lightweight app that tells you exactly where, and the week in which your Mac or iPod was built. Some may view this as a little unnecessary, but not I! I feed on pointless yet interesting facets of information. Now the next time a random stranger asks me when and where my Mac was made, I can say: "Between the 28th of July and the 3rd of August 2008, in Shanghai!".

As well as telling you where your iPod or Mac come from, Coconut Identity Card can also let you know whether or not that nice Apply product you bought it stolen or not by searching the online database of stolen Apple products. You can also manually enter an eleven digit serial code from any Apple product and have Coconut Identity Card tell you where and when it comes from.

Thursday 2 April 2009

Duke of Edinburgh

I'm off on my Duke of Edinburgh Gold practice expedition tomorrow morning, so there'll be no posts from now until Wednesday the 8th... maybe Thursday the 9th.

For those of you who don't know, Duke of Edinburgh is basically just me and four friends hiking from over mountains from campsite to campsite in the middle of Wales, with just one bag to hold everything I need for the whole four days. Food and all. And sadly, electricity is not invited. What's not to love?


Wednesday 1 April 2009

Paparazzi!



Sometimes, a certain webpage you view is a hankering for a screenshot. But sadly, the screen grab application that comes with OS X, and most other screen grab applications for that matter, only capture what's currently displayed on your display.

Not Paparazzi! Paparazzi is an extremely small app. The file is only 180Kb. It takes a screenshot of an entire webpage. Even the parts that are offscreen. Unlike most other screenshot software, Paparazzi has its own window. You don't select what you want to be grabbed, and then press a button. Instead, you simply enter the URL of the webpage you want to be captured, and then click "Capture". And then, after a momentary pause, the entire website will be ready for you to view. Whenever you want.

You can crop the image to whatever size you want, and also set a minimum size for the screen grab. Paparazzi can also export the file as either a JPG, PDF, PNG or TIFF file.

Tuesday 31 March 2009

Desktopia


Desktop Backgrounds are lovely. They let you put a nice, personal spin on your computer or laptop, and can bring back memories if you stick up a photo. But regretfully, once you stick up a wallpaper, you're stuck with it until you change it. Leopard does come with an option to change the background at certain time intervals, but you can't choose which wallpaper you want and when.

Desktopia is a great little programme that allows you to set different wallpapers for different times of the days. You can have a nice sunrise at dawn, and fix yourself up with a picture of the starlit sky at night.

Getting Desktopia started can be quite difficult. Mounting the disk image and copying the application to the "Applications" folder is simple enough, but once you start Desktopia, the window doesn't appear. Instead you have to click on the Desktopia icon in the menu bar, and then click on "Show Controller". But besides this, Desktopia is a very simple and enjoyable piece of software to use.