Consultant | Musician | Networking Expert | Technology Freak | Daddy

I thought I would list off a few of my favorite Dashboard Widgets for OS X.

Weather Underground – One of my favorite weather related sites, the application is very well put together and extremely informative, the web cameras are a very nice additional touch.  Out of the many options available, this is a nice addition for weather.

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iStat Pro – provides a ton of system information.  This is useful for a ton of reasons, it is extremely  configurable.

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Woot – This provides at a glace what is currently posted on Woot or its branches, like Sellout and the price of the item available.  If you are not familiar with Woot, check out http://www.woot.com

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I’ve been messing with Google Voice, its certainly awesome.  It sucks that Apple has dumped the Apps for the iPhone, especially after approving them first.

Setting up Google Voice was really easy, about the only thing that is complicated or difficult is picking a phone number.  From the Mac side of things, I typically use Address Book to keep my contacts up to date and to keep them in sync with other applications and services that I use.  It is easy to get your contacts to Google, if you hadn’t already, by going to the Address Book’s Preferences and in the General Section, putting a check box in Sync with Google.

Some of the features I like about Google Voice is the voice mail saving in *.mp3 format, the SMS features, and the ability to have it ring multiple phones.  This service is by far one of the biggest and coolest free ones in awhile.  So hopefully it will stay that way.

Some other plugins and applications that I have ran across that seem to work well with Google Voice:

• Firefox Plugin
• I’ll post more as I run across them and update this post or post a comment….

Apple has now, FINALLY, release the iDisk application for iPhone.  My first thoughts with this application, what in the heck am I going to use this for? It nice to have the access, I think it would be even better if I could edit at least a basic text file.

Obviously it would be awesome to have the ability to edit an Office style document, but I really didn’t expect to have that ability.  So far I think I’ll drop my resume on there just so I have another method to quickly grab it and share it.  I do see potential with this application, but I think it won’t fill any needs I have at this time.  The file sharing ability might come in handy for some instances.

I always seem to forget that Bonjour is available for PC.  I was working on a network setup and they had recently purchased a Time Capsule and were running the printer directly through this via USB.  From the Windows XP box, it was as simple as going and getting Bonjour, install, install driver, instantly saw the printer and it was a done deal.  Such an easier method that always seems to be forgotten, so I thought I’d take a second to post it up here.

After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 one of the biggest problems that I have ran across has been setting up the WMR100 weather station to actually be seen by the operating system.  This was  a very tricky thing to setup especially when there was very limited amounts of documentation about each specific device and then add the changes to UDEV in Ubuntu 9.04, and well it makes the setup process a bit more complicated.

Using Weather-Display, which you can get a copy of here for Linux or a limited edition version for other operating systems (which is very limited, if you are looking to share the data or to place in your own storage medium, like mySQL for example).  The Linux distribution provides a full featured version completely free.

After doing this the hard way the first time and figuring out how to get the permissions and UDEV and capturing the device identifiers, there has recently been a guide put together in the forums at Weather-Display in which will walk you through the complete setup of WMR.  Depending on your setup, you may have to tweak a couple things like I did, but I do not recommend going into the setup process blind,  walk-thru the following guide and it will get you setup and I highly recommend reading about the uDev Rules and Permissions so that you can fully understand the walk-thru.

Guide is found here:  http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php/topic,39257.0.html

I was working with someone on a website that uses Apple’s iPhoto to store their photography to their machine.  One of the methods that we were able to utilize was using the Sync feature that is similar to the .Mac Sync used for .Mac’s Gallery.  This plugin comes in handy if you are using Gallery2 and have a need to Sync or upload photos directly from your iPhoto library.  I thought it was pretty cool and as Gallery over the years has progressed, it is also a great tool to utilize.  iPhotoToGallery can provide a very seamless experience between keeping your iPhoto library and Gallery online up-to-date.

If you are like me and have a PS3 and have multiple OS(s) in the house, then odds are you would probably like to have something you could stream some content, like freaking MKV files for example, to the PS3.  I naturally also wanted to have an application that would support Transcoding, this feature is extremely helpful.  There are many applications that are available, and this one as many of the others has it’s limitations.  One thing that I can say it is one of the better applications available for OS X.  I can’t say its 100%, still would be great to have some support for iPhoto Library and ITunes Library, (which there are applications available with this feature).  This is a fairly new application, so it is pretty solid for being in its early stages, I’ve had it since its launch day and so far it has worked very well on all three operating systems.  If you are a Windows user, there is also the option of Nero, which I have used and works fairly well.  Check it out for yourself and see what you think, plus I always take recommendations too:  PS3 Media Server

I received this from a co-worker, and well I think it speaks for itself…

Visitors look at a prototype sex doll for dogs during the Pet South America fair in Sao Paulo, Friday, July 24, 2009. (source:  http://www.yahoo.com )

This is an application that I have had for awhile now and since I just recently updated this website, well, I guess you could say there are a lot of things I could post up here, especially since I started from scratch.  This application I am reminded of, because I am currently at work and well this application works like a car alarm.  You can actually arm the alarm by typing in a code or by using your remote, the same goes for disarming it.  What is really cool about this application is it utilizes the SMS technology built into most recent Apples and back to the Power PC chipset.  Basically if you slightly bump or move your machine, it will set off the alarm and snap a picture also using the built-in iSight.  I use it quiet often at work more as a joke, because the alarm sounds like a car alarm and it sounds like it is coming from outside.  So naturally its great to watch the rest of the guys trying to figure out who’s car it is going off in the parking lot.  iAlertU, is a little application that I’d recommend checking out.

TUAW ran a recent post that described this tool, which is pretty cool for customizing your loading screen when booting up your Mac.  It has its limits in the size of the image, which replaces the standard Apple icon.  I thought I’d check it out just to give a little different look to the boot up screen that I see so rarely.  If you’d like to get a copy of the application, it is called BootXChanger.  It is currently for OS X 10.4 and 10.5, it is unclear if it will be supported for the upcoming 10.6, but I would assume that it will be.