Stuff I Use: YouControl

There's a great menubar program for mac called YouControl ($30, free 30 day demo), and among many other useful features, there is a pasteboard that creates a menubar menu which allows you to see and select any of the past 5, 10, or however many past clipboard entries you've copied.  After you have selected the one you want to paste, there is another menu that pops out that gives the date, time, and application you copied from, and gives you the option to paste in the style it was copied in, or to paste with unformatted text. This is infinitely useful for me because it not only allows me to paste things that have been written over in the current clipboard, but also allows me to paste following the same style I'm already using in a document without having to reformat the style.

The program is a bit resource hungry, and at a price of $30 this may not be the most elegant solution if you only get the pasteboard out of it. However, the other functions of the program are very useful - the ones I use include an iTunes controller, weather forcast, address book, and an enhanced date/time in the menubar.

First Thoughts: Valentine One Radar Detector

Up until recently, I thought radar detectors would only serve to guarantee you a ticket when you got pulled over.  I had read multiple articles about how they aren't really that effective, and if you had one mounted to your windshield, a police officer would be almost guaranteed to write you a ticket (as opposed to a warning) if pulled over.  

However, after using a Valentine One radar detector, I can honestly say that this is a huge improvement over the next best competitor.  As I drove down the highway coming back to school after purchasing one of these units, the detector produced no false alarms, and gave me a good 20-30 seconds of warning if there was a speed trap ahead.  This gave me adequate time to double check my speed and ensure I was safe from, as the V1 website calls them, "bogies."  While I realize that speed limits are put into place as protection against ourselves, I think speeding within reasonable limits is acceptable.  This device helps to be better aware of what is around, while allowing me to concentrate more on driving, rather than trying to search out the next uniform hiding under the bridge.

On top of the highly selective detection hardware that filters out false alarms, the Valentine has one feature that no other offers - arrows.  Arrows might not seem very logical for a radar detector, but the device interprets the radar it detects and gives you the direction, strength, and number of radar streams it detects.  For example, if you get four simultaneous signals from in front, behind, and to the sides, you can be almost fully assured that you're picking up microwave signals from a grocery store door system or the like.  On the other hand, if you get one slowly building signal from ahead, you can be almost guaranteed that you're approaching a speed trap.  The inventor of this system has written many articles on the V1 website as to how these signals can be interpreted and what each most likely means.

Overall, the V1 has saved me me from a speed trap on almost every highway trip I've taken since I started using it.  If you're one to speed, this is the detector to get, and while the price is steep at an MSRP of $399, used units can be had for around $250 on ebay.  The V1 website does a superb job of explaining the unit and how it can be best utilized.  Check it out.  Here's a link to their store.

Stuff I Use: Caffeine

I'm not usually one to start my day with a coffee or espresso, but from time to time it can help. Now my mac, on the other hand, seems to get a bit tired and dim the screen after a few minutes of idle time. This is a feature created to save battery life in notebooks and while this aspect is useful at times, the feature becomes very annoying if I'm watching a movie or at work trying to follow a long document. I could go into the preferences and change the settings every time, but it would be simpler if there was, say, a button in my menu bar that I could just click and have my mac stay awake for longer than the 10 minutes it is set to stay awake.

Meet Caffeine, not for you, but for your mac. This bit of freeware by lighthead software is extremely useful for day to day video watching and for extended reading where moving the mouse around every 5 minutes isn't convenient. The most recent update has added a timer so that you can set it to keep your mac awake for anywhere from five minutes to two hours before returning to its normal settings.

If you have a notebook mac and find this useful, you can download your free copy here

Stuff I Use: Mail Appetizer

As a compulsive email checker, I tend to have my email client open at all times.  Each time it chimes with new mail, I switch over to Apple Mail.app to read whatever I've just received.  Unfortunately, half the time the chime ends up being junk mail and I've just stopped whatever I was in the middle of and interrupted my train of thought just to figure that out.  The solution for this should be for me to just turn off Mail.app aside from when I'm specifically checking email, but I wanted something more convenient that still fueled my email addiction.  I wanted something that would instantly display a small preview of the sender, subject, and content of an email as an "on top" message window.  Mail.appetizer is an Mail.app plug-in that does exactly that.  The plug-in creates an instant preview of incoming mail after rules (such as the junk mail filter) have been applied.  This allows me to ignore spam messages entirely and at the same time fits into my workflow allowing me to see new mail without having to switch from what I'm doing every ten minutes.  Regardless of the application I'm in, I'm presented with new mail and given the options to ignore the message for now, mark it as read, or delete it on the spot - all without switching to Mail.app.

This was one of the primary plug-ins that I'd been missing since my switch to Mac OS X 10.5, but a recent upgrade by the developers has enabled Leopard use and my productivity has increased as a result.  If you use Apple Mail, give it a try!

Bronson Beta