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

My Other Blog

I like to share interesting stuff I find online with friends and family and usually do so by email.  This works for most items because certain things pertain to certain people where others probably wouldn't be the least bit interested.  However, there are other things that I feel like sending out a mass email about, but considering I highly dislike receiving mass emails myself, it would be rather hypocritical for me to send out mass emails to others.  Tonight, I found a really interesting article that I wanted to share with everyone, so I'm starting a blog just for my random thoughts and tidbits I find online.

Link

A Quick Suggestion: Backup!

More than once a week I find myself listening to the lower left palm rest of a friend's Macbook or Macbook Pro.  I'm listening for grinding, whirring, or the fatal click, click, silence that signifies the death of yet another 2.5" notebook hard drive.  Then comes the fun part - I get to tell the owner that the reason their computer has stopped working is that their hard drive has crashed, and while it will probably be covered under warranty, all their data- the six-page essay they've been working on for a week, all their digital photos, their (pirated) movies, and illegal music downloads are all gone.  Forever.  

This is certainly not just a Mac problem, and is actually just as common in PC notebooks.  However, all your data can be secured and backed up extraordinarily easily.  Now this is not something to put on your todo list.  This is not something to do next week, or whenever you get around to it. This is something to do today.  You should be making backups of your important data weekly at the least.  There are many utilities that can help you with this, but before we get into those, we need to find a place to store those backups that will be made.

There are two options for this:  Online, or an external hard drive.

Online options are relatively limited and tend to cost a bit more than external hard drive solutions.  However, in return for this extra expense, your backups are available to you anywhere you have an internet connection, and there's no way for this data to be lost if there's a catastrophe such as a fire where everything could be destroyed.  The top three options here are Amazon's S3 service, Box.net and Apple's .Mac service.

Amazon's service is unlimited, but charges you for putting data on the server, removing it, and storing it.  This is infinitely secure, very automated, and has the highest capacity of any online service, but charges you for it accordingly.  Pricing information is about half way down on the description page linked above.

Box.net gets you one gig for free, with 5 or 15 gigabyte services available for a fee.  There is no automation like there is with both the Amazon and .Mac services, but if you're looking to backup only the essentials, the free gig is better than nothing.

Apple's .Mac option gives you many many things in addition to online storage with automated backups, but gives you 10 gigs online with fully integrated functionality for $100/year ($8.33/month)

Moving away from online options, external hard drives are getting very affordable, and with all the available backup solutions, there's really no reason not to pick one of these up to save your data.  Once you have an external hard drive (links to hard drive deals at the bottom), here are a few options for back up utilities:  Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, and SuperDuper

My favorite: Time Machine.  Mac OSX 10.5 comes with this feature built in and setup couldn't be simpler.  You plug in your hard drive, your computer asks you if you want to use this hard drive for backup, you say yes, and you're done.  Your computer backs up hourly in the background and keeps those hourly backups for 24 hours.  You accidentally deleted an email you got this morning?  No problem, Time Machine has a copy.  Time Machine saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month.  Price is free with Leopard, or $129 for the upgrade

My second favorite: Carbon Copy Cloner.  Bombich software released version 3.1 of this fantastic software just a few days ago.  The program creates a carbon copy of your hard drive onto an external one.  If your hard drive crashes entirely, hold down the option key and boot from the external straight into the system just the way you left it.  Easy, simple, and best of all, free!  (Donations accepted)

A third option I've also used is SuperDuper.  This is by far the most customizable, but with that comes additional setup time and effort that I just don't like to spend.  If you have specific files or intervals you'd like to backup by, this is the option for you.  $27.95

Free trials are available for all of the above, but no matter which works best for you, don't wait!  Spend the small investment of time and/or money to save your data!

Cheap External Hard Drives Galore

... and a whole website devoted to affordable hard drives

The Point & Shoot Convenience

Now that I've written a few articles explaining the many benefits of a DSLR camera, there is one thing that DSLRs are not quite up to snuff on, and that one thing is compact size.  If I have my Nikon D80 DSLR with me, it is because I have specifically blocked out a portion of time to go shoot photos.  I lug books, paper, notebooks, my MacBook Pro, and anything else I need for classes around every day.  I just don't use my camera enough to justify carrying it around 24/7.  However, point and shoot cameras have come a long way in just a few years, and while they can't match the quality of a nice DSLR, when that moment comes that you really wish you had your camera, a pocket-sized point and shoot is far better than nothing.

There are many nice point and shoot style cameras out there, and I've used many different types and styles.  In general, Nikon, Fuji, and Canon are the leaders, while olympus goes for a certain niche of the market (weatherproof/waterproof).  Sony, Samsung and Panasonic make very decent cameras as well, but my personal favorites are Nikon and Canon.  In my experience, Sony cams tend to lack accurate color, Samsung makes their cameras out of a brushed nickel, making them very durable, but too heavy, and Panasonic's Lumix line tends to lack build quality and feel cheap in the hand.

The most important things in a point and shoot are:

1. Small size - if you can't fit it comfortably in your pocket/purse, you won't carry it.
2. Speed - if your son is about to jump from the swing set, you have about half a second to turn your camera on and take that photo.
3. Image stabilization - When he jumps from that swing, you might want to be able to make out that it is indeed your son jumping, not just an ambiguous blur!

Nikons and Canons will give these features, with the highest quality output, at the best price for the quality.

My current point and shoot is a Canon SD800IS.  This camera has survived many scrapes and falls, and sits in my pocket nearly every moment I'm not at home.  The camera features image stabilization, a wide angle lens, and packs all the quality I need into the photos I take with it.  I absolutely love my 800, but it can be a bit large for some users.  I would recommend the SD1000 which packs the same photo quality without the wide angle lens in a much smaller package.

Here's a link to a small gallery with some pictures taken by my SD800