Recently in Software Category

I like my iPhone very much, but I was unhappily surprised to learn that it doesn't have iChat and AIM built into it. I suspect this is because AT&T wants you to get used to paying for SMS. But I just learned about a service called JiveTalk that lets you use instant messaging on your iPhone. I tried the alpha version it and it seems to work well.

JiveTalk for iPhone (alpha) Features:
• Multiple IM networks, multiple accounts per network: AIM®/iChat, MSN®, Yahoo!®, GoogleTalk®, ICQ®, and Jabber
• Automatically reconnects in case of data service disruption, including phone calls, loss of cell coverage
• Real-time chats, quick switch between multiple simultaneous chats, intuitive chat interface: - click to browse, call, or send an email directly from the chat screen
• SSL encryption of all over-the-air data transmission

Future versions promise to include buddy list management, privacy controls, and the ability to email your chats. Link

It's been over 10 years since Myst came out, and I recently bought this 10th Anniversary edition to introduce the world's best computer game to my daughter. The 3 DVD set runs on Mac and Windows and contains three titles: Myst Masterpiece, Riven, and Myst III: Exile. My daughter is spooked and enthralled by the creepy, lifeless world filled with abandoned buildings and machines. She having a great time discovering the world of Myst, and I'm having a great time rediscovering it. $14.82 on Amazon

I forgot how much fun it is to rifle through a stack of 12-inch LPs to select music. iTunes is a wonderful music management system, but it's so darn cold and mechanical. I came across an application that brings back the fun of browsing for music. It's called CoverFlow, and turns your iTunes library into a stack of LPs that you can flip through. It grabs the cover art already on your hard drive, and then goes online to find as much missing cover art as it can.

According to the Readme file, CoverFlow is a "tech demo" that will stop working September 31st. "There may or may not be a new version out by then." I hope there is one. I'll pay for it! Link

I've been dipping my toes into podcasting, and today I wanted to use Skype to interview Scott Sigler, author of EarthCore. Skype has decided not to include a call recording feature, which is silly if you ask me, but I found a plug in for $12.95, called Call Recorder, which adds recording capability to Skype for the Mac.

You can set up your preferences in the Skype preferences window to record calls automatically or manually. It saves files as QuickTime movies, with your voice on one track and the other person's voice on the other track. You can convert the MOV file to an MP3 by dragging it onto the included "Convert to MP3" icon (I don't know why they made the converter a separate application. It would have been nice to have them integrated.)

The recorder interface shows up as a small separate window with a big red button to push when you want to start recording. A blinking light lets you know when it is recording. When you are done, click the magnifying glass to go straight to the file in the finder. The name of the caller and the time and date of the call are stored in the metadata tags of the recorded file.

You can download a 7-day trial version for free to test it out. Link

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) In 1998 I got this 4-CD set containing every issue of Mad magazine published between 1952-1998. All 376 monthly issues, 133 special issues and 12 Worst of Mad issues are included on this out of print set.

The scan quality is only fair, and the application includes a lot of sound effects, movies, radio spots and other dancing baloney I don't care for, but I treasure this out-of-print set, and when I recently bought a Windows machine, it was the first thing I loaded onto it. (The furshlugginer thing doesn't work on Macs!)

My favorite issues are from the 1950s. The Kurtzman-edited issues are, of course, amazing, but so are the earlier Al Feldstein issues, full of insanely detailed Will Elder illustrations. One day, someone -- either Warner Bros (which owns Mad), or some kind souls on the P2P networks, will make the complete run available as high-definition PDFs (My bet is on the latter). Until then, this is the next best thing. $134.95 to $379.95 on Amazon

With over 30,000 emails in my Macintosh Mail application, searching had slowed to a crawl. My Mail.app seemed to be slower and buggier lately as well. Guessing that I had too many email messages in the database, I tried a highly-recommended email archiving program called MailSteward.

It's easy to use. Just click the "Setup" button and then click on a few checkboxes, then click "Store email in database." It took all night for it to index my files, but once it finished, I was able to clean out my email app and start from scratch. Now, at the end of each day, I click "Store email in database," button and MailSteward sucks all the new mail from that day into its database. $29.95

It's a shame Apple cripples its otherwise excellent iTunes and iPod by making it difficult to copy songs from one machine to another. Yes, I know Apple must play ball with the music industry, but the truth is, locking up hardware and embedding DRM into music doesn't prevent piracy. Anyone can buy a CD, rip it to MP3 and upload it to a filesharing network, rendering all that expensive and inconvenience-causing DRM useless.

I buy a lot of Macintoshes and iPods, and every time I get a new machine, I run into trouble transferring the songs. I'll plug my iPod into a new computer and a window in iTunes pops up that gives me the choice of either not being able to connect to iTunes or zapping every song on my iPod. What a lousy choice! And if you've ever tried to copy a song from iPod to iTunes, you will discover that you can't.

Thank goodness for iPodDisk, a free OS X utility that fixes what iTunes broke by letting you copy music from any iPod to any Mac. When you launch it, it opens a Finder window with all your music on it. You are free to copy it onto your Mac. Hurray! Free

I like trying out lots of shareware and freeware programs. If I don't like them, I drag the application into the trash. But that's not really the best way to delete applications, because a lot of them have preference files and other supporting files. Who knows where they are or what they are called? I don't.

But a Mac OS X application called AppZapper does know about all the extra files that are associated with an application. To delete an application, just drag it onto the AppZapper icon. In a matter of seconds, you'll be presented with a list of folders and files that belong to the application. You can uncheck any file you want to keep (I've deleted about 20 applications with AppZapper and haven't had to uncheck anything yet.) I've zapped away about 2 GB worth of unwanted junk from my hard drive.

You can zap five applications for free. After that, you have to pay $12.95, which includes free upgrades for life. Link

I have an 80 GB hard drive, and it's always on the verge of filling up. Most of the files are podcasts, music, and videos. To reclaim space, every month or so I go through the disk, deleting applications and files I don't need any longer.

A free application for Macintosh OS X called Disk Inventory X is a wonderful visual tool that shows me which folders and files are taking up the most space on my computer. It color codes the files by type, making it easy to pinpoint the storage hogs. One of the most common culprits are AIFF files that I have yet to convert to MP3s. I've also found duplicate email folders and iPhoto volumes using Disk Inventory X. It's a must-have utility. Link

I recently got an iPod video and I use it to watch movies while I pedal and climb on the machines at the gym. It makes the time go by so quickly that I sometimes stay on the machine for an extra five minutes or so during especially good parts of a movie. This is a miracle for me.

I use a fantastic free application called HandBrake Lite to transfer my DVDs to a format playable on the iPod. It's free and couldn't be simpler to use. You stick a DVD into your Mac, click "Open" to select the DVD, then click "Rip." That's it.

On my G3 eMac, it takes about 2 hours to convert a movie. The final size is about 500 MB. I like watching classic movies on the iPod the best, because they fill the entire iPod screen. Newer letterbox movies become thin horizontal strips.
Link

Dates mean little to me in terms of what I should do about them. When it's January 27 and I'm supposed to do something by February 3rd, I have a hard time visualizing what that means. To visualize, it helps to see, and for dates, I've started using a great program called iCalViewer.

The application's creator has a nice description about what the program does: "iCalViewer displays calendar events as boxes dynamically moving towards a finish line which is now. It can do this on your desktop or in a window."

The screenshot here is my desktop. (The photo is of an atoll off the coast of Aitutaki. I took it in Summer 03. Read about our island adventure here)The colored boxes are my appointments and the vertical yellow line is on the left. As events get closer, they move towards the finish line. iCalViewer has kept me out of trouble more than once.

A limited version is free, the full version costs $11. Link

Over the years I've tried several different information organizers: Webstractor, StickyBrain, and Devon Think. None of them felt quite right. Either they were clunky, slow, or too complicated for my needs.

I've just started using Yojimbo from Bare Bones Software, but I think I'll be sticking with it. Here's what I like about it:

I can drag the URL from my web browser over to a little tag that sits on the edge of the computer's display, and the web page will be saved locally as a searchable archive in Yojimbo.

I can print any web page as a PDF to Yojimbo. This is a great way to save receipts from online purchases or travel reservations.

I can create searchable notes and categorize them any way I want.

Bare Bones makes the flawlessly fantastic BB Edit, and the same loving care can be found in Yojimbo. It's lean, fast, and so easy to use you won't have to spend much time reading how to use it. At $39, it's a great deal. You can download a free, fully-featured, 30-demo from Bare Bone's web site. Link

Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS is my 8-year-old daughter's current favorite obsession. It's not a game. I would describe it as a music synthesizer with cool animation. It will record your voice or accept input from your stylus to produce wonderfully weird music.

Even though it's hard to explain exactly what Electroplankton is, the interface is so easy to use, and the results so immediate and pleasing, everyone I show it to becomes instantly charmed by it.

The one sad thing is that you can't save your favorite creations. That's too bad, because I think this could become a legitimate musical instrument. $34.99 on Amazon

Project Gutenberg is a great source of free e-books. They've been around for a long time. I remember in the mid-1980s when my dad had a CompuServe account and he downloaded a book from Project Gutenberg. The thing was, he downloaded it to his storage space on CompuServe's hard disk (I'm not even sure if our computer had a hard disk). When he got his monthly bill, he had a charge of a couple of hundred dollars for the use of the disk space. (He was able to talk his way out of it.)

Project Gutenberg now has 17,000 e-books available for free download now. The top 100 list for a good place to start exploring. PG's e-books are plain ASCII, but in recent years, they've started offering human-read MP3s of books (like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), a utility to convert e-books to the Plucker format (for Palm handhelds) on the fly, and movies and still photos.

I usually read Gutenberg texts on my Palm by converting them to the Palm document format with an excellent donation-ware utility for Mac called Pordible.

I just started using PG's RSS feed of recent eBooks, which is updated nightly, to see the list of new books that kind volunteers around the world have scanned in. There's a lot of great reading here -- you could stop buying books and just use PG as your free Amazon.com from now on. That is, if you don't mind not reading books published after 1923 (which, in most cases, are still under copyright in the US).

I looked at the sales reports for 2005 and compiled this list of the top 14 best selling items reviewed on Mad Professor (and Boing Boing). Here they are:

1. MAKE: Technology on Your Time Volume 04

2. The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

3. Gonzo Gizmos: Projects & Devices to Channel Your Inner Geek

4. Worlds Worst: A Guide To The Most Disgusting, Hideous, Inept, And Dangerous People, Places, And Things On Earth

5. Life's Little Annoyances : True Tales of People Who Just Can't Take It Anymore

6. Strange Angel : The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

7. Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3)

8. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian : Mobile Phones in Japanese Life

9. The Apprentice : A Novel

10. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

11. The Week

12. One Two Three . . . Infinity : Facts and Speculations of Science

13. The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight : Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution

14. They Have a Word for It : A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases (The Writer's Studio)

Thanks for visiting Mad Professor. BB has over 300,000 daily visitors, and MP has about 3,000, so I consider you all the cream of the crop. *:)

I put a lot of items on my to do list every day. I only get about 25% of them crossed off. This was getting to be demoralizing, so I recently started using a timer to force me to do at least a little bit of every thing on my list.

For example, I have a bunch of Quicken housekeeping to do -- hours and hours of it. I dread it, but it has to be done, for tax purposes. I don't want to blow an entire day doing it, so I've started attacking it in 15 minute chunks each day, which is much more bearable. I use a free OS X program called Fob, from Leaky Puppy Software, as a countdown timer.

Fob lets you set up and store a list of timers that you can use whenever you want. I have a timer that I can activate that gives me 30 minutes to research a book I'm working on. I have another timer that lets me work on a painting for 20 minutes (in this case, I use this as a timer to force me to stop doing something fun, as opposed to the Quicken timer, which I use to encourage me to do something I hate).

Merlin Mann of 43 Folders has written some great stuff about using timers to beat procrastination. Just today I noticed that he reviewed another Mac-based timer called Minuteur. It looks nice, but I haven't tried it yet. Link

Password Plus is a database for storing passwords, software registration codes, credit card numbers, and other personal information. I use it at least once a day. It's the simplest way I know of to make this kind of information both secure and easy to access. I even use it to store my wife's shoe size so I can remember it when it's time to shop for presents.

To use it, you launch the program and enter a master password. That gives you access to all the records. I use it all the time to get my credit card numbers to make online purchases.

One great feature is the way it syncs the data back and forth between my Palm OS and my home computer. Earlier this week I went to a Chinese restaurant to pick up some food I'd ordered on the phone and I forgot my wallet. But I talked them into selling me the meal by reading my credit card number from my PDA. Link