Entries tagged with “X,Troubleshooting,Freeware” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

In the comments to my near-desaster story of last week, several readers suggested I should have a look at a utility called AppleJack. In hindsight, I cannot tell whether AppleJack would have been able to fix the problems that caused my Mac to refuse me access to my main user account. I sure wish, though, that I had it installed so I could at least have given it a try.

In recent months, my MacBook has occasionally slowed down to a sleepy snail's crawl: applications would respond with a major lag, switching between applications would take a few seconds, and the time for launching another application -- including Activity Monitor for hunting down the culprit -- could be measured in minutes. I still have not found a general root cause for this behavior yet, but force-shutting down and rebooting would always get the machine back to its proper performance without any further problems. The last time I had to apply this remedy, though, I could no longer log into my main user account after the machine had rebooted. And this was just minutes after I had left Phil Schiller's keynote, looking at a full week of Macworld Expo '09 still ahead of me. Bad timing, really bad timing...

Developer Tyler Loch is shutting down Techspansion and discontinuing VisualHub and iSquint. But (having never met Tyler myself), he appears to be a class act by providing instructions to make sure customers can backup/migrate his software and Open Sourcing his apps.

I made a note to myself many months ago to take a look at the Smultron programmer's text editor. Even though I'm quite happy using TextWrangler or Komodo Edit, I'm glad I took a look at this free and lightweight editor. Here's what I found...

Here's what I looked at last week: Great Blender generated animation - Big Buck Bunny, Rescue Kit for Mac OS X Lite (?), Zoho Creator pricing, Google spreadsheet vs. Google Gears, and I'm tech tweeting.

Here's what I looked at last week: Disqus, TwitPic, Blender, and Tabs/Ajax vs. browser memory management.

Here's what I looked at last week: My City: Facebook Silverlight App/Game, Snackr: Adobe AIR based RSS Scrolling Ticker, Google vidnik: Record with iSight Then Post to YouTube, and Google Search Blacklisting Mystery.

Here's what I looked at last week: Transmission BitTorrent client, Microsoft Live Search, Yahoo and McAfee partner for web security, NetBeans IDE 6.1.

Summary: Just NeverBall (game) and Google Docs Offline Spreadsheet and Presentation Viewing summarized week.

Microsoft Live Mesh Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:25:17 read more Coming Soon: Login to Zoho with Your Google ID Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:19:31 I'm still trying to understand why this is reported on CNet but not mentioned anywhere in Zoho's official blog... Zoho to integrate with Google sign-on However, assuming this is true, that will be one less login/password...

Here's what I looked at last week: Google Docs Offline Access, coconutBattery, OpenDNS vs. T-Mobile Hotspots, and Adobe Media Player.

I started wondering how well my MacBook's battery was holding up after two years of use. After using coconutBattery to find that answer, I began wondering about other freeware and Open Source utilities to learn about temperature, motion, and UPS levels in a Mac. Here's what I found...

You don't have to spend a lot of money to build a useful Mac software library. Here's a list of some of my favorite freeware and Open Source software for the Mac.

Crucial Mac RAM Scanner, Google Presentations saves to PowerPoint files, Valleywag condenses Time magazine's top 25 blogs (and makes it easier for us to quickly click to see for ourselves).

Evernote blurs the line between client-side software and web service. It makes mulit-media note taking simple and lets you access your notes anywhere and anytime. You are no longer tied to a specific Mac with a single-user license. It frees you and your data to be productive no matter where you are and what you are using (including a phone).

Here's what I looked at last week: The Microsoft Mac Remote Desktop Client beta hasn't really expired, received my Arduino Diecimila microcontroller, Google Apps Email Uploader: Import Messages and Contacts from Outlook and Thunderbird, and Google Docs Offline with Google Gears?

The HD videos of the Sanctuary webisodes I bought aren't playable on my iPod touch. I have a 5 hour flight to a conference coming up and wanted to watch those videos on my iPod. Fortunately, I remembered reading about the freeware iSquint video converter a while back. Here's what it did for me...

Here's the F/FOSS-Web Stuff I looked at last week: iSquint 1.5.2 video file converter, Adobe PhotoShop Express, Tasko Web Outline and Task Manager (thumbs up for all of them).

OpenDNS works around my Leopard DNS problems. Is Safari 3.1 really that much faster? When did the right click start doing stuff in Google Docs document list?

Here's what I looked at last week: TrueCrypt 5.1 update, ActiveState Komodo Edit goes Open Source, UNdata (United Nations Data site)