Integrating your Mac with the real world requires a way to get signals from sensors. The ASProxy utility provides an easy method for triggering AppleScript programs using serially-connected devices.

It seems to me that changes are coming to dot mac and we're seeing some of them now.

Embedding data, particularly text-based data back into an mdbackup file isn't just a matter of setting the value in the dictionary for the @"Data" key. Instead, you need to serialize your output. The code that follows demonstrates a simple way to serialize property lists into an mdbackup-compatible format

Twitter is probably the most beloved unreliable web-service on the net. That said, if it is running (even with some features turned off), I tend to be using it. Here are some Mac clients I've been using with it instead of the default web interface.

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

The Safe Sleep feature in more recent Apple laptops is a good idea in theory: every time the computer goes to sleep, the entire contents of its RAM are written to disk so that the machine's state can be quickly restored in case the computer runs out of juice while sleeping. No data loss, no waiting for the computer to reboot, and very handy for exchanging batteries without having to shut down the machine, too. In practice, though, this feature may not work quite as advertised, so you might just as well want to deactivate it, and you can.

Can your Mac make your smarter? I put three different "Flash Card" programs to the test and tell you what I found. Luckily, there are good ones to choose from.

Parts 1 and 2 of this mini-series introduced you to mdbackup files. When backing up your iPhone or iPod touch, iTunes stores files in mdbackup property lists. The name mdbackup comes from mobile device, the name of the private framework that's responsible for handling the iPhone backups. Today, you'll discover how to extract file data from the backups.

Dictate has been a good enough product that it has made it worth dealing with MacSpeech again.

Believe it or not, Microsoft has useful tools (many free) for Mac users. I cover a bunch of them in here: Silverlight, MSN Messenger 7, Remote Desktop Connection Client, Flip4Mac WMV, SkyDrive, and the Microsoft Memory Mouse 8000.