Did you notice that there are seasons for software as well ? Similarly as with other merchandise, there are times during the year when many more people suddenly decide they need that one application X. Luckily, this trend is not as extreme as with e.g. Santa hats or carved pumpkins, which are impossible to find in stores outside of the narrow window around Christmas and Halloween (I am grateful for that :-)). In software world, the most seasonal category is tax preparation software, for obvious reasons. Taxes, like the dentist checkup are not something you will be crazy even thinking about, unless it is that time of year ....
The CHM files (Microsoft compiled HTML help files) are often used for eBooks. They are readable on OS-X using excellent open source CHMOX application. If you want to get more useful preview in OuickView than the not very helpfull static icon, get this plugin.
Download here
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.p...group_id=211847
How to install it: Unzip it, take the proper package for your system (the ZIP file contains several architectures, on modern Intel-based Mac's you want to use x64), put it inside
As time passes, I am discovering more little features that either fill in the still existing gaps from my Windows toolchain or add new features. Today, at Apple presentation about Leopard Client and Leopard Server I have heard great tip.
The QuickView in Leopard is extensible with plugins. One very obvious and very useful plugin is ZIP View that gives you content of the ZIP file in preview without unzipping it. This is finally a workable replacement for Ctrl-PgDn of TotalCommander that allowed to "walk into" archive and treat ZIP file as part of the file system.
I have been using it for over half year now and was very happy with it. After I did today hear Steve Gibson mentioning (and recommending) it on Security Now!, I want to share my experience and add my vote of confidence.
The solution is Amazon S3 service (Simple Storage Service), fantastically affordable system to store your data securely on-line. You pay as you go - the size is unlimited and you are charged only for what you store and bandwidth you consume. Fantastically affordable means 15 cents for gigabyte-month storage and 10 cents for gigabyte transfer in / 18 cents for transfer out which will drop to 13 cents if you use it more. This means that to store my approximately 30 GB collection of pictures I need to upload them first (for $3) and then pay $4.50 monthly for storage - plus the download traffic. But of course, I am not using it for the images because I really need and like the nice album user interface which SmugMug provides. But to archive documents - this is just the perfect solution.
Audiobooks and podcasts can be an excellent way how improve your vocabulary and improve your English. If you are suffering of "written English only" syndrome, this may be an excellent remedy.
What is that funny syndrome ? Many people from information technology (including myself) actually had to learn English twice. During the late teens and university we managed to get reasonable command of written English, so that we could (and did) read the books. Mostly about computers, of course. With that, we managed to build decent vocabulary of words which we knew ONLY in written form, and for many of them have absolutely no idea how this could be pronounced. This had two consequences: we had hard time to recognize the word when we heard for the first time pronounced the way how it should be pronounced - and - which is even worse - often our own audio rendering was be a big surprise to native anglophones :-) ...
and similar plague (for some reason they were pretty active last few days):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un_PjRXV5l8
I wish I could pull similar stunt - but I am not really a good actor and my accent would make it hard to believe. But it is hilarious anyway (video is a recording of phone call and contains text transcription ...). Enjoy.
Thanks to Peter M. for the link. I would link his blog or home page, if he had one :-).
Good selection of news, observations and comments on stuff that is happening around. There seems to be pretty good match between what Michael considers blogworthy and my areas of interest - as I found there lot of interesting pieces.
It is mostly news - but not only news. It is worth browsing through archive, just to discover small jewels - like this one:
If you had a top 7 tips list for managing the flood of digital information, what would it be?
If you live on week cycles, it is quite nice to see the week number in your calendar. It is not (yet) provided as standard feature in the user settings for my calendar solution of choice.
An obvious solution is to run user script in the browser that will decorate the calendar page - using the fabulous Grease Monkey. The user script to install (after installing the plugin) is here.
It works, but ... However I admire the power and possibilities of the user-scripts, it is fairly heavy tool for such simple thing. My Firefox install is pretty large thanks to variety of developer-oriented plugins, and I do not want to slow it down even more. Another issue with scripts is potential security implication - recently (as you will see on the script site) a malicious user started to upload scripts stealing cookies. What this means for slightly paranoid security-aware person like me, is to read and understand the source - and that is way too much trouble.
Yes, such nice tool really exists and it's name is Remember the Milk.
At first sight, RTM is not extremely visually appealing, but very nice and very usable Ajax application. After some time using it, you may better appreciate the "less is more" design. The offline access is thanks to Google Gears magic. Just flip the small green arrow (which will download your data to local cache) and voila - you can go offline, keep editing or adding tasks - your changes will be remembered. Later on, after going online the changes will be synced back.
It happened! After starting my preferred feed aggregator - Google Reader I have noticed the new feature that sounded so good that I almost could not believe it: offline reading. Using new plugin - Google Gears, the reader can cache 2000 items locally and allows you to go offline and read the news, blogs or whatever you have subscribed to absolutely anywhere.
The installation starts with this screen: