Monthly Archives: May 2009

My Oats

Posted on by
Reply

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otzvfjT59Os&hl=en&fs=1]
Not what you think. This Web Service Is for creating your own wallpaper images.

This pretty much takes your mouse patterns which you draw and puts them into a cool symmetrical pattern. Many modes, many things you can do with it. You can select specific colors for the design as well as the background of it. And even, you can put it into photoshop and stick I don’t know, a logo into it (click for Good Morning Geek My Oats wallpaper!)? This is fun, and easy to do even with your eyes closed!
A cool thing about this is that it can link to a couple of other things.
1. It uses colors. and if you want to know what your color is, try out colourism.com! Simple. Put in your name and date and birth and it will tell you your color and complimentary color. That’s how I made that GMGMOWP (Good Morning Geek My Oats WallPaper) I mentioned above.
2. It doesn’t need to be a web app. What about Fluid (clickable)? It will become your own desktop application. I did try it using a web archive file and downloading doesn’t work. What’s the purpose of making a wallpaper if you can’t use it?
My Oats requires Adobe Flash player.
Free, online, no registration required!

iStat

Posted on by
Reply

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O-MXWa-XQ8&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

Some people who have followed my other blog Good Night Geek before it turned into an iPhone app review blog may have seen my post about MenuMeters. I have found an even better alternative though. iStat menus is a form of one of my favorite dashboard widgets called iStat (download link at the bottom). This is in menu form, but unlike MenuMeters, gives you a lot more info, such as temperatures and fan speeds. Also for you multi-core users, there is a separate CPU meter for each core. Finally, some definition between two cores. Also, I can monitor things like how fast my fan is running (for me it’s usually about 2000 RPM). You can also see why your computer is making far more noise than it usually is. I know. I’ll take a good look at my iStat menus. Wow, my temperature is almost 100ºF (you can change it form F to C to K), and Wow, my fan is running 3 times faster than usual at a blasted 6200 RPM! Now I know. I have my primary temperature (the one that appears in the menubar) as the enclosure bottom, but I can have it configured so it shows the temperature of well, almost anything! The nice thing is that if you want to monitor multiple temperatures, just choose the most important one as the primary and to look at any of the temps, just click the temperature in the menubar. it will then give you details of everything in your computer that has a heat sensor including CPU(s), Heatsinks, batteries, and even the bottom of your computer (enclosure bottom). It groups fans and power together, so if you click on the fan speed in my case, I can see how many watts everything is using and how fast my fans are going. Click on my CPU info and I can see a lot of info about what is taking up the most CPU, uptime, and even a button to open activity monitor. There is much more you can put up there in many different ways, But I already have a lot of stuff in the menubar and that does not work good with photoshop because of how many menus it has.

BUT HOLD EVERYTHING!
Now you can even check it out on your iPhone or iPod touch! All you need to do is download iStat server (free!) and install the iStat app on your iPhone ($1.99). Then, open the iStat server on your mac. It will give you a passcode. Next, open the iStat app on your iPhone. If you are connected to wifi, just select your computer and type/tap in the passcode. Or, you can simply click add and type in the IP address of your computer. After that, tap your Mac in the menu and bam. You will see Fan, network, CPU, uptime, and everything else that you could see on the computer itself. This will be viewable from anywhere as long as your computer isn’t asleep/offline. What’s going on inside your mac-iStat menus and server.
iStat menus
iStat server and iPhone
iStat Dashboard widget

Qumana

Posted on by
Reply

Well, I think many of us long-time blog readers remember ecto. Well, that now has to be paid for. So I am hunting all over the web for another one because ecto now costs money. I had tried some that wouldn’t install right, but I finally found one. Qumana has a fairly old style, but really When it posts to the blog, gets the job done. when it posts to the blog, you wouldn’t really realize it was done with a fairly old style blog editor. It has all of the features as the blogger web interface, but has one big feature: saving to your hard drive. This means I can create posts even when I’m not connected to the internet, but I can publish them when I get an internet connection. Qumana is able to connect to multiple blogs of many sorts. The setup consists of entering your blog URL and credentials then selecting the blogs that you would like to be able to post to via Qumana. you can even insert an ad! Sadly, that is only compatible with adGenta, which I have no use in. But there is in fact one big flaw: the spell check is outdated. in fact, it only accepts internet as Internet. I don’t know if. this is correct of incorrect spelling, but from what I have collected internet is valid. Easy to use blog post editor: Qumana.
Home Page
Download for Windows
Download for Leopard
Download for Linux

Mactracker

Posted on by
Reply

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC62nggALlA&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]Ever wondering how that old Mac you got 10 years ago sounded right when it turned on, just to remember what it was like? Ever wanted to see how much RAM that first mac that ever existed had? That is exactly what Mactracker is for. It is a free easy app, that gives you info an every single apple product in existence. In fact, for many it has the available startup chime and even death chime that you can play right out of your speaker system. It gives you history, If it is still supported, memory, RAM, ports, and everything else you could imagine including OS version and Finder version. It is really that simple. When I say it shows every apple product, I mean laptops, iPods, iPhones, Desktops, Cameras, Printers, and even Newton models! Who knew that the MessagePad 2000 had a code name of Q, 5 MB of RAM, and ran Newton OS 2.1, and was available in english and german? All of that and more came from a single window in Mactracker. and lucky for everyone out there, it’s available for windows too! there is also a FREE iPhone app of it that features all of the features from the desktop app, but lacks the history feature. In fact, the Apple genius training class in cupertino uses this app, and that is where I found out about it. Apparently they use it so much they even have a dock icon for it! Info on every single Apple product: Mactracker.

Vienna

Posted on by
Reply

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogv6PBsbHLc&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

Do you like to read RSS? I didn’t before, but now that I have found the right app, I love to use it. I used to try to use things like Google Reader, Th Mail application that comes with every mac, and even safari. But none of those well, “clicked”. So I have finally found this really cool application called Vienna. This is a very clean RSS reader, with a catchy name and icon (all an app needs to be downloaded a lot). But not just that, this app is good. It is another one of those apps that I had scanned over at a website and hadn’t seemed interested, but once I downloaded and tried it, I couldn’t live without it. Vienna almost looks like a mail application. It has RSS subscriptions in the left sidebar, and shows the RSS posts in the center. Click on the post and it appears in the small sidebar on the bottom, just like the defaults for a mail client. The dock icon does have a small glossy badge in the top left with a number showing how many unread posts there are. To mark a post as read, simply open it in he sidebar on the bottom for 0.5 seconds. To know what articles are read and not, it shows a glossy blue ball next to the post which disappears when you open the post for 0.5 seconds or more. That feature also reminds us of the Mail application that comes on every mac, except in Mail the blue ball is matte. All together, this app is great for reading RSS and Atom feeds. In fact, Good Morning Geek has an RSS feed. After you download this, make sure you add this URL to your subscriptions!:

feed://goodmorninggeek.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss