Here’s a handy little applescript that puts an icon on your finder’s toolbar. Click on it and you invoke a terminal session in the location you’re currently looking at in the finder. If that description makes no sense to you, you don’t need this, but if you spend a good bit of time monkeying with things in the terminal you’ll find this to be very useful.

I’ve commented on the issue of interface clutter repeatedly on this site – modern apps spawn windows in multitudes, and even with a 20″ screen it’s almost impossible to keep things organized, leaving users to click around, mutter, minimize, tab switch, and curse as they try and find the right window that contains the piece of whatever project they’re working on at the moment. While no mainstream OS has an ideal fix for this problem (and really I think we need a new interface paradigm to solve this, though I’ve yet to see anything I like in this regard), things like my beloved quicksilver come close, and Macosx’s Expose helps tremendously. The good folk at Otaku Software have brought most of the features of Expose to win32 with their topdesk utility. It’s not free, but $9.95 is about as close as you’re going to get to free and this really is a tremendous productivity booster once you get used to it.

Vienna is a very promising free RSS reader for Macosx. It’s got your typical 3-paned interface, which you can set to three vertical panes or the more traditional 1 left, 2 stacked on the right interface you see in things like mail.app or outlook. It’s a little rough around the edges, especially in the interface department (lack of command keys being my chief complaint) but it’s small and fast and has two really great features – first, it’s pretty simple to re-style the visual appearance of the feeds using html and css. Second and even better is the ability to create what it calls ‘smart folders’ – these are meta-feeds which are created by parsing the contents of all your feeds and creating a new one based on a very comprehensive set of filters. This is a feature I love in FeedDemon, and Vienna’s implementation is superior. To give you an example of how this works, in FeedDemon I have a filterset that watches for any occurrence of a set of terms related to diabetes, and every day I look over the output it produces, allowing me to take in at a glance all the research that’s been published on the subject plus every mention across the so-called blogosphere and in the mainstream press, every day. The usefulness of this can’t be overstated, and Vienna is one of the few RSS readers to add this feature – to my knowledge netnewswire is the only other one on the mac that has this. If you’re on a mac and haven’t paid for netnewswire yet, this is well worth checking out. More generally, if you’re not yet using rss to help you absorb info more efficiently, you’re wasting your own time. Get an RSS reader and spend a few hours figuring out how to work with it, your brain will thank you.

Notice how with every release it takes longer and longer for Adobe Acrobat to load? Turns out there’s a simple solution to this problem on windows – check out this blog entry for details, but the gist of it is, go to your acrobat folder, and move all the plugins from the plugins folder to the optional folder. This radically decreased the launch time (basically to instantaneous) and memory footprint of reader for me, and I’ve yet to have trouble reading any pdf’s after I did it.

On the mac I note if you get info on acrobat there is a plugins section to the preferences pane where you can turn off the plugins, but this led to a host of error messages when I launched acrobat. It still opened pdf’s with no trouble, but it’s annoying dealing with the error messages. On the mac you’re better off with preview.app anyway so I didn’t dwell on the issue.

The scenario – you download some Win32 shareware game, launch it, play, quit, and come back to discover the icons on your desktop have moved all over the place. Curse, then spend 10 minutes playing digital janitor cleaning up the mess. No more – go get yourself a copy of Pix-art. It’s free, svelte, and works beautifully. Just launch it, save your current setup, and then the next time windows decides to emulate the perfect desktop storm, launch it again and hit restore. Problem solved.

Check out the Netgear Storage Central. $150 gets you a 2 bay SAN device that can hold as much as a terrabyte (or more as drive capacities increase), connects seamlessly to your network, and is cross platform. I’ll have one of these by Christmas. The only downside is it’s IDE – I’d prefer SATA since it’s gradually displacing IDE in terms of volume of drives shipped. Still this thing rocks for the price.

Yeah, all 12 of you. Speak up! Back during the first dot.com heyday a host of different companies all jumped on the ‘We’ll offer free online disk space!’ business model. Software pirates and music enthusiasts worldwide thanked them for assisting in their distribution efforts before these services went out of business. Now I find myself needing such a service.

We have this dilemma at Skidmore, which I also had at Bowdoin – namely how to enable file sharing between faculty at different institutions. Sad but true, mostly they’re too technically illiterate to use, say, IM transfers (and generally the firewall gets in the way anyway) and college’s have an inherent resistance to adding accounts to their own authentication systems (not without good reason – what happens is, they add these accounts, and everyone forgets about them, and suddenly you wake up one day and find you have 55k accounts in your ldap directory and only ~6k that you can readily identify). Never-mind that these issues could be resolved by simply applying good management practices. Sounds great in theory, in practice it just doesn’t happen. At Bowdoin they punted and licensed ftp space from an outside vendor. I’m looking for alternative solutions and am all ears. Basically I’m hoping for a free file storage service similar to the once free xdrive. Any suggestions? Pipe up in the comments. Oh and the ‘use gmail as online storage’ won’t fly since it doesn’t really enable sharing and also see my earlier comment about lack of technical acumen on the part of the folks who will be using this. It needs to be drop dead simple.

Check out the timeline clock. I wouldn’t mind seeing it spruced up a bit visually but this is pretty cool nonetheless.

The Demoroniser ought to be in every self-respecting web geek’s toolkit, even if I can’t vouch for it being any more useful than, say, the tools in Dreamweaver designed to to do the same thing. It’s a perl script designed to help clean up the unholy mess that is the html microsoft word writes if you use its html export function. Even if you have no intention of downloading it its worth visiting the site just to read the humorous jibes directed at Microsoft by the script’s author as he takes them to task for being so clueless about html and text encoding.

…come home to discover they’re all corrupt and you can’t get any of them off your compact flash card. Sound like the plot to a bad tv sitcom? Actually it happened to me. I spent a glorious 5 days on Lake George during the first week of August, took tons of pictures and then got home and discovered every single one of them was corrupt. Did I give up in frustration? Smash my camera in a fit of angry geek violence? Go steal someone else’s vacation photos off of flickr and then try and pawn them off as my own? Nope, none of the above. Instead I did some research and found Smart Recovery, a free win32 utility for file recovery off of corrupted memory cards. There are plenty of commercial products designed to deal with this problem, but I’m cheap and impatient and this filled the bill nicely – in fact it also recovered photos that I had taken at Roger’s Rock earlier in the summer which had also gotten corrupted (and which should have tipped me off to something being wrong with the camera – at the time I thought it was just an aberration since it had never happened before). Anyway this should definitely be added to your toolkit if you’re on the pc.

A slightly ironic aside – a couple of days after I recovered my pictures an instructor at Skidmore called to thank me for the help I had given her with some materials she was using in a book being published this fall. She had just sent the final version off to the publisher. During the course of the conversation she told me her horror story of losing a ton of materials she had on her 1 gig thumb drive that had gotten corrupted just days before she had to send it in, and how thankfully it only cost her $90 for a technician to recover them. I told her to call me next time, I would only charge her $45. I was kidding of course, but it is worth keeping Smart Recovery around for these kinds of episodes.