In certain cases, some Microsoft mail clients will encode mail attachments as a MIME type of “application/ms-tnef”. These attachments show up as ‘winmail.dat’, and are invariably unusable.
TNEF’s Enough is a free app that extracts files from TNEF stream files, which is pretty handy for Mac users in Windows office environments.
Delicious Monster’s Delicious Library app is supposed to be released today, and I’ve been counting down the minutes. What does this app do?
What doesn’t it do?
“Delicious Library’s digital shelves act as a visual card-catalog of your books, movies, music and video games.” It’ll scan in these items using your Apple iSight camera to read the bar code. No, really.
And of course, it has all the other good stuff you’d expect from a library-type app, including voice-activated catalog searches, iPod-synced catalog lists, user ratings, and recommendations.
Here’s a list of my favorite OSX apps.
Web: Safari — I’m a Safari fanatic, and really only for its speed and its synced bookmarks.
IM: Adium — I’m a sucker for tabbed interfaces, and this slick, tabbed, multi-protocol chat app is the best around.
NewsFire — As I’m sure you’ve read, Newsfire rox my pants. I’ve tried others, and I still think it’s the best.
Address Book.app — this is an indespensible app for me, especially combined with Quicksilver.
iTunes stutters. Y-Yu-Y-You heard me. It didn’t always do this, though. When I first ran iTunes on my PC, it was a wondrous revelation… but recently, probably after a software update, it developed a stutter. I got fed up tonight and searched until I found the answer buried in an Apple messageboard, away from Google’s prying eyes. The culprit: DirectSound.
Yes, Apple is now using Microsoft’s pitiful DirectSound via QuickTime to play iTunes music. I don’t know if it’s always been this way (I don’t think so), but the way to remedy the stutter is to close iTunes, open QuickTime preferences, and change the ‘Sound Out’ from DirectSound to something more reasonable, like ‘Wave Out.’ Close QuickTime Preferences, open iTunes, and poof! Stutter banished.
GeekTool is a nice little prefpane applet that lets you display time-refreshed unix command outputs or Internet-based images on your desktop.
MenuMeters is a great set of system monitoring tools for OSX, displaying CPU, network, and disk utilization in the top menu bar. Sadly, menu real estate is pretty small on my iBook, so I only use it on my G4.
I tried out Bloglines with the OSX notifier, and was less than impressed. I like the persistency of a web-based aggregator, but I hate pretty much everything else. Bloglines doesn’t support importing from OPML, which makes setup a pain, and browsing via a standalone app like NewsFire is much faster [especially if you use keyboard shortcuts].
Wow! Holy crap! In a hat!
I’ve been using NetNewsWire Lite for reading RSS feeds for the last several months [and if you don’t use a RSS feed-reader, please crawl out from under your rock and smell the sunlight] and though I’ve had no real problems with the application, I’ve not looked for other RSS readers either.
Today, though, I discovered NewsFire. Holy crap, this thing is cool. The UI is very slick and very easy to use, with good, intuitive keyboard shortcuts, and the whole app is very integrated into the OS. You can easily import your old RSS bookmarks, and you can instruct the app to “discover feeds” for a given site, or even the site currently displayed in Safari.
Synergy truly rocks.
For a while now I’ve been using osx2x along with UltraVNC, just so that I could use one keyboard and dual monitors on two computers — a Mac and a PC.
osx2x’s problems were many: the PC would detect a / as a ?, and vice versa; the number pad wouldn’t work, and sometimes the shift key would get stuck. Worse, it was impossible to play games on the PC and span over to the Mac’s monitor — osx2x would either completely garble the mouse commands, or would just crash. I had to put a KVM in place just so that I could switch the hardware keyboard to the PC when I wanted to game.
In a fit of masochism, I decided to secure my Airport Express WLAN via WPA and Radius authentication.
RADIUS authentication lets you manage access to your wireless LAN from a central RADIUS server, making it much more secure than storing authentication info on your wireless access points.
I picked up a pre-compiled OSX package of FreeRadius from <a href=http://carpestellarem.com/Products/StellarRADIUSLite.php">Carpe Stellarem.
There are a few other ways to get FreeRadius, including via Fink package, and by Andreas Wolf’s installer.
I’m sure this is old news [I’m finding articles as old as 2002] but in reading the info for Apple’s latest Security Update, I noticed that in most of the security fixes, Apple gives the discoverer credit for finding and reporting the problem.
That’s a lot nicer than suing the whistleblower.
For my birthday [which isn’t until next week, so you still have time], I traded my 3rd Gen iPod to Daniel, and got myself a new 20GB 4th Generation iPod.