I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Filed under 'download'

September 25, 2012

National Railway Museum | The East Coast Timeline

As someone who’s taken the Waverley–Kings Cross train many, many times in my life, this app just fills me with nostalgia.

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June 20, 2012

Satellite Eyes

Fab tiny OS X app which sets your desktop wallpaper to a satellite view of your current location. Added bonus: You can switch to use the gorgeous “Watercolour” themed maps by Stamen.

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June 7, 2012

Houdini

New favourite Mac utility. Automatically hides app windows after a couple of minutes in the background so you can focus on what you’re working on.

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June 4, 2012

Vinyl Tap - A record player app for your iPad

Skeuomorphism gone mad. I kind of love it. (Also, double plus points for the name)

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March 21, 2012

Fish: a tap essay

Fab thoughtful piece by Robin Sloan, delivered in an innovative form.

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March 9, 2012

Biologic: A Playful Social Network Browser for iPad

Cellular loveliness from Bloom. Makes for a delightful second-screen.

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November 16, 2011

Meanwhile for iOS

Jason Shiga’s outstanding “interactive” time-warping comic, reimagined as an iPad app. Highly recommended.

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November 1, 2011

The Eatery: Massive Health Experiment #01

Congrats to my lovely chums at Massive Health on the launch of their first experiment. As beautiful and playful as you’d expect. Curious to see how helpful it is.

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October 13, 2011

Private Eye | Free Network Monitor for Mac

Dead handy. Lightweight tool to track which apps are accessing the internet, and which hosts they’re hitting.

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May 17, 2011

screenstagram

OS X screensaver that shows your friends’ Instagram shots. Lovely!

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March 7, 2011

Rdio for Mac

Rdio have launched their (mostly-)native Mac client, and it’s grand. Not as nice as Spotify (playlist building is still clunky), but it does 99% of everything you want. I’ve been using it for a few weeks, and it was the sole reason I resubscribed.

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January 25, 2011

Cathode

OS X terminal application that emulates old & busted phosphor displays. Pointless and gorgeous.

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January 3, 2011

Dialvetica - Get all up in your peoples' grills

<3. Like a Quicksilver or LaunchBar for your phone contacts. Previous versions were good, new version has replaced the Phone app in my iPhone launcher dock.

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November 15, 2010

GIRL TALK - ALL DAY

New Girl Talk album, free to download. Similar to his previous work, which is both a good thing, and mildly disappointing.

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September 25, 2010

Glympse - Share Your Where

My new favourite iPhone app — When you’re running late, send an updating map of your whereabouts by text message so friends have some idea of when you’ll arrive! People should expect to receive these from me a lot!

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September 15, 2010

calvetica - The fast calendar for iPhone

I am digging the heck out of this. A lovingly-designed calendar app replacement for the iPhone which interacts with your existing calendars, so all the lovely syncing goodness of iOS keeps on working.

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July 21, 2010

Flipboard for iPad

Beautiful social news gathering tool for iPad. Feeds are “curated” using Twitter lists, giving buttloads of flexibility. (Sadly the social part is buggered at the moment, as they didn’t account for all the iPad users out there)

Unrelated: New goal in life: Create a product that is cool, then get Adam Lisagor to make the promo video.

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July 17, 2010

iFontMaker – The First & Fastest Font Editor for iPad

Super-simple typeface designer for iPad. Touch interface to sketch your font, then it uploads it to a website for sharing.

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June 23, 2010

Tilt to Live

Outstandingly enjoyable iPhone game — like Geometry Wars if it had been designed from the outset for the iPhone. Challenging, smart, funny, and rewarding.

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June 14, 2010

Fittr Flickr Extension for Chrome

Fab site-specific Chrome extension to improve Flickr. Lightbox view is super nice. (Bonus points for removing the “by Yahoo!” from the Flickr logo!)

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June 13, 2010

Carcassonne for iPhone

Beautifully designed and implemented board game for iPhone. I’m still getting to grips with the strategy, but it’s rather fine.

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June 3, 2010

Reeder Redefines Google Reader on the iPad

Looking forward to this. Reeder on iPhone is the reason I switched back to using Google Reader for my RSS collation needs.

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June 1, 2010

Kaleidoscope — File comparison for Mac

New diff viewer for OS X. Finally, a diff tool that can deal gracefully with changesets across multiple files!

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May 12, 2010

Portal is FREE!

The free game is not a lie! To encourage download of Steam, Valve is giving Portal away for free for the next two weeks. If you haven’t already played it, YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE NOT TO.

March 18, 2010

Tribute to Famous People by Pomplamoose

The fabulous Pomplamoose have compiled their outstanding cover versions into a new album. Many examples of cover versions being better than the originals, particularly their gorgeous take on “Single Ladies”.

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December 31, 2009

Best of Bootie 2009

This year’s mash-up-mega-mix. Amazing as ever!

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December 26, 2009

Android Starter Kit

According to CNet, three of the top four must-have Android apps are: A file manager, a process killer, and an app uninstaller. Because, as everyone knows, the kids LOVE to kill them processes.

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December 20, 2009

Annabel Scheme

Robin’s novella is now available as a CC-licensed PDF file. I’m about halfway through reading my copy, and proud to have been part of the Kickstarter project that funded it.

Perfect for copying onto your Kindle before you board a flight this festive season!

December 11, 2009

8-bit Christmas

Chiptunes Christmas album, raising cash for Child’s Play.

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December 7, 2009

MagicPrefs

I love my new Magic Mouse, but was missing my middle click. This app adds it back. Hooray!

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November 30, 2009

Flickit - Fun and easy Flickr uploading for your iPhone and iPod Touch

This is now my go-to Flickr photo uploader for the iPhone. Great UI, lets you queue up photos and upload in batches, free. Everything you could want, and nothing more. Ace!

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November 29, 2009

Waze

Free car routing app for iPhone, which is using game mechanics (points & leaderboards) to crowd-source maps and traffic info. Initial prodding suggests it’s not ready for prime-time — you’re better off waiting for protonerds to fill up their data banks — but it might be worth watching in the future.

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November 25, 2009

Ommwriter

Oh my, this is rather lovely. A distraction-removing full-screen text editor (similar to WriteRoom), with a lovely background and jangly music!

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October 6, 2009

Glims for Safari

Safari “plug-in” which fixes a bunch of my frustrations since switching from Firefox. This plus ClickToFlash rock my world!

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October 5, 2009

Canabalt

Rather ace Flashgame, now available for the iPhone. Interesting sidenote: Reviews in iTunes are rather overwhelmed by their stupid decision to include a review in the app description containing the word “faggotry”.

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September 29, 2009

Dropbox iPhone app

Dropbox release a (free!) iPhone app the lets you access all your saved files. I almost feel guilty that I’m still on their free plan — They rock my world massively.

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August 2, 2009

Tig: text-mode interface for git

Dead handy ncurses-based browser for git. It makes git diffs and blames much more manageable.

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July 28, 2009

BootXChanger

Replace the Apple graphic on OS X boot. Being a traditionalist, I’ve got with an old school Happy Mac.

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July 23, 2009

ClickToFlash

OS X Safari users: Install this! Blocks Flash until you click on the object in Safari (and other WebKit-based applications). A way to mitigate the risk of the Flash exploit without completely nuking Flash Player from your machine.

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July 20, 2009

Weezer - The 8-bit Album

Compilation of chiptunes covers of Weezer. Ace!

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May 2, 2009

Dinosaur Comic message style for Adium

/me steps on log cabin

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April 20, 2009

atebits - Tweetie for Mac

Tweetie has been my iPhone Twitter app of choice for some time. The new OS X version seems equally lovely. Not going to tear away folks with seven-column Tweetdeck setups, but it seems to be a good step-up from Twitterrific.

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April 15, 2009

Tree Style Tab :: Firefox Add-ons

Ooh, this I like. Moves your browser tabs to the left pane, and groups them by the tab that launched them.

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March 18, 2009

Mac Lounge

Alpha version of a new OS X Twitter client. Still a bit rough around the edges, but has a bit more oomph than Twitterrific (and isn’t as complex and desktop-real-estate-consuming as TweetDeck), so I’m giving it a shot.

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February 20, 2009

Flux

“F.lux makes your computer’s lighting adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.”

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Supervisor

Handy lightweight process-launcher-and-watcher. Features like “restart this process if it swallows too much resident memory” are going to be handy.

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February 2, 2009

A Review of Two Things: One For the Mac and One For iPhone

Things has completely changed my life. My moleskine has laid dormant for months, no longer the recipient of a gajillion TODO lists. And, as Shaun Blanc points out, the interface is a near total delight. Dragging a TODO into the project section to split it up into subtasks is the kind of intuitive action that makes it ace. If only it had MobileMe syncing, instead of custom-over-wifi and Dropboxery.

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January 14, 2009

Slacker Personal Radio - Slacker Radio on iPhone and iPod Touch

I prefer Slacker’s personalized radio stations to Pandora, and their new iPhone app is top-notch.

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January 4, 2009

Sen:te - GPGMail

The plugin for OS X’s Mail app which makes cryptography easily manageable.

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December 30, 2008

Best of Bootie 2008 CD

Awesomesauce! The new Best of Bootie mashup CD is ready for download.

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December 28, 2008

Lazarus: Restore lost forms with a single click

Firefox extension to help avoid “crashed browser/lost textarea” syndrome.

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December 20, 2008

SmartSleep

Hurrah! Sleep your MacBook instead of hibernating it when you have sufficient battery life left. It was very annoying that I had to wait for OS X to persist 3GB to disk before I could pick up my laptop.

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December 16, 2008

What's In The Box? | Vermillion Lies

One of my favourite music-geek-thrills is hearing a support act at a concert, being wicked impressed, and buying their CD from the merch table afterwards. Vermillion Lies supported Amanda Palmer last night, and were ace in a quirky discordant silly folkpop kind of way. You can download their latest album for free here. Give ‘em a listen, whydontcha?

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December 10, 2008

ack -- better than grep

Why am I only finding this now? A smart replacement for the “find . | xargs grep” recipe I use on a daily basis.

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November 30, 2008

App Shopper: TapDefense

Fantastic, highly-addictive and free tower-defense game for iPhone. After three (almost half-hour each) games, having trouble beating Level 30 on Easy.

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November 24, 2008

AddressBookSync | Facebook Picture Synchronization with OS X Address Book

Update your OS X Address Book with photos and birthdays from your friends’ Facebook pages (sadly, Facebook bars it from doing anything useful, like updating email addresses and phone numbers)

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October 28, 2008

Bejeweled Twist

PopCap’s latest. When I watched the video, I was skeptical — it all looked a bit crazy and flash and overkill. But it is ace fun and a worthy addition to the Bejeweled family.

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October 24, 2008

TinEye Mobile - Idée Inc.

Take a photo of a CD sleeve, and it’ll attempt to ID it for you. Like Shazam, but for product photos. Since I use my iPhone as a way of remembering books I’ve seen in Borders to buy off of Amazon, that’d be a handy app.

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October 23, 2008

Poladroid

Gorgeously playful app which takes your digital photos and makes them look like old Polaroid snaps. Features loving touches like having to wait for the photo to “develop”.

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October 14, 2008

2D Boy: World of Goo

Stonking little indie game, finally officially released. Filled with bizarreness and imagination, I’ve been having a blast with it.

October 8, 2008

macvim

Newer, more Mac-like version of vim than the olde Carbon port on vim.org.

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September 23, 2008

Boxer: Mac-Friendly DOS Emulation

Nice wrapper for DOSBox, which allows you to bundle up DOS games on OS X. I look forward to a little light “Jones in the Fast Lane” this evening.

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August 20, 2008

Things - task management on the Mac

I will confess to having fallen somewhat head-over-heels in love with Things as a TODO list manager over the last couple of days. Requires some light symlinking-to-an-iDisk to “sync” across machines, but offers the right levels of “This is a task for today/soon/sometime” to help keep me organized. Next step: Play with the iPhone app.

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July 24, 2008

Silverback: guerrilla usability testing

Pretty damned nifty usability-testing app for OS X. With an *awesome* icon. Similar to (and considerably cheaper than) the Windows app Morae.

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July 15, 2008

Adeona: A Free, Open Source System for Helping Track and Recover Lost and Stolen Laptops

Open-source app which logs your laptop’s network location (and optionally a snapshot from the webcam) to a DHT distributed database at irregular intervals.

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June 23, 2008

firefox-mac-pdf

In ye olde days, displaying PDF documents in the browser drove me nuts. You’d unwittingly click on a link, and your entire web browser would freeze up for 30 seconds while Adobe Reader started. But since PDF is baked so closely into the OS X system, this Firefox plugin is wicked fast, and thoroughly helpful.

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June 9, 2008

PhoneFinger

Testing tool for iPhone development — Replace your mouse cursor with a lifesize finger. Needs a dirty-fingernail easter egg, if you ask me.

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May 21, 2008

Clutch

Web remote-control plugin for the Transmission bittorrent client. Very handy.

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May 17, 2008

I Love Stars

Lightweight menu-bar app for OSX which displays, and lets you edit, the star rating for the current track in iTunes.

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May 14, 2008

XBMC on OS X

Port of the XBox Media Center to OS X. Works with the Apple Remote, making it more elegant than my usual VLC + Sofa Control combination. Looks good.

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May 12, 2008

tms - Command line client for Time Machine backups

Command line tool for interrogating and diffing Time Machine backups.

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May 9, 2008

TapeDeck. ▸▸ The tape recorder…fast-forwarded to Mac OS X.

Graphically lovely, and drop-dead simple, audio recording app.

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May 5, 2008

nine inch nails: the slip

Another NIN album released for free download under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. It should be noted that Ghosts I-IV was the first NIN album I’ve ever bought, after enjoying its free release earlier this year.

March 26, 2008

Crossover Games

Wine for OS X and Linux especially designed to play graphically-intensive Windows games. The Orange Box and its contents are supported, and Audio-Surf ran OK for me, with some minor resolution-based oddness. Not sure it’s worth $40, though, when I can just reboot to Boot Camp.

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March 3, 2008

Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts

Trent Reznor releases a new NIN album as online download with “premium” collectors offerings. Notable differences to the Radiohead “In Rainbows’ download include a) It’s CC BY-NC-SA licensed, so you can remix it however you like and b) The first part has been “officially” seeded to BitTorrent in a shareware stylee.

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February 26, 2008

Winclone

I bought a new laptop drive for my MacBookPro last week, and with SuperDuper, was able to copy my OS X partition and boot off it within hours. The Boot Camp Windows partition, however, stumped me. No amount of disk copying or dd’ing worked.

This tool did. It does all the magick required to successfully copy a Windows partition and tweak the partition table to make Windows boot again. Hurrah!

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February 22, 2008

CoverSutra

Got this as part of MacHeist recently, and dismissed it as “pointless eyecandy”. I couldn’t be more wrong — While it is graphically-lovely, it allows for keyboard control of iTunes (including tasks like rating tracks) and is a lower-memory last.fm client than the official last.fm client. Added to my Login Items!

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February 16, 2008

Audiosurf: Ride Your Music

An outstandingly fun Windows game: Drive a car over coloured blocks on a track generated by an MP3 of your choosing. Pick something mellow, and you get a relaxing low-scoring game. But if you want a challenge, throw some pumping techno its way. Works very well with Chemical Brothers and Pixies, I find. Best use of Digital Signal Processing ever!

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February 14, 2008

Vara Software : ScreenFlow

Really rather sweet Mac screencasting software. The post-capture editing tools look handy.

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Flying Meat: VoodooPad

Local private hypertexty wiki note-taking brain-dumping app for OS X. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and really like it.

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February 6, 2008

TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software

The excellent TrueCrypt now runs on OS X, as well as Windows and Linux. I’ll definitely be shunting some of my files onto an encrypted thumbdrive later.

February 5, 2008

Iconfactory : Arcade Daze System

Gorgeously-retro 8-bit-esque system icons for OS X.

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January 25, 2008

Mondrianum

OS X system-wide plugin that adds color palletes from Adobe’s kuler community to the ColorPicker widget.

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January 14, 2008

Shelf - jerakeen.org

Cool prototype application by Tom Insam which monitors your foreground application in OS X, and tries to provide you some context by matching it to someone in your Address Book. It’s early days yet, but decidedly cool (and written in Python)

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January 13, 2008

DTerm

Interesting looking tool which is a cross between Quicksilver and Terminal.

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January 1, 2008

Best of Bootie 2007 CD

Hooray! A new Best of Bootie CD for the new year!

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December 19, 2007

Peggle

The awesome Peggle is now available for Mac, for anyone who hasn’t yet been caught in its crack-like addiction. And only $10 to register until the end of the year. Well worth it.

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December 12, 2007

CDBurnerXP: Introduction and News

Freeware CD burner app for Windows. If this means I can nuke bloody Nero off my work PC, I’ll be a happy, happy man.

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IronPython Studio

Free development environment for Python code under .NET. Will definitely be having an in-depth play with this soon.

December 9, 2007

Begley's Blog: Time Machine Menu Bar Add-On

Handy “Time Machine” menu bar icon which Apple removed from the released version of Leopard. (Make sure and read the installation instructions in the comments)

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November 30, 2007

PuTTY Tray

Improved version of the essential ssh client for Windows

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November 22, 2007

ies4osx

Automatically downloads, installs and runs the Windows versions of IE natively on OS X using Darwine.

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November 6, 2007

Synthesia, Piano for Everyone

The project formerly known as “Piano Hero”.

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September 4, 2007

Jing Project: Visual conversation starts here. Mac or Windows.

Cool looking little screencast app from TechSmith — An easy way to grab images or video from your desktop, and share them quickly. Works in OS X and Windows.

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August 22, 2007

DeskLickr - Flickrize your Mac desktop!

Automatically swap your desktop background for snaps from Flickr. I’ve had some gorgeous stuff come up in the couple of hours I’ve been running it.

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August 14, 2007

infinite-sushi.com - ecto3 alpha

The splendid OS X blog authoring tool gets an (alpha) upgrade.

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August 8, 2007

Xslimmer - Your Mac, on a Diet!

Free up diskspace by removing unneeded bits of applications (eg. translations for languages you don’t speak). Chris Messina reports that you can get an extra 500Mb of diskspace by slimming iWork and iLife ‘08.

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August 2, 2007

Remote Buddy > iPhone support

The excellent Mac remote control software adds an AJAX web-server designed for the iPhone. It works a treat for the old Mac Mini I keep under my TV.

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July 30, 2007

iGTD

Donationware OS X app to help you get your act together. Comes highly recommended by friends.

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July 27, 2007

iFuntastic 2.0 released with added features | iPhone Alley

OS X GUI which makes it a piece of piss to add your own ringtones to the iPhone. Those wily hackers!

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July 5, 2007

telekinesis - Google Code

Remote control for your Mac, designed to be accessed by Safari on an iPhone.

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June 25, 2007

OliveToast MiniMail

Lovely little email floater for Apple Mail.

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June 24, 2007

Friend Photos - Facebook Screensaver

OS X screensaver which grabs your friends’ photos from Facebook. Playing with this, I was reminded that a) I have some incredibly hot friends and b) I have some incredibly strange friends.

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June 19, 2007

Versions - Mac Subversion Client

“Versions is the first Mac OS X Subversion client that won’t make you long for the command line interface anymore.”

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June 16, 2007

VMware Fusion Overview

If you don’t already own Parallels Desktop, the new VMWare beta is great — I far prefer “Unity” to “Coherence” for mixing Windows apps on the OS X desktop. Only $40 if you buy before the official release at the end of August.

June 14, 2007

AppFresh - All Software Updates for your Mac in One Place

Free alternative to the VersionTrackerPro Mac software updater, using iusethis.com’s database for version information

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May 22, 2007

Medallia Blog: jQuery Reference Widget

Dashboard widget for the JQuery docs.

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May 18, 2007

Moody - Mac OS X app to mood tag your music in iTunes

Tag your tunes by mood, then shuffle away for the right mix. Would be interesting to see if there’s a consistent way to share moods across users…

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May 17, 2007

ThisIsNotALabel.com - My Wiimote Drum Kit

Virtual drumming with a wiimote. The video gives a good idea how it works.

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May 16, 2007

nocturne

Simple OS X app which does smart screen-inverting to make late-night computing more bearable.

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May 15, 2007

Pathway

Browser which makes it easier to retrace your steps as you delve through Wikipedia.

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May 6, 2007

MailActOn

Plugin for Apple Mail which allows you to quickly tag/file/act-on your emails with a couple of keystrokes. I’d been looking for something like this for a while.

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May 1, 2007

Frets On Fire

Open source Guitar Hero-a-like.

April 26, 2007

MIKE PIONTEK // software / mac os x / delivery status 3.2.3

Beautiful OS X Dashboard widget to track package delivery.

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Hackety Hack: the Coder's Starter Kit

Simple easy-to-get-started programming tutorial, based upon Ruby and Mozilla. Written by “Why the Lucky Stiff”. The “Hackety Manifesto” is worth reading.

April 23, 2007

Panic - Coda - One-Window Web Development for Mac OS X

Panic’s newest app is aimed squarely at web-devs, attempting to roll “all” the stuff you need to build a website into one app. Looks interesting — I’m definitely guilty of needing about 7 windows open to do web development (a couple of TextMates, Firefox, Safari, a terminal or two). It’ll be interesting to see if this can bring it all together for me.

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April 17, 2007

Port 25 : Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin - Download

From the “about bloody time” file, a plugin from Microsoft for Firefox which allows WMV files to stream in your browser. This has been broken (and required lots of DLL copying) for years.

April 13, 2007

IE WebDeveloper V2

Firebug-a-like for IE. If this works as advertised, it could be indispensable for cross-browser Javascriptery.

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April 12, 2007

Correo - a new mail client for OS X

An attempt to mould Thunderbird into a more Mac-like mail client.

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April 4, 2007

filehippo.com Update Client - filehippo.com

Know when Windows programs you have installed need updateing — Like VersionTracker or AppFresh, but for Windows.

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April 1, 2007

iusethis mac software: applications used by rodbegbie

Up-to-date list of the software I use on my Mac.

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Slife Labs

App which tracks what you’re browsing/reading/writing/working-on over time. Kind of cool to build up a picture of your day.

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March 25, 2007

Products > Remote Buddy

Tool to enable use of the Apple Remote in more apps than just Front Row on OS X. I hooked my old PowerPC Mac Mini up to a USB IR receiver, and can now control VLC with the Apple Remote that came with my MacBookPro. Hoorah! Well worth €10.

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Billable: Simple service and invoice tracking for Mac OS X.

Nicely-done OSX app to help you keep track of your hours and invoicing when doing freelance work.

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March 16, 2007

DockArt

Replace the iTunes icon in the dock with the coverart of the currently playing track. Nice.

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March 12, 2007

Package Tracker - Monkey Business Labs

Package tracking widget for OS X’s Dashboard. Saves you wearing out the F5 key when you’re waiting for something shiny.

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February 18, 2007

Dream Recorder

Sleep analysis tool for Macs, using the built-in iSight and microphone to work out when you’re in “deep sleep”. I think Joy would kill me if I started sleeping with my laptop, though.

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January 28, 2007

Twitteroo

Windows Twitter client. Very “inspired” by Twitterrific.

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January 25, 2007

Humanized

Interesting looking program launcher for Windows — It actually makes CAPS LOCK a useful key on the keyboard again — but I’m not sure it’s worth $25.

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January 13, 2007

Best of Bootie 2006 CD

Some stonking mashups on this album. The Bon Jovi vs. George Michael “Careless or Dead” is a particular favourite in this household.

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January 11, 2007

CrashPlan

Impressive looking network backup software. Straightforward to set-up, you can either pay CrashPlan to backup to their servers, or use local or friends’ hard drives for free. Lots of nice touches, like using Bonjour to discover local backup destinations automatically. Once the Linux client is ready, I’ll be in heaven.

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January 4, 2007

Wormux

Open source Worms-a-like. Far too many of my student hours were taken up playing “Worms 2” against my flatmates. Admittedly, most of that time was taken up by giggling as we named our worms things like “Sean Is A Virgin” and “Jim’s Cock”, but I think the game was fun too.

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January 2, 2007

Vienna

Open-source newsreader for OS X. Looks to be worthy competition for NetNewsWire.

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December 10, 2006

DVD Audio Ripper

Handy utility for ripping (stereo) music DVDs as MP3s.

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December 2, 2006

home of the nerd cave | taskbar shuffle

Drag’n’drop the buttons in your Windows taskbar, in case you, like me, are the obsessive type who gets quite out-of-whack when your mail client isn’t the left-most button.

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November 24, 2006

Twadget — The Twitter Vista Sidebar Gadget

I’ve knocked out a sidebar gadget for Vista which displays your friends’ statuses on Twitter.

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November 13, 2006

Sqlite Developer - Sqlite3 Database Manager

GUI for managing SQLite databases. Best one I’ve found, although it’s not free. Deals gracefully with the 4Gb database files we use at work.

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October 30, 2006

Disco - Mac Disc Burning

CD burner for Mac. Fairly boring idea, sure, but the UI is a gorgeous example of minimalism.

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October 28, 2006

Frozen Bubble - the official home

Truly excellent open-source Bust-a-Move clone hits 2.0. Features, oh yes, internet multiplayer mode. My productivity hits new lows. (No Windows or OSX port yet, but hopefully only a matter of time)

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October 26, 2006

Adobe Labs - Adobe Soundbooth

Beta of a new audio-editing app from Adobe.

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Windows Defender home

MS’s anti-spyware app is out of beta. Go install it on your relatives’ PCs post-haste.

October 12, 2006

AndreaMosaic Home Page

Really frickin’ good Photomosaic-making software. I’ve been having lots of fun with this, using around 15,000 album covers as the “tiles”, and it does an bang-up job, without “cheating” by tinting or repeating images (like some other software does).

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October 9, 2006

OpenPandora

Player for Pandora which supports the multimedia keys on keyboards, minimizes to your system tray, and uploads your track info to last.fm.

October 3, 2006

Listening Post: Winamp Adds Remote Access, Dashboard Widgets

New version of WinAmp (Remember them? It’s like an iPod, except you can’t carry it around with you. Ask your parents) includes “remote listening” — Stream music from your home PC to wherevers. Since Apple kept disabling hacks that did this with iTunes, I’m curious how AOL think they’re going to be able to keep this “legit”

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September 13, 2006

Foxit Software: Foxit Reader 2.0

Foxit Reader, the PDF viewer for Windows that doesn’t slow down your PC startup, kill your web browser, or take 45 seconds to load, has reached version 2.0. Recommended.

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September 4, 2006

REAPER - Rapid Environment for Audio Prototyping and Efficient Recording | Cockos Incorporated

Shareware Windows multitrack audio editor from Justin Frankel and co.

September 3, 2006

TubeSock - Rip videos from YouTube

OSX app which downloads YouTube flash videos, converts them to MPEG4, and loads them onto your iPod Video.

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August 2, 2006

WinTabber - Tab your terminal, shell, browser or favorite application

Can be used with PuTTY to create a tabbed interface. Since I usually have four or five ssh shells open at a time, this’ll help me keep track of things.

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July 31, 2006

The Broadband - God Save the Internet

” Writing songs about corporate malfeasance so you don’t have to!”. Free net-neutrality MP3 from Jill Sobule, Kay Hanley and Michelle Lewis.

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Guardian Unlimited | G24

The Grauniad’s constantly-updated downloadable PDF, designed to be printed out before you leave the office in the evening to read on the train home. Nice way to attack the evening newspapers’ sales without having to distribute deadtree yourself.

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July 19, 2006

Adobe Labs - Project: Lightroom

Adobe’s Lightroom photo-processing beta is now available for Windows in addition to OSX.

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July 3, 2006

nLite - Deployment Tool for Unattended Windows

nLite’s hit 1.0. If you reinstall Windows with any frequency, it’s a lifesaver, allowing you to slipstream an install containing all Windows Updates, plus your favourite settings, tweaks, and apps.

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June 16, 2006

visor

Cunning OSX hack to enable an instantly-accessible Quake-style terminal window.

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June 15, 2006

ClamWin Free Antiviru

Free and Free antivirus for WIndows, based on ClamAV. Imagine Norton Antivirus, but without all the masses of shite that slows down your PC. Doesn’t include “on-access” file scanning, but I’m happy with that.

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June 13, 2006

GParted -- LiveCD

Manoman is this handy. Boot up off the live CD and repartition your hard drive on the fly without losing data. It’s like PartitionMagic, but free, free and it doesn’t corrupt your data!

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June 8, 2006

Google Browser Sync

Interesting offering from the Googleplex — Sync your bookmarks, saved passwords and cookeis across your Firefox installations, via Google’s big-ass database in the sky. If there were a way to do this using my own server, I’d be all over it.

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June 4, 2006

BixData | Cluster and Systems Management

Free but not-free tool for system monitoring. Looks like a usable alternative to Nagios.

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June 3, 2006

Omniscient Debugging

Very cool Java debugging tool, which records your application’s entire state over runtime, and allows you to replay and debug it at a later date.

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May 26, 2006

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats (Beta 2)

Microsoft make good on their promise — This download allows users of Office 2003 to save and open the new zipped-XML file formats.

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May 23, 2006

2007 Microsoft Office System Beta 2: Get the Beta

The first major public release of the next version of Office. Get your grubby hands on the shiny new UI for the first time, and try to imagine how you’re going to explain it to your parents over the phone.

May 22, 2006

SourceForge.net: UltraStar

Open-source version of the SingStar karaoke game.

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May 20, 2006

MacSaber: Turn Your Mac Into A Jedi Weapon

Hah! Using the motion-sensor built-in to recent Mac laptops to synthesize lightsaber noises. Genius!

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May 18, 2006

JungleDisk - Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3™

Cross-platform mountable network file-system storing your precious data with Amazon’s S3 service.

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May 7, 2006

Server Monitoring With munin And monit

Cool. I’d been looking for a simple Linux monitoring tool like this a few weeks ago — Something simple that can plot load over time.

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May 6, 2006

Moose

Win32 remote controller for Slimserver. I now have toast popping up on track changes, which makes me happy.

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April 29, 2006

blakeseely.com » Mugshot

Excellent wee Flickr organizr for OSX. Easily sift through your photos, sets, contacts and groups. The author is now working on Aperture for Apple.

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April 15, 2006

Akismet for Movable Type

The hugely-successful Akismet anti-comment-spam plugin for Wordpress has been ported to MT.

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April 14, 2006

ANOTHER WORLD

Remake of the classic PC game, Another World. Bastard tough, but awesome fun, as I recall.

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April 12, 2006

AjaxTerm

Jeepers, this is a cool hack. VT100-emulator running in Javascript over AJAX to allow you to remote-control a server over HTTP.

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mozdev.org - tamperdata: index

A Firefox extension that allows you to tweak your HTTP (and HTTPS) requests and responses in real-time. I used to use the Achilles proxy for this, back in the day.

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April 8, 2006

s3DAV

Java app allowing you to mount your Amazon S3 storage account as a local drive.

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April 7, 2006

BBC Radio 4 -The Now Show

Auntie releases a Radio 4 comedy show for MP3 download & podcast. Hurrah! If they do this with the next series of Just a Minute and I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, I’m going to be a happy camper indeed.

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Network Magic

Simplified home-network manager for Windows. A common interface for all the things you want to manage — routers, software firewalls, file/printer sharing, etc.

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April 5, 2006

DOSBox, a x86 emulator with DOS

Tool for running olde DOS games (Soundblaster emulation and all) in Windows/Linux/OSX. I’ll have to try getting “Jones In The Fast Lane” up and running with it.

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Apple - Boot Camp

Well blow me! Apple have made available a tool to help you install Windows XP on your new Intel Mac. Strikes me that a MacBook Pro is the best Windows laptop you’re gonna find at the moment.

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March 30, 2006

Daversy

“Daversy is a source control tool for relational databases.” Man, something like this has been needed for years.

March 29, 2006

XScreenSaver

jwz’s awesome screensaver collection is now available for OSX. Windows users are still SOL. “There is no Windows version of xscreensaver, and there never will be. Please stop asking. Microsoft killed my company, and I hold a personal grudge.”

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March 28, 2006

Safely install software in a virtual layer - Lifehacker

This looks handy. Install Windows applications into isolated silos so you can try them and uninstall them without leaving debris all over your hard drive and registry.

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March 27, 2006

Videora TiVo Converter

Free one-click conversion of video files to the specific MPEG format required to copy video onto your TiVo. No messing around with demuxers or codecs required. They also have one that converts to iPod Video format.

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March 19, 2006

Allmydata.com

Distributed P2Pish secure backups. You give up 10Gb of your hard drive, for the rights to distribute 1Gb of your files across hundreds of peers. Sadly Windows-only, and there’s no way to tweak how much *bandwidth* you’re willing to give up, but could come in handy.

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Darik's Boot and Nuke

Bootdisk that fits on a 1.44Mb floppy which securely nukes every scrap of data off of hard drives. Handy to have if you’re about to sell an old computer.

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March 17, 2006

Tribler

Interesting attempt to add more social context (eg. trust, recommendations) to BitTorrent donwnloads.

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February 28, 2006

ZoneTag Photos

It’s stuff like this that made me want to purchase a Series 60 cellphone again. Two-click Flickr photo uploading, along with geo-tagging.

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February 18, 2006

A Look at GNOME 2.14

The now-traditional “What’s new in the next version of Gnome” post. As per usual, nothing that makes you fall off your chair screaming OMFGAWESOME, but it’s all welcome tweakage (especially the speeding up, since my Pentium3 laptop is pretty clunky these days)

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February 16, 2006

Cenqua FishEye Source Perspective

To be investigated… Intriguing source-control browser (and searcher). I’ll have to give this a go at work tomorrow.

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February 8, 2006

VMWare Server

Fantastic news: VMWare are making their server product free(beer). I’m almost certainly going to use this for a dev server at work — Backup the virtual machine image every night, and if hardware crashes, just startup your backed-up image on a new machine. Also gets around the “You can’t create an image” limitation of the free VMWare Player app.

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January 31, 2006

Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview

Microsoft have released a public beta of IE7. The homepage is a staggeringly fucking awful flash animation, promising “Everything you need, nothing you don’t, and a few things you have yet to imagine”, before displaying a list of Firefox’s features.

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Why Reboot?

Small Windows app that tells you what an installer is planning on doing after the seemingly-compulsory reboot.

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TorPark

Tor + Firefox that you can run on a USB keychain to enable anonymized web browsing anywhere. Fantastic stuff.

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January 30, 2006

MP3Gain

App to apply ReplayGain volume normalization to MP3s by tweaking the audio data, so the normalized files can be played back on any player (such as yer iPod), not just those that understand the tagging format.

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January 26, 2006

Reveal

Swish little graphical-history extension for Firefox. There’s a lot of polish here, including a very clever “tour” when you first use it.

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January 14, 2006

ViewMyCurrency

A great example of why Firefox can be so powerful — An extension which automatically currency-converts prices on webpages.

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January 8, 2006

Vongo.com - Choose Now. Watch Now.

Starz’s online video download service: $9.99 for all-you-can-eat movies. Windows & US only, naturally.

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January 3, 2006

Hamachi

To be tried-out: Cross-platform app that creates VPNs between computers — even if they’re behind firewalls. Downside: Requires connecting to a centrally-run server to initiate connection, which will soon be charging $$$.

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December 29, 2005

Free Music

Kristin Hersh has released a new EP as free creativecommons-licensed FLAC files.

December 28, 2005

Tunatic: free music identification software

Shazam-a-like “hold a microphone up to a speaker and identify the tune” service that runs on your PC. Neither codebase or database is open, sadly.

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TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software for Windows XP/2000 and Linux

Open-source whole-disk encryption package for Windows. Perfect for keeping your USB keychain drive safe from prying eyes.

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December 25, 2005

BBC - Doctor Who - Episode Guide - The Christmas Invasion

The Beeb’s made a commentary track for the new Doctor Who christmas episode available as an MP3 download. What a great idea!

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December 7, 2005

mozdev.org - nextplease

Ooh. This is just supersmart! A Firefox plugin which works out when you’re on a site with multiple pages to a story (or search results), and lets you flip through them with keyboard shortcuts. This makes TWoP much easier to read. Hurrah!

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December 6, 2005

Colorize black and white photos - DevLobby.com

Cool little app to re-color black and white photos. Lots of fun!

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December 1, 2005

How To Install Apple’s Front Row

Install Front Row on any Mac, not just the new iMacs.

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Dean Gray Tuesday

On December 13th, the now-banned Dean Gray “American Edit” album will be up for download from a bunch of locations — including groovymother.com. Spread the word.

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November 27, 2005

Paint.NET

New version of the excellent free^2 Windows image editing software.

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November 26, 2005

the Radio Knives

My brother-in-law-in-law’s band. Really rather stonking garage-rawk.

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November 23, 2005

Indieish: Remixing Pop Culture - CC:365

Podcast promising a new CC-licensed indie MP3 tune every day of 2006. I’m really looking forward to this.

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November 22, 2005

Dean Gray presents American Edit

Mash-up album based on Green Day’s “American Idot”.

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November 11, 2005

Celestia

Wow. An amazing free space “simulator” for Windows, OSX or Linux. Tip: Select “Demo” from the Help menu to get an idea of what it covers.

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November 7, 2005

Visual Studio Express

Microsoft have release the various versions of Visual Studio Express for free. Very smart move on their part — It reduces the cost of Windows programming to essentially zero for those who aren’t willing to pay, and MS can make up the money with their “professional” Team solutions and MSDN subscriptions.

November 5, 2005

mplayerplug-in

The best video plugin for Linux I’ve found. Plays Quicktime, Windows Media and Real Video without complaint, hiccup, or browser crash.

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October 25, 2005

Flickr.Net Screensaver

Flickr screensaver for Windows. Rather nicely, it displays different photos on each monitor if you’ve got multiple screens.

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October 21, 2005

VMware Player

This has great potential. VMWare have a free “player” allowing anyone to run pre-built virtual machines.

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October 7, 2005

the electric sheep screen-saver

My screensaver-of-choice — Collaboratively generate frames for gorgeously-trippy animations.


About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.