Monitoring your Macbook's Health

 

Its important to keep an eye on your battery usage over it's lifetime. In my case, it happens to be a macbook pro. Knowing its capacity, charge cycles and more will help you maintain it, and know if you are having issues that are battery related.

I like to use an application called Battery Health Montior from Sonora Graphics. It's free, and works on Macbooks, Powerbooks and iBooks. Battery Health Monitor provides information on:

• Current Capacity
• Original Capacity
• Current Charge
• Charge Cycles
• Voltage

Checking up on these bar graph values will indicated changes in the lifespan of your current battery. A very important part of extending your battery's life, is to let it run down completely and then fully re-charge it at least once a month. I try to do it once a week, since my macbook is on AC power most of the time.

Coconut Battery is another free application I've used in the past worth noting.

Download - Battery Health Montior

Mac OSX's Preview - hidden jems

For the most part, there are certain workhorse applications I use daily, such as Adobe Photoshop & Acrobat for heavy lifting on my projects. That said, for most of my other regular everyday computer usage, I don't require the power and overhead of those applications. Enter Mac OSX's PREVIEW.

The Preview application does quite a bit more than just reading PDFs or viewing common image formats. Most users never bother browsing through it's menus. In actuality, Preview is a very versatile little program. For instance, without having the Adobe Acrobat suite installed, you can Annotate PDF's, Delete Pages, Rearrange Pages, even Merge PDFs.

Most importantly for me though, are it's image editing capabilities. From basics such as Cropping, resizing, and rotation to color/exposure adjustments, and Alpha Mask Extractions. For producitvity purposes, it's capable of doing many of these operations in Batch mode as well.

An added benefit to using Mac OSX's implementation of PDF in preview, is that you are not subject to the same recent security flaws found in Adobe's PDF product. Don't forget there's also PRINT to PDF built right into the operating system.

Encrypting Disk Images in OSX

You can use the built in FileVault feature to encrypt your whole user directory in Mac OSX. However, this usually comes with an overall price on performance. Additionally, if you use Time Machine and Filevault together, your home directory gets backed up once you log out of your machine.

There is however, another option. You can make a mountable Encrypted Disk Image (any size) of your own to securely store your confidential files. This will allow you to turn FileVault off for best system performance, giving you the ability to backup your password protected images to CD-R or DVD-R, or other removable media.

Lets get to it. Although you can make the image any size, for this example we will make a file that is 660MB, so it can be backed up to a CD.

Click to read more ...

Best Unarchivers for Mac OSX

The standard BOMArchiveHelper.app built into OSX's finder is ok for simple compression and decompression Zip operations. If you're looking for replacements that can handle more formats, such as Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, Rar, 7-zip, LhA, and others then try some of my favorite free ones:

• ZipPeg
• The Unarchiver
• UnrarX
  

If you consume much content from the usenet newsgroups, then you will definitely want a set of programs that can recover missing information by processing often used "par" and "par2" files, and recombine sets of files. The best combinations I've found for this are:

• MacPAR Deluxe
• Split&Concat
  

 Suttfit Deluxe is a good classic Mac compression utility as well, however it does sell for $80.00.

Best Netbooks for running OSX

Looking for one of those affordable netbooks everyone seems to be raving about? If you want one that runs Windows XP, Linux or even the upcoming Windows 7, then shop around for the best price. They're all pretty much in the same price range now for similar specs.

If you're reading this because you would like to run OSX on a Netbook, then read on. The decision of attempting this is left completely up to you. Fact is, this would only be good for simple computing tasks such as browsing, email, word processing, network administration, or any other such non-CPU intensive tasks.

Click to read more ...