Pat Miller explains how to surf the web, word process, email, do instant messaging and even make Internet phone calls all with a Nintendo DS.

Mind you, at least in the UK at £79 the DS is actually more expensive than an XO (the “one laptop per child“) would be (if we could buy one), and of course it lacks a keyboard. But doing all that on something that was designed to play simple games would certainly be good for one’s geek cred.

Back when I used to write for MacUser (14 years ago!) I had a column called “Brake’s Bunch” where I used to write about various shareware utilities, games and other files which I had found. Then I left the Mac fold for a while… but now that I am back I have slid back into the habit of gathering bits and pieces and installing them. So here is a moderately frequently updated roundup of the freeware, shareware and open source stuff I have accumulated since I got my ibook in the hope it will help some of you (this post seems to be one of the most-read ones so I hope it works!). Unless otherwise noted these are available in PC and/or Linux versions as well - if I don’t provide a link it’s because you should be able to find them by Googling for them or using MacUpdate or Version Tracker to find the relevant files. If you think there’s another game/app/utility I should take a look at or there’s a different utility available that does the same things as one I mentioned but does them better please let me know!

Items added since last major update (March) are italicised.
Games:
Alphababy - Lets your baby have fun bashing the keyboard of your Mac - it pops up shapes and makes sounds whatever they press and makes sure other applications running aren’t affected by what is typed. Whether it is a good idea to encourage your baby to bash your keyboard is up to you to decide!
Army Operations 2.5 - The best (certainly the most advanced) free game available - a first person perspective shooter. Enjoy it while you can as last I heard the guy supporting it on the Mac is no longer going to keep it up to date with the (dominant) PC version.
FreeCiv - an open source, customisable offshoot of Civ II.
triplea - A WW II strategic level game being developed as open source. The AI is basic to non-existent but if they get that and other niggling bugs sorted out it looks promising
The Ur-Quan Masters - a multi-platform port of a classic “explore the galaxy in your ship and negotiate with/kill aliens” adventure/combat game. The best Mac variant is here.
Xconq-MacOSX - An excellent open source empire building game based on the original “Empire” game. Graphically unimpressive but offers loads of options for different modes of play.
Privateer Gold - An open source copy of Wing Commander Privateer (with some added features).
Applications:
Audacity - Great open source audio editing and recording software
Chicken of the VNC - Lets me view the screen of a machine running VNC server and control it remotely (handy for using both my wife’s PC and my Mac at the same time).
Conversation - Free IRC client
Cyberduck - FTP client
Comic Life - An excellent little app that lets you take pictures from your own collection, add comic-book style speech balloons etc and create your own comic book. It’s not freeware but you can try it out for a month before it starts putting a watermark on anything you do.
Fire - Multi-platform instant message client. Similar to Proteus - which one you use is probably a matter of taste…
FreeMind - A Java-based mind mapping application
galerie - A (mac only) add-on for iPhoto that makes it easy to create photo galleries using your available web space. OK to use but I am using Flickr for this these days.
Grapher - Cool free graphing calculator
Nvu - Handy WYSIWYG web page editing software
Transana - Excellent open source software to aid transcription of video and audio files - in Alpha on the Mac but still worth checking out.

Utilities:
Active Timer - Tracks the amount of time you spend in each application on your Mac. A pretty basic feature set but it’s easy to use and it’s free.
AudioScrobbler - Tracks what you listen to in iTunes and automatically creates a profile for you on last.fm which should help you find music you like. Its support for Classical music is rubbish (it doesn’t handle the ‘composer’ tag) but otherwise well worth a look.
Aurora - An alarm clock for your Mac that ties in with iTunes - excellent!
BluePhoneMenu - Handy utility for controlling a bluetooth phone via your Mac. Since superceded by BluePhone Elite which offers more features but is shareware. Still downloadable, though.
Compost - Lets you control the way the Trash works so you can instantly delete big unwanted files without flushing all of the files in the trash unneccessarily.
Default Folder X - gives you much better control of which folder you open when you get the open/save dialogue on your Mac (as well as adding lots of other misc features). Reminds me of a very early Mac addon, ‘Boomerang’. (I still don’t know why this isn’t a part of the OS by now).
Delocalizer 1.1 - Gets rid of foreign language support files you are not using to free up hard disk space.
ION, the Open Media Network and DTV - Trying to make it easy to find and download internet video podcasts.
Greasemonkey - an add-on to Firefox that enables lots of useful enhancements to your web browsing - like Quicksilver (below) it’s something you have to try before you see what use it can be.
Eyehide - makes it easy to create an invisible, password-protected folder to hide files you don’t want everyone to have access to (so you can retain some privacy without password protecting your whole computer against everyone).
Mailtags - Must-have utility for organizing Apple Mail messages (see this post)
Memory Usage Getter - (also measures CPU usage) Figure out which of your applications is a memory or CPU hog and figure out if you need more RAM.
Quıcĸsilver - Swiss army knife keyboard shortcut application many rave about but I haven’t really delved into yet.
R-Name - Easy way to change several file names at the same time on your Mac.
Romeo - Excellent free Mac application to let you control your Mac (eg your iTunes or your Powerpoint presentation) using your Bluetooth phone
Screen Spanning Doctor - Use more than one screen or use a large screen at > 1024×768 with your iBook by installing this.
SimpleWget - Provides a basic non-control-line interface to Wget which automates copying web sites onto your hard disk for later browsing.
SMARTReporter - May be able to warn you in advance when your disk is in danger of failing.
Synk - easy-to-use file synchronisation and full disk backup app for the Mac - free to academic users, cheap for others.
Textpander - (Mac only but PC options are also available) - automatically substitutes text for other text in every application you type in - useful for common mis-spellings and can also insert the date when you type “ddate” etc.
Time Out - Warns you to take a break away from the keyboard (Mac only)
Tidy Up! - Find duplicate files
TinkerTool - gives you access to additional preference settings Apple has built into Mac OS X
VLC video player - Excellent player for many kinds of video content - more versatile than Quicktime for this and includes a full-screen mode (which Quicktime ‘basic’ does not).
WhatSize Disk Inventory X - Lets you see at a glance where the big files and folders are on your hard disk so you can free up space.
WireTap Pro - Shareware Mac utility that lets you record streamed audio into files for later listening.
Yasu 1.3.1 - Performs various low-level Mac (UNIX) “maintenance” operations. Use with caution. I have to say I only used it once so far because I am not clear what it does or why I would need it…

Update: Widgets!
How could I forget the widgets I have found (through Apple’s directory) and installed? In truth I don’t use them all that much but they are occasionally useful…

Countdown Plus - Tells you how long you have before something happens or is due.
iStat Nano - Shows memory, network and CPU use etc
CharacterPal - reminds you of the keypresses needed to produce special characters, accents etc. Also see Symbols which is not as intuitive but more powerful, including info on how to generate them in HTML as well as in Mac documents etc.
Decor - lets you stick a picture up on your dashboard
Air Traffic Control - Lets you see all of the wireless networks in your area and whether they are secure or not.
quikconvert - converts between lots of different units including currencies - just type in the number and the unit type and it will figure out what you are trying to convert to.

UK users in particular may want to check out these:
BBC Weather - lets you see the weather forecast in your area in the UK or around the world for the next 5 days. Much better (and prettier) than the US one included as standard.
Postage Calculator (Royal Mail)
Trains - see the train timetable of your choice

According to this summary of a recent study at York University in Toronto,

A body of research suggests that playing video games provides benefits similar to bilingualism in exercising the mind. Just as people fluent in two languages learn to suppress one language while speaking the other, so too are gamers adept at shutting out distractions to swiftly switch attention between different tasks.

Je suis le champion mental du monde alors!

(Yes there is a site you can visit if you click on the ad).

It’s a good thing I can only play Civilization IV on my wife’s computer - if it ran on my Mac, my productivity would be nil. It is fun though - dare I say more fun than Civ III? The new version requires a lot less micro-management than Civ III did.

P.S. I interviewed Civ’s creator, Sid Meier, back in 2002 when he was promoting Civ III (and I’ve got a picture to prove it).

“Teh Newbian Institute for Madder Skillz” or to translate to non-gamer-speak “The Institute for Novice Game Players teaching Improved Skills”.

I love games but I am basically crap at playing them (I guess because I am 25 years away from my ‘peak’ gaming age)

From Penny Arcade

Two similar humorous exercises in jargon juxtaposition made me smile recently - excerpts follow. First, The War on Terror as viewed from the Bourne shell:
$ cd /middle_east/Iraq/Democracy
$ ./install
Install Error: Install failed. See install_log for details.
$ more install_log
Installed failed!
Prerequisite packages missing
Conflicting package Wahhabism found in /midde_east/Saudi_Arabia
Packages Church and State must be installed separately
File System /PeakOil nearing capacity
Please read the install guide to properly plan your installation.

And If World War II was a realtime strategy game this is what would be going on in the chat during the game (warning - lots of profanity - as you might expect):
benny-tow: hey ur losing ur guys in africa im gonna need help in italy soon sum1
T0J0: o **** i cant help u i got my hands full
Hitler[AoE]: im 2 busy 2 help
Roosevelt: yah thats right ***** im comin for ya
Stalin: church help me
Churchill: like u helped me before? sure ill just sit here
Stalin: dont be an arss
Churchill: dont be a commie. oops too late
Eisenhower: LOL

My wife just took delivery of her new Dell notebook. She is rightfully afraid that because it is a PC I will be tempted to spend lots of time on it playing games… But when we started filling in the XP setup stuff one of the two example texts given for the computer’s “friendly description” on the network was “David’s Game Machine”. She hadn’t typed my name in… How did they know?!

Having finished a self-imposed game-free hiatus I just downloaded a bunch of game demos.
* Kohan II was OK but nothing special (rave reviews notwithstanding)
* Doom 3 wouldn’t run properly on my machine (no sound)
* Axis and Allies wouldn’t install at first then turned out to be very similar to Kohan II as it was produced by the same developer
* Medieval Lords, Nexus and Superpower 2 had no tutorial modes and just plunged you straight in to rather complex games so I became confused and bored
* Tribes: Vengeance had a demo that was so limited I couldn’t really get a flavour of the game.

I had been looking forward to hours of demo-playing fun to give myself a break after a tough couple of weeks but it looks like if I want to play anything I am going to have to play some of my old favourites - eg “Combat Mission”:http://www.battlefront.com/products/cmbb/cmbb.html. Or maybe this is the universe’s way of telling me I shouldn’t be playing games?

I wish I had the time to do a proper write-up of the NotCon session I attended featuring Brewster Kahle, the man behind the Internet Archive whose mission is nothing less than to provide universal access to all human knowledge. Here is some stuff I noted instead.

Some interesting factoids from his presentation:

* There are 150,000 people using the Internet Archive per day. It stores 3-400Tb of data and recently upgraded to 1Gbps bandwidth.
* There were 300,000 to 600,000 scrolls in the Library at Alexandria. Only around eight of them are left.
* You can store the contents of the Library of Congress as plaintext (if you had scanned it all) on a machine costing $60,000.
* The bookmobile he produced that is connected to the Internet via satellite, travels the world and produces complete bound books from a collection of 20,000 public domain works cost just $15,000 - and that includes the van itself.
* He says that it costs him $1 to print and bind a public domain book - I assumed the books produced would be very rough and ready but he brought some along and they were almost as good as the kind you’d buy in a shop. I suspect he may be stretching the truth a bit - I believe the $1 a book cost he quotes is for an 100 page black and white printed booklet. It’s still impressive though especially as:
* He notes it costs US libraries $2 to issue a book. He suggests they could give people copies of public domain books for $1 instead and pay another $1 to the author to compensate them.

Like many geniuses he just doesn’t know when to stop and thankfully he has a private income from a dotcom or two he was involved with that enables him to try out lots of projects. Aside from archiving the web, movies, books and music he’s:

* taking the US to court to try to get their boneheaded copyright laws changed
* working on mirrors of his San Francisco-based archive in Alexandria and Amsterdam (hosted there by XS4all)
* encouraging anyone to upload anything to his archive (copyright permitting) offering unlimited bandwidth indefinitely (though the site doesn’t make it very easy to figure out how you are supposed to take advantage of this generous offer) including performance recordings of bands that have given their permission.
* Trying to collect and save old software (he got special dispensation from the US copyright office to do this for the next three years but can’t make it available). He does want your old software however so if you’ve got some he would like you to send it to him - in physical form with manuals where available. He’s even
* Trying to provide fast, free wifi across all of San Francisco.

He’s so hyperactive my fingers get sore just typing in all of the projects he is involved with! I worry that he’s taking on too much and that some of it may fall by the wayside if something happens to him. But his enthusiasm and his optimism are infectious. I am pleased to have been able to shake his hand.

P.S. Ironically, I recorded his presentation and have it in MP3 format but because it was 21Mb I can’t serve it myself and so far nobody has stepped forward to host the file. I finally found how to upload it but then discovered I deleted the original file once I passed it on to someone else to upload! So I hope someone still has them - if it does get posted I’ll tell you where.

I am not an online roleplaying game player myself but I know enough about how they work that this article - “The Automated Online Roleplayer”:http://www.gamespy.com/fargo/august03/autorpg/index.shtml made me laugh long and loud.