Did you know that there’s a perfectly usable OCR package built into Microsoft Office for Windows? I managed to lose the install disk for the software that came with my scanner so imagine my relief when I found out about it. I gather the next version of Word in Office 2007 comes with a blog posting tool. Reminds me of the Flanders and Swann song about the rhino whose “bodger on his bonce” (odd thing on his nose) is good for opening tin cans, picking up litter and removing stones from horse’s hooves but alas rarely gets the chance to do any of those things.

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

When is it do you think that Word would decide to crash and, for a change, not to auto-recover any documents? Yes, you guessed it, with several documents open and just after I had had an insight into my thesis which inspired a small but welcome burst of creativity (thank you Prof. John B Thompson!). To add insult to injury, when I reported the crash to Microsoft using their automatic notifier and looked at their “online crash analysis” I was told essentially “we don’t know what the problem is but we aren’t going to do anything about it because Word 2000 is too old so we don’t care - you should have upgraded by now.”

MailTags - as its name suggests - lets you add keyword tags to email messages in Apple Mail and do a variety of other interesting things with your email to help you sort it. Best of all - a feature just added - you can set it to effectively display your own subject line in the “message list” pane. So you can scan your email and quickly find something you label “important advice” instead of having to remember that that email had the subject line “Re: that thing you said”. (This is a feature Eudora had for ages which I really missed when I moved across to Apple Mail).

Having bought a desktop PC (dubbed ‘playmate’) for (mostly) games and (partly) other applications like NVivo which don’t run on my iBook, I find that I have had to learn how to network between them inside the home. So now using VNC I can view my iBook’s screen in a window on my PC then when I have finished working on a file on my Mac I can use Windows Sharing to open my Mac’s filing system as if it were a drive on my PC and copy what I need across. I can even print to my printer in the study from my Mac in the living room. It’s like my Mac is somehow ‘inside’ my PC. Rather eerie - and I confess it makes me feel like I am finally catching up to the level of computer skill exhibited by some of my friends. Of course they have been doing this kind of thing for years…

According to this press release from now until the end of the year anyone in (or merely passing through) Canada or the US will be able to use Skype on their computers - or their PDAs for that matter - to call any US or Canadian number.

I have my reservations about Skype - I would be much happier if I could find a VOIP solution that worked well, was open and cross platform but so far I have not found anything that fulfils all three criteria - Skype while not open at least fulfils the other two. I would certainly like it if my friends and family over in North America would all sign up (hint, hint) and let me know they had done so. As an additional incentive, if you have Windows you can even use the latest beta to look in on Adrien while we talk using our webcam…

Nathanatos Software has produced the ultimate tea brewing timing software for the Mac. I couldn’t resist downloading it…

In theory the backup I made using Synk onto my firewire disk should allow me to plug the external disk into my Mac (or any recent Mac?) and have it boot up off that disk, making my work environment exactly as it was at the moment of the backup. I tried something similar the last time my PC crashed but that never worked properly and I ended up having to copy  things across and re-install applications.

I found a colleague with a Mac today and tried my backup - my heart in my mouth - and it seems to work just as advertised! (At least on the basis of a few minutes clicking around).

So there will be a week of chaos while my machine is being repaired after which I should be able to go back to an almost completely normal life (technologically speaking). Thank you Apple and Synk!

Ever decided to change ‘l337′ to ‘elite’ in a dozen (or a hundred) different documents? As far as I know there is no easy way to do it in Word - and certainly no way I know of to do it across text documents written in several different applications. This Windows program makes it easy - I don’t know if it would work on native Office files as well as plain text and HTML ones but you could try it on some test files and see what happens…
Thanks to “Tales from the Terminal Room”:http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/ for the tip.

I just read in “Wired”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/start.html?pg=7 about NASA World Wind - a free application which (if you have a powerful enough PC) lets you hover over the globe and zoom in on any part you like to see a satellite overview of it. It only runs on Windows, alas.