Needing a USB drive I couldn’t resist buying the catchily named Sumvision M18 – a 4Gb memory stick MP3 player, voice recorder and FM radio costing around £30. While it’s labelled “USB 2.0” the speed of data transfers on it is dreadful (7 minutes to transfer a 160Mb file). It’s much too slow to run portable applications off of it as I’d hoped to, and it’s a hassle if you want to change the music or other files on it regularly. If all you want is to use it as an MP3 player and radio though I guess it’s OK, and the price is certainly right, but the user interface is extremely un-friendly to the point that about the only way to use it is like an iPod shuffle (“just give me a random next track”).

By contrast the iPod nano I bought before has not been without problems and was much more expensive for fewer features but is one of my favourite devices – what it does, it does very well.

I just read about the Freeplay Devo radio and was quite excited. OK it is £90 which is a little steep for a radio but I’m geeky enough to want to supplement my podcast listening with a little digital radio. So a wind-up one seemed just the thing… until I looked at the fine print. The Devo weighs 1.2Kg and while 60 seconds of winding gives you an hour of FM listening, it provides just 3-5 minutes of digital radio listening! Inevitably this ‘green’ radio would mostly stay plugged into the mains or run off its 6hr battery. Guess I’ll have to wait another few years. Which is probably just as well since I also just read that the Freeplay radio and others may become obsolete anyway.

At my local toy shop I noticed a new series of wooden toys – the BRIO Network Toys. They look cute but not exactly technically accurate… The website has flash animations and even some video clips but alas is Flash-based so no deep linking- you’ll have to explore it yourselves. Yes, the Internet really is everywhere these days!

“Viro”

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 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…

Like others I have quickly started to find my iPod Nano’s screen is starting to be covered with hairline scratches – even though I left on the thin plastic cover it came with. Now (a little late) Apple is shipping Nanos with cases but since mine did not come with the case, Apple will not ship one to me retrospectively. If I want my iPod screen to be fixed I have to send it back (and it will presumably just get all scratched up again thereafter).

P.S. I am reluctant to write about my iPod further because every time I do I get annoying spam comments advertising pyramid schemes to get them free!

I just discovered that I can’t use my iPod to transfer files between my Mac and a PC – the Nano has to be formatted as a Mac disk to work on my Mac (though Macs can normally work just fine with PC disks). I am a little surprised I didn’t read anything about this before I bought it. Oh well – it works OK to do everything else…

P.S. I am very annoyed that any mention of the iPod or Nano seems to attract people trying to get you to join their pyramid schemes to get a free Nano. If you were thinking of posting such a message to my comments just forget it now – such messages are deleted…

I am beginning to realise there is no reason for me to be bored ever again…

My biggest problem remains books – I occaisionally run out of books I am interested in reading (I tend to rely on book reviews from The Guardian, Time Out, or more occaisional outlets). I do really wish that as much work was dedicated to making book reviews and recommendations available and searchable online as has been devoted to movies and music. But now that I am an academic I have plenty of interesting books and papers I can and should read alongside my recreational reading.

I am not a great TV watcher anyway but now that I have a DVD recorder I have recorded more documentaries and movies than I will ever have time to watch – around 70 hours unwatched on DVD, another ten hours or so of unwatched – and unlikely to be watched – videotape and perhaps 500 hours or so of stuff I have already watched but am keeping for a rainly… er… month. In fact the size of my collection is starting to alarm me a little.

I spend most of my time in front of this lovely little iBook and as you can see from my link list on the R there is plenty there to both interest and entertain me online…

Which used to just leave the time I can’t spend in front of a book or screeen – when I am in the shower, cycling around or doing the dishes or ironing etc – which I tend to spend listening to an MP3 player. I selectively recorded the many speech radio programs listed at R from the Internet into MP3 format and listened to them, normally in preference to music (though I now have nearly 15Gb of MP3s now that I have almost completely digitised my CD collection). There too as with books I sometimes found that I would sometimes ‘consume’ faster than I could ‘collect’ good listening material. Now with the arrival of podcasting (see new collection of links on R) I am finding at last that there is more interesting stuff coming in than I can listen to in a week and my last ‘content gap’ has been filled.

Like I said – there is no reason I need ever be un-stimulated. But I fear this may be a bit of a problem. I am getting used to having every waking moment filled with some kind of stimulus, and I can’t help thinking this isn’t particularly healthy. It also means there is an abundance of distractions available for my all-too-distractable mind…

I was all ready to buy myself an iPod nano when I got up this morning. It seemed like events were conspiring to force me to upgrade (gadget freaks you know what I’m talking about here). For a while now I had been getting a little frustrated with my two year old Ondio audio player, mainly because the batteries are prone to shake loose, its controls are a little fiddly and it can’t remember where the ‘last listened’ point is when I stop it. But also more recently because it can’t sync with iTunes so it’s hard to keep track of what tracks I listen to and the other meta-data iTunes tracks which I pass on to last.fm via Audioscrobbler. Anal retentive, I know.

So I told myself I would treat myself to a new iPod once the latest models arrived – either a lower-priced model (once the new models drove the existing prices down) or a new model (if the new ones offered capabilities I wanted) as long as they cost less than £100 ($US183/$cdn218). And what should happen last night? The batteries stopped connecting again and I went to fiddle with the metal battery connector again to make it fit when “bink!” – the connector snapped off.

One part of me felt “if I can’t fix this it would be such a waste – a perfectly good music player ruined because of a simple bit of metal” and the other part thought “now I definitely can get that new player – hope it comes soon!” (at that point I didn’t know that the nano had launched). Then when I got home I found out about the nano but I also discovered that by using the foil from a chocolate bar I can make the ondio work again. Yay me!

Alas, when I rang up Apple UK, credit card in hand, I found out to my horror that I couldn’t get an academic discount at all! I thought “I’ll be damned if I am going to shell out full price (£139) especially when the US$ price is 199 (£108) – and since I am going to be going to the Association of Internet Researchers Conference in the US anyway in less than a month.

So I’m going to hang on a little longer. Is anyone interested in a second-hand, really quite handy Ondio when I trade it in? Read my blog entry about it and let me know what you’d offer for it. I really quite like it notwithstanding its peccadilloes. In fact it has aged very well and it still has features (FM radio, audio recording through built-in mic) that the new device won’t.

P.S. I don’t suppose there would be any kind of compatibility issue around a US nano? Like dates or currencies being hardwired wrongly into the calendar etc?

Update: Turns out the average MP3 player owner only has 375 songs on their device – the average iPod owner has around 500. It’s for that reason I will just be buying a 2Gb nano – even that will be 16 times larger than my current player and to be honest I didn’t find that storage capacity very constraining…

I am thinking of getting an MP3 player and I would like one that could for example keep track of the number of times I had played a particular tune and pass that data on to iTunes when I connected my player back to my Mac. Is that something only an iPod would be able to do or is there software provided with other MP3 players able to do this?

Does Apple make the interface to iTunes for that sort of data syncing available to developers or is it proprietary?

I confess that I am just geeky enough and fashion-conscious enough that I will probably end up spending a little extra and buying an iPod mini if other players won’t let me track my music-listening behaviour…

If the right software did exist is there any other MP3 player around that other people would recommend over the iPod? I wouldn’t mind something with a built-in microphone for recording interviews…