I found a tiny, basic and very practical bandwidth meter that just sits in the menu bar: MenuMeters. Can also display CPU, memory and drive use. Free.
A fancier and more comprehensive alternative which monitors many more system functions is iStat Menu, but it’s $10.
Most definitely the easiest way to install all your basic apps after a fresh install of Windows is using Ninite. You simply go to the website, select some popular apps you would install anyways (like Winamp, iTunes, Firefox, Adobe Acrobat Reader, uTorrent, WinRar) and the site checks for the latests version of those apps and then gives you a package to download of all of those apps, and then runs all their default installations disabling all the annoying installation options like ad-ware, toolbars, etc. And done!
Great topic over at reddit.com asking “What’s your favorite software that no one has heard of“. I’m discovering and discovering a lot of gems as we speak.
When LogMeIn acquired Hamachi, I was hoping that they would release an official Hamachi client for OS X, but unfortunately they didn’t. I was looking for an alternative secure easy-configuration file sharing solution to use between Windows 7 64-bit and OS X Snow Leopard, and for a moment I thought I had found the solution in Remobo. It works on both OS’s and has most of the features Hamachi had, but it’s just not quite like browsing shared folders over VPN.
It’s still a great little app and some might find it useful.
Previously, when I wanted to show someone a screenshot from my computer, I would use Jing, but I thought having an account with them was unnecessary for how little I used it and it’s little app is a bit too feature laden and takes too many key strokes to do what I want.
So now I’m using Pict.com’s “Pict Uploader” screenshot tool. Sits in the taskbar, very quick and easy.
So apparently Canon hasn’t gotten around to writing a Windows 7 64-bit compatible driver for viewing their digital camera CR2 RAW images as thumbnails in Windows Explorer. Easy fix: these guys at FastPictureViewer have it as a free download here.
For years I’ve been using Bandwidth Monitor Pro but for whatever reason it became buggy when I upgraded to Windows 7. It wasn’t correctly detecting my network cards and interfaces and rather than troubleshooting I decided to look for a free alternative and finally chose NetWorx (free, PC-only). Somehow, I had overlooked this particular bandwidth monitor in my searches the last couple years. And all the other apps that were coming up in my searches were inferior
NetWorx actually has more features than Bandwidth Monitor Pro, but most important to me is it’s simple and straightforward graph. I almost always keep this graph up because it helps me avoid getting frustrated over browsing and downloading slowdowns or videos buffering. This way, if I see no obvious drops in the visual graph of my connection, I get to more accurately place the blame on YouTube’s slow servers or slow torrent seeders.
Screenshots below of how I like my graph and of one of the settings tabs.
My first choice for remote controlling my main home desktop/server (running Windows 7) is Windows Remote Desktop Connection. As a backup I also have that computer running LogMeIn for when firewalls block RDC or if I want to log in via a browser. And while those two have replaced VNC which I used exclusively years ago, I still use VNC for when I want to log in and remotely control a computer as is… without it having changing resolutions or desktop settings the way it would to accommodate LogMeIn or RDC. For example, I use it when I am watching a movie or playing music from on the main computer and want to change something in the media player without interrupting whatever is playing.
In those cases, my preferred choices are UltraVNC as the PC server, and Chicken of the VNC as my VNC viewer from my Mac notebook.
Soundstream is a cool sound reactive screensaver I have running on my Mac notebook.
Check out this demo video:
Lifehacker’s High Five topics are an awesome resource, when it’s readers vote for the top five of various tech categories. I’m already using a lot of the most popular apps, but I’ve also learned about a lot of alternatives and discovered some real gems. And now I’m going to double check each of these one by one to make sure that I am in fact using the latest and greatest.
Below are some of their most popular High Five topics of 2009.