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.
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.
I run this site on Wordpress but a small project came up where I wanted to research some database-less CMS / blogging alternatives (still need PHP, just no databases to store the content).
After researching this a bit, the two I’ll be trying first are:
And some others I came across and may try next:
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.
Quick little tip for Google Chrome users, and yet another reason for you to use it. Pressing SHIFT + ESC brings up Google Chrome browser’s internal task manager showing the memory and CPU usage of individual tabs and extensions, revealing what is hogging up the memory. Not being able to figure this out was a major annoyance of Firefox as it become more and more bloated over the last couple years.
