MacFUSE

Need to be able to read non-Apple file systems on a Macintosh? Use MacFUSE. It is free, and works, at least for me. I need to read hard drives that have been formatted in NTFS for Windows, and in ??? for Linux. With MacFUSE installed, they look like regular Mac drives. Without MacFUSE I am told that there is nothing there. I like MacFUSE!

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

Four days with my Macbook Air

I picked up my new Macbook Air on Friday afternoon.  Now, Tuesday morning, it is almost ready for my trip to Portland tomorrow morning.  I will be gone until Monday.  It will be a great chance to see how it goes.  The technology is life changing.  The new track pad is incredible.  No more reaching for the scroll bar to scroll a page; just drag on the touch pad with two fingers.  A two finger tap is a right click.  It is incredibly fast and intuitive, just like a Mac should be. 

Here are the programs that I have installed so far.

• Mozilla Firefox
• FileZilla (client)
• Chicken of the VNC (client)
• Skype
• Grandperspective
• vlc
• Evernote
• Office 2008
• Ruby on Rails per instructions at http://developer.apple.com/tools/developonrailsleopard.html
• Stuffit Expander
• Thunderbird
• iWorks
• Growl

I guess I will be adding VMware so I can run Microsoft Money and any other Windows app that I might still need.

I am also trying to set things up so that I can get back to my regular PC from the network.  That will give me access to the data and apps on it.

What a joy this has been to work on.  It may make me a fully Mac person sooner than I thought.

Enso Launcher - Useful+

Back on May 8th I wrote about Enso Launcher.  In that post I said that I needed to think about it some more before installing.  Well, I decided to go for it.  I now use it as the primary way that I open application.  I press Caps Lock and type "Open" and enough of the program name to identify it.  I have it set so I then press Enter.  It is designed to use the Caps Lock key like a shift key, and process the request when you release the Caps Lock key, but I can type faster if I don't have to hold down a key while typing.  With this process I can quickly launch any program from the keyboard.  There are other ways that Enso products can be used, but this is what I am doing with it now.  And I like it a lot.

http://humanized.com/enso/

WorkRave - Break manager

I was listening to Marcus Buckingham's book "The One Thing You Need to Know" while driving back from a meeting on Friday.  It reminded me that the human mind needs breaks in order to allow us to recover from our efforts.  I tend to sit down at the computer at work and, sometimes, only get up every three hours to go to the restroom.  That is not good for me or the quality of my work.

There is a free program, WorkRave, that times how long you have been working at your computer and inserts a micro break or a rest break.  You control how often they appear.  You control how long they last.  You control whether you can have a "snooze bar" and delay the break.  During the breaks, WorkRave displays some exercises that you can do to loosen up your muscles.  Buckingham suggests getting up and going for a walk.  Either way, it is a good idea to take breaks regularly.

I have placed WorkRave back into my Startup folder so it will run automatically on my machine again.  I don't remember why I removed it.  I don't think it was because it crashed the system or anything.  I would guess it was because I got sick of it telling me to take breaks.  I promise to be nicer to it now.

http://www.workrave.org/

Lookeen - Finding a receipt in a haystack

I have used the Lookeen add-on for Outlook for less than a week, but it has already paid for itself.  Lookeen indexes my Outlook mailboxes.  I have around 250,000 items in Outlook, including the offline archives that I create from each year's messages, going back to 1998.  I try to be organized, but sometimes I just cannot find the message I am looking for.

Yesterday I had to document my purchasing card statement.  This is a monthly task that I dread.  Most things that I purchase are done over the Internet, so the receipts are somewhere in my e-mail.  I create a special folder for the receipts, but sometimes I put them in other places or I don't get around to moving them at all, so I can't always find them.

This month I used Lookeen.  I worked down the list of purchases and searched for the company name for each purchase.  It took about 5-8 seconds to come up with the list of matching messages.  Since I had the date of the purchase on the statement, it was trivial to locate the receipt and print it out.  Each search took the same amount of time, because Lookeen looked in ALL of my mail files.  So I knew it wouldn't miss the message I was looking for.  The entire task took less than 30 minutes, and this was a month where I had purchased a lot of items.

I like being able to locate old e-mail messages quickly. I am often get computer questions from the faculty here at the University of Miami.  If I have gotten the same or a similar questions in the past, I want to be able to quickly find that answer and use it as the start of the new response.  Or I am dealing with a vendor and I want to find all the e-mail messages that we have exchanged.  Quickly accessing old messages makes me more productive.  Lookeen looks like a great solution to me. 

It took a day and a night to index the 250,000 items the first time.  Now it only takes about 7 to 8 minutes to update the index every four hours.  Other than the disk activity, I don't notice that it is happening.  If It slowed the computer down, I could lower the priority of Lookeen so that it took longer to index but had less effect on my CPU.  This is a well designed product that is worth the $40 price, at least for me.  So next month when I document my purchasing card statement, I will use Lookeen to find the Lookeen receipt.  How nice.

http://www.lookeen.net/