Baggas’ Blog

As I mentioned yesterday, I had to rebuild my PC this week, which included a clean install of Vista and all my other software. So here’s my list of some essential programs for Windows. Anyone have any other suggestions they would add to this list?

• Mozilla Firefox
• Mozilla Thunderbird (email)
• Office
• Google Picasa (photos)
• Exact Audio Copy (CD ripper) with LAME (MP3 encoder)
• Tag & Rename (MP3 tagger)
• iTunes & Quicktime

This next one is not essential, but I wanted to test out a game on the new PC and ended up downloading Trackmania Nations Forever. This has to be one of the best free games in history - basically it’s a racing game with a range of extreme tracks and online racing - all for free. I enjoyed the previous version of this game but it wouldn’t run on Vista so it’s nice to have an updated version that works. If you like racing games or just want something to help you waste a few minutes then definitely download this game. Here’s a YouTube trailer for it…

So ob1 is raving about Apple again, specifically how much of a pleasure it is to use the Apple store.

My latest Mac win is another piece of great software I downloaded last night. After the fire the other day (which actually didn’t even come close to threatening our home - my brother’s house was much closer to his fire) I got to thinking a little bit about insurance and replacing all our stuff if it was lost. Aside from the fact that the insurance probably wouldn’t come close to covering it all, I was reminded of the need to keep track of things - specifically all my books, CDs, DVDs etc. Well books are already taken care of by my online catalog at LibraryThing (which I have recommended a number of times already - awsome site). Unfortunately I couldn’t find any comparable online catalog for my DVDs and CDs - if anyone has any suggestions I’d be glad to hear them. So I decided to go with a software solution.

After looking at a few alternatives I settled on the ‘pedias’ from Bruji. They have a suite of four programs CDpedia, DVDpedia, Bookpedia, and Gamepedia for cataloguing those things. Very powerful software with a host of options I haven’t explored yet. Data entry is easy - you can scan the barcodes of your CDs using the iSight camera on your Mac - which works quite well, just takes a few goes to get used to. Or you can use a handheld scanner like a cuecat (which I have and works reasonably well). It then uses the barcode data to look up your CD, DVD, book etc on an online database like Amazon (or many others) to retrieve the cover art and lots of other info. You can customize your library with various custom fields and of course tags. All of this is integrated with spotlight for easy searching. There’s plenty of other features which you can check out on their website but already I’m finding this software a joy to use.

One feature I’m yet to try is the web export function which lets you export your catalogs to a website. I’ll do this once I’ve entered all my data and will post links in a few days. But this is perhaps my one disappointment with this (and other similar) software. What would be really great would be if you could somehow dynamically synchronise your library from this software with an online catalog (akin to LibraryThing) so as to have your data permanently available on the web and up-to-date. Maybe this is possible somehow but I’m yet to see it. If not perhaps they could look at making this part of a future version.

But overall, yet another very useful piece of Mac software

If you’re a musician then this piece of software is almost reason enough to consider switching to a Mac. GarageBand is my new favourite piece of software. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what this program can do but basically it’s a powerful multi-purpose recording studio that can be used for anything from podcasting to creating a demo CD or just jamming around. We started off with some simple vocal stuff (Jenni recording some stories onto CD for the boys to listen to) and then mucking around with the boys using various vocal effects (like echoes, monster, mouse, and chipmunk voices). Now I’ve got myself some decent quality digital/analogue interface hardware so I can connect my guitars to my MacBook Pro. Even the basic level guitar effects included are not bad. The nice thing is you can lay down your raw guitar tracks and then change the effects after so as to experiment with different sounds.

For those instruments that I don’t possess and/or can’t play myself, Garageband fills the need, with a huge range of software instruments and a nifty “musical typing” keyboard for adding piano or any other virtual instrument. Of course you can also plug in a Midi piano but I’d have to work on my keyboard skills to make much use of any of that. One of the coolest things is that there is a huge database of pre-recorded loops to jam along to or I can create a “Magic Band” in moments in a range of styles - an instant backing band! It also integrates well with other iLife software like iMovie and iTunes so any tracks I record are instantly available to download to my iPod or mobile, or to use in any video projects - watch out YouTube!

As I said I’ve barely scratched the surface of what this software can do but so far I’m having a lot of fun

This week’s been a little quieter at work - no babies born so I’ve managed to keep well away from the hospital. Taking advantage of the odd bit of free time I’ve been working on getting my office a bit tidier and better organised. Now my office is by no means that bad - some of the other doctor’s rooms are incredibly messy. Even so, it’s been good clearing out the shelves and drawers and getting rid of all manner of odds and ends - mountains of drug company post-it notes, pens, out-dated drug samples, old books, drug information sheets, referral pads for services/specialists I’ve never used, various useless gizmos and other drug company paraphenalia, amazon.com boxes, and much more. Some of this stuff was 5 or 6 years old, from doctors who are long gone. I now have all this empty space that I can start filling up again - it’s wonderful.

On the subject of organisation, I’ve been doing some similar stuff at home - getting the garden tidied up, organizing the garage a little bit, tidying my study, organizing my music, doing 6 months worth of filing. Maybe it’s some sort of nesting instinct

I’ve also found an awesome piece of software to help get me organized on my Mac laptop. After trying a few similar options I’ve settled on a program called Together, for Mac OS X Leopard. Basically this is a great way of organizing my thoughts and various pieces of information, documents, pictures etc that I find as I surf the web from day to day. If I find something on the web I like, I just drag the URL to a little tab at the side of the screen, and the Together software will store an archive of that web site for me. Or I can just cut and paste a bit of text and store it as a note in Together. All this can be done through the little tab without needing to open the main window of the software itself so I can keep my focus in the browser or whatever else I am doing. When I do open Together, I can easily categorize webpages and notes etc through various Group and Folder settings, as well as tagging. For example in planning our trip to Denmark tomorrow I was browsing various websites and came across some good information and maps etc - I’ve just dragged these into Together so I now have an offline archive of all this info that I can easily retrieve, even if I am down in Denmark with no net access. I’ve also decided, with the aim of making my book reading more effective, to start typing the odd note or quote into my laptop - Together looks after this for me too. It also handles a large range of other file types, including email (handy to drag an important email across from mail) and media files. Another way of sending info to Together is using the Print command in any other application, and “printing” as a PDF file directly into the Together archive - very neat. I like the way Mac OS is so well integrated with PDFs. Anyway it’s a great piece of software. I don’t think I’ve really done it justice here so if you are a Mac user I’d definitely encourage you to check it out.

It seems there are some problems with this blog not displaying correctly in some older versions of Microsoft Internet explorer. The columns are not always lined up properly and the Right sidebar seems to be getting lost completely.

I’ll do my best to try and get this fixed but in the meantime may I suggest trying to download Microsoft Internet Explorer version 7 (get it here for Windows XP) or even better, download Mozilla Firefox, which is a much nicer browser. Not only will it make this page display properly, but it will enhance your entire web browsing experience

Laridian Electronic Publishing » PocketBible for Windows Now Available

Laridian are my favourite Bible software company. I used their software on my Palm, now I have it on my PocketPC, and now I can have it on my Windows PC also, with the release of PocketBible for Windows. The beauty of this is that all the various Bible versions, commentaries, dictionaries and other books I have purchased from them can now be viewed on my PC without having to pay for them all over again. All I have to do is login to their website and re-download the versions for Windows, saving me hundreds of dollars.

Also they have a version for the iPhone coming out next week. No word about a Mac OS version though…

EDIT : I’ve also created a file which contains our church Bible reading plan for use with Pocket Bible. This is a great plan which takes your through the OT once and NT twice each year. You can download the installer file for Pocket Bible for PocketPC here . There is no installer for Pcoket Bible for Windows but you can get the plan in there by copying the “lbk” file in this zip file into the directory where your other Laridian Books are installed. I’ve also discovered this can be done for any other Laridian books for PocketBible for PocketPC, even the ancient ones which don’t have a Windows installer available for download…

Just thought I’d update on something I posted about a while back. As you may recall I was having some trouble booking flights using my surplus of QANTAS frequent flyer points for my mission trip to Uganda in October. Initially there were no seats available at all and I was expecting to have to pay for my tickets. Then I downloaded a program called Frequent Flyer Friend which sits on my desktop and automatically checks airline websites for reward tickets on the days I want. Initially no results but a few weeks later a big smiley face appeared informing me flights were available. So I booked the tickets, happy that I wouldn’t have to pay, but still not entirely happy because the trip was cut short by several days (seats on my ideal days still weren’t available) and because I had to fly back to Perth from Johannesburg via Sydney.

Fast forward another few weeks to early June. The software still sitting there, checking daily and sending a report on it’s findings to my email. Most days the smiley face alert appears on my desktop telling me about the same flights I’ve already booked or other, even worse, ones. But then one day a whole crop of smileys appears - it seems a bunch of new reward seats have been released, and for much better days. I quickly phoned up the airline and got my flights changed, at the cost of only a small penalty of 2,500 points but I was happy enough with that. So now I’m leaving on the day I had originally planned (October 10) and returning on October 29th - which means I will be there for the whole duration of the medical team mission instead of missing a few days. I’m still returning to Perth via Sydney, but I can live with that.

Since then I haven’t bothered to load Frequent Flyer friend, but I just happened to click on the icon today, and guess what? All the good flights are gone. There’s now no flights at all to South Africa and only a couple back (via Sydney) several days after I want to return. So thanks to Frequent Flyer Friend I was lucky enough to find the small window when those seats were available and book my tickets. A very handy piece of software indeed

USB thumb drives are getting cheaper and cheaper now. I bought my 1 Gig drive a couple of years ago for over $100 which was pretty good price at the time. Now you can get a 4 Gig drive cheaper than that. And with these kind of capacities available at a low price, there a few limits to what can be done with them.

Today I discovered a great site PortableApps.com which provides a great collection of stand-alone applications that can be run directly from a USB stick or portable hard drive, without any sort of installation on the host PC. All freeware and open-source stuff, they give you the ability to take your own personal suite of software, setup just the way you like it, to be used on any computer. This will be great for people who travel a lot, any maybe even students who access different PCs at university or school. Applications included include portable versions of Firefox browser, Thunderbird email, Open Office suite, instant messaging software, media players, rippers and recorders (like Portable Audacity) and FTP software. But these are just the start - you can find a portable app to achieve just about any task you might want be internet, office, media-related or whatever. Take a look at the Wikipeda List of Portable Apps for a large selelection. The beauty of the Portable Apps website is that they include an elegant launcher which displays the applications on your drive in a Start Menu like format.

For quite some time now I’ve been almost exclusively using Mozilla Firefox as my default web browser. It’s speed, reliability, and the tabbed browsing feature made it far superior to Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.

Well it looks like Firefox’s days may be numbered. It may yet face a similar fate to that of it’s ancestor Netscape Navigator back in the 90s. And once again the threat comes from the Microsoft Empire. Today I downloaded the beta release of Internet Explorer 7, and it is that good that I am seriously considering switching back from Firefox. Microsoft have added some of Firefox’s useful features such as tabbed browsing and RSS feed handling, and gone one better with improved speed and simply the best rendering of web pages that I have ever seen on a PC. It’s hard to put my finger on where the difference lies but every page just looks simply beautiful. All the fonts and images are clearer and crisper and just plain better looking than in Firefox and IE6. They also have this useful little magnifying glass tool in the bottom right corner which lets you scale the whole page between 10% and 1000%, including not only fonts but images too. It has a pop-up blocker, “phishing” filter, and the facility to add other plugins down the track.

Anyway, it looks like Mozilla have some work to do if they are to regain their innovative lead over Microsoft. I, for one, must reluctantly admit that the evil empire seems to have once again triumphed over the little guys. But don’t just listen to me - you can check it out for yourself here.