September 2007

As a part of the Lifehacker Show Your Menu Bar post, I’m posting my OS X menu but with a few more details than I’ll send to LH (mostly because it involves deep linking to other content here on Simplehelp).

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SmallScreenX is a Cocoa version of the “Small Screen” utility for the old Mac OS. It simulates smaller screen resolutions, which can be particularly helpful for web designers. This overview gives you a run down on its main features.

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This tutorial will guide you in using Restoration 2.5.14, a free program that can help you recover files that you may have accidentally deleted (and removed from/emptied the Recycle Bin). [click to continue...]

This is a requested tutorial for Marcelo. It will take you through the steps to set up Gmail using the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. [click to continue...]

With the hockey season fast approaching, like many Canadians, I’m starting to get psyched. It’s not enough that I have the Leafs schedule added to my Google Calendar, I have to have them on my dashboard too. Enter Conference Call Omni. Oh and yeah, it works with pro football (and lots of other sports/leagues).

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Thanks to Michael, who contacted me to let me know there was in fact a better solution to the one I first provided regarding bandwidth monitoring in OS X. And that solution is SurplusMeter. This brief tutorial will get you started using SurplusMeter. [click to continue...]

Why MWSnap doesn’t show up on every “top Windows freeware” list, I’ll never know. Version 3 has been around since 2002 (!?). Admittedly, it hasn’t been updated since 2002 either - it still works perfectly well in XP (I haven’t tested it in Vista yet). With the resulting screenshots you have a choice between BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG and GIF formats, with selected color depth and quality settings - among dozens of other features. This “part tutorial, part overview” will get you started using MWSnap in no time. [click to continue...]

Using the same software that allows you to extract the contents of an .iso, MagicDisc, you can create .iso files. This brief tutorial will guide you through doing just that. [click to continue...]

I have to admit, I almost want this one (BlogRush) to work. It’s like the little train that could. It came out of nowhere, had huge publicity immediately, and then huge problems, immediately. Today it rolled out the promised “Flavors” feature. So now I have a slightly more appealing widget.

The BlogRush CEO sent out another long-winded email today (I’m talking 50+ paragraphs) that I’ll summarize for you here:

-”we won’t rest” until it’s working great, acknowledgment of problems
-huge list of excuses for problems
-reassurances that BlogRush isn’t some passing “fad”
-huge rant full of threats to current “cheaters”
-we’re moving to a manual, human reviewed process for allowing sites into out network, and we’re going to review everyone who has signed up already
- SPECIAL NOTE TO ALL LOW-TRAFFIC MEMBERS: In the near future we’ll be giving our low-traffic members (those that need more traffic the most) the BULK of our bonus credit allocations. You’ll get a ton more bonus credits than high-traffic members because you really need it. It’s only FAIR!
-Flavors and “Filters” are now live. Filters allow you to stop certain posts from appearing in the BlogRush widget (ie. content you don’t want displayed via BlogRush).

Update: (later in the day) If you really, really want, you can read the entire thing here. And, since I wrote this post, the “Dashboard” section of BlogRush (the part that displays your ‘credits’ etc) hasn’t been functional.

Also, in the last 3 days, my BlogRush referrals has doubled to 30. But the average time spent on the site is pretty low.

Source: widget.blogrush.com
Visits: 30
Avg. Pages/Visit: 1.30
Avg. Time on Site: 00:00:21

Site Avg. Pages/Visit: 1.67
Site Avg. Time on Site: 00:01:28

Delicious Library has been out for a while. I know this. I’ve had their site bookmarked for months, and during my last ‘bookmark cleanup’, I decided it was time to finally time to download and install it. The following article is part tutorial, part overview, and has lots of screenshots. If you’re a serious DVD, book or CD collector, you may want to take it for a spin. [click to continue...]

Mailplane is a stand-alone Gmail client for OS X. Besides including all of the great features of Gmail, Mailplane adds extras such as built-in drag-and-drop attachments, quick import from iPhoto and iTunes, Growl notifications when you get new messages and much more.

Update: All 5 of my invites have been given away. If you’d like to sign up for an invitation to the beta program please visit http://mailplaneapp.com/beta/request_invitation.php. If you’d like an invite to the beta program, leave a comment. I have 5 invites to give away to the first 5 commenters. [click to continue...]

From the AppFresh site:

AppFresh helps you to keep all applications (third-party and Apple), widgets, preference panes and application plugins on your Mac up to date, from one place. It works by checking the excellent iusethis.com for new versions and lets you download and install available updates easily.

This tutorial will walk you through the steps to get started using AppFresh. [click to continue...]

If you’ve downloaded an .iso (or .bin, .img, .cif, .nrg, .img etc) and don’t want to burn it to get to its contents, you can download and install MagicDisc, a freeware app that lets you “mount” the image file as if it was a CD/DVD drive. This tutorial will guide you through doing just that. [click to continue...]

I was recently approached by someone who wanted to buy $550 worth of advertising on Simplehelp, and ended out turning them down. After seeking the advice of a number of other bloggers, here’s why I said no. [click to continue...]