[P1] Great apps that one should not be without

[andy]

> Of course if you take your iBook into Starbucks in the US, chances are 
> they have a wifi setup and for $40 a month you can surf the net while 
> slurping caffeine at a speed upto 50 times faster than dialup. Or you 
> may find free bandwidth somewhere.


    I'm still waiting for Starbucks to decide to do this in Canada, as 
it would make my lunch hours a lot more interesting-- my school has 
several networks in place, but one can "only access them on School 
Computers" [Dells!] for "security reasons." (No thanks!)

    A few days ago I found myself locked out of the store, downtown, and 
spent a few hours sitting in a Starbucks downstairs-- curious, I pulled 
out the iBook and found a network from another cafe three floors up (at 
an unreasonable pay-per-use rate) and that someone else had set up an 
AirPort Extreme base station elsewhere in the building-- SSID: freeb.

    It pays to look around.

    Thus, my most frequently used apps are:

    MacStumbler-- a small application that I usually have running in the 
background. I've set it to chirp
when it finds an open network, it keeps a log as well that I believe 
can be tied into GPS. I think the
legalities of wardriving are still being called into question, so use 
of something such as this may
require an examination of one's ethics. Free public WiFi connections in 
my part of the country are
still rare-- be aware of who's bandwidth you may be lifting. Check out 
the site http://www.nocat.net/
for much more in-depth info on these matters than I'm able to provide.

    Synergy-- "Synergy is an iTunes utility designed for expanding the 
graphical display of the standard iTunes feature set." Basically, it 
fades in the current track title and album cover from iTunes when the 
song changes. Downloads album covers automatically, controls iTunes 
from the menu bar, and much, much more that I couldn't even begin to 
list. Best $7 I'd ever spent.

    SlashDock-- aggregates RSS newsfeeds and resides politely in the 
dock.




andy
    calgary, alberta, canada