Here’s my setup. These should all be easy to find via Google.
These are all login items on my Mac:
- Boom = makes your speakers louder. $10ish.
- HyperDock = lets you move and resize windows much more quickly
- Alfred = very fast launcher for apps and docs. (Replaces Quicksilver, which I used to use.)
- TextExpander = text substitution. There are now some great free alternatives if you haven’t paid for this, such as DashExpander.
- Display Menu = a tiny, handy app that lets you choose resolutions for whatever displays you’re using. This used to be built in to OS X but was removed in Mountain Lion.
- Day-O = nice view of the date and time in the menubar. Click to see a monthly calendar that you can drag around the screen, which is handy for planning.
- CloudApp = easy way to share files
- CrashPlan = no-fuss cheap total online backup
- Show Desktop = handy utility that lets you click the icon to hide all your apps
- Skitch = I actually use the old version, which I much prefer. Get it here.
- Skype and DropBox, obviously
- TaskPaper for to-do lists, although I collaborate with HackPad
- nvALT = slightly better replacement for Notational Velocity. Can import all your old Notational Velocity files.
Other than that, I use
- CoBook = awesome utility to access and manage your contacts. Big improvement over Address Book.
- Spotify for music. And Songza a lot.
- TextWrangler for text editing
- VLC for playing movies
- Chrome for web browsing, with the extensions Merge Windows, Session Buddy, Instapaper, Bit.ly, and AwesomeScreenShot
- Gmail for mail, with Boomerang (send messages later) and Morse.io (auto-scour your inbox for contact info)
- Google Calendar, Facebook. I use the normal Twitter for Mac client for tweeting.
Handy stuff. Anything essential I’m missing?
The simplest, decently secure way to send a password
Send it to me via Skype, which is wonderfully encrypted. Downside: synchronicity required.
A quite secure asynchronous way to send a password
privnote
= secure page. You type in a message, send me the auto-generated link, I click and read the message, and poof: the message self-destructs a minute after I open it.
An even more secure, verging on paranoid, semi-synchronous way to do it
…a technique that generates no machine-readable text.
- draw it—using, for example, artpad.
- make a screen capture of it (on a mac, command-shift 4; on a PC, “print screen”)
- upload it to senduit—and select how long you want it to stay there (eg 30 minutes). senduit generates a private link.
- Send the private link using privnote (see above).
- Clean up after yourself: delete the image file from your machine.
It should be easy to switch into these inbox views:
- Sort out emails sent from machines. This should be clear from email headers. I should be able to choose a “people only” view and a “machines only” view.
- Emails from my contacts; emails not from contacts—and also “emails from my top contacts” (with a slider to choose how many of those contacts).
- The most recent email from each person who emails me.
- Probably-useless email—which can be identified by tons of messages from the same sender, generating very few (or no) opens, clicks, or replies. It should be so much easier to clear junk!
- Unsubscribables: one per sender. It’s not hard to find every email with an unsubscribe link. I want to be able to click a button and see one email from each email list. Bonus: make it easy to tick off a bunch of them and unsubscribe from the lot.
Is Down for Everyone or Just Me down for everyone, or just me?
Specifically: when I put in MacApper.com, it responds “Huh? doesn’t look like a site on the interwho.” But that certainly is (was?) a site on the interwho! Rats.
Simple idea for an experiment.
- Register a trademark (or pick one you already own).
- Put the same piece of content on a bunch of hosts that uses the mark in order to criticize it—for example, if Wiklerpedia were trademarked, I could put up a bunch of sites that say “Wiklerpedia sucks! Boo Wiklerpedia!”
- Put my Wiklerpedia hat back on and send cease-and-desist letters to every host where I posted my Wiklerpedia Sucks page.
- Those WIklerpedia Sucks pages are perfectly legal—they don’t violate WIklerpedia’s trademark. But evil hosting providers will happily remove content on the basis of a C&D letter alone, in contrast to the good guys who actually take a look at the content and stick up for their users. So, pretty quickly, you find out who is evil and who is good.
- Announce the results of the study in an attention-grabbing way to shame the evildoers and praise the heroes.
- Repeat every so often until evil disappears from this earth.
Easy!
… the big secret, coming soon!
