Lighthead – Caffeine. mac app to keep your mac from dimming the screen or going to sleep. handy while watching videos. very nicely done.

Screencast: Install Internet Explorer on OSX using VirtualBox | 10 Volt Media Blog. awesome screencast for getting IE7 running on a Mac with VirtualBox and Microsoft VirtualPC images. All free, legal, and worked like a charm.

Irradiated Software – TwoUp. handy mac app that will make a window fill 50% of the screen aligned to left/right or top/bottom. I usually have several google docs open at once so i’m enjoying this.

superduper indeed

I’m one of those people who never ever backed-up their computer. Never. Didn’t even consider it. I only started because back-ups with Time Machine on Mac OSX was so damn easy that I would have been foolish not to. I’m not someone with an ungodly amount of music or photos or ripped TV shows so I bought a portable USB-powered Western Digital hard drive (WD even has this model up to 750G in size). This thing has been a total gem. I’ve had no problems with it, it doesn’t need external power so it just sits attached to my monitor, and it’s the size of an iPod so if I ever need to share enormous files with someone I just bring it with me.

Then, a few months ago, I started thinking about Time Machine and how I use it: never. I had never actually put Time Machine to use. Every important document I have is on Google Docs, all of my code is stored (with complete history) on github, and my music and photos were archived on my iPod. I really had no need for historical snapshots of my data.

What I did worry about was my computer breaking and needing to work on a loaner for several days or having it completely die, needing to buy a new machine, and spending a full day setting up the machine (In my mind, this event always occurs in the middle of a deadline or while pushing something into production).

Going from a salaried employee to a bill-by-the-hour contractor does a lot of things to you, one of them is always putting a clear dollar value on your time. Losing the ability to bill clients for several days is something I consider “very expensive”. Luckily, there’s a very cheap solution to my problem. It’s called SuperDuper.

The app is simple and phenomenal and well worth it’s $28USD price tag. Every day at noon it starts making an exact bootable duplicate of my hard drive. The first backup took about 90 minutes and daily ones take about 15 minutes. This means that if my hard drive or computer died right now I could plug my external drive into another computer and it would boot up and function exactly the same. It wouldn’t be as fast as my internal drive but it would definitely suffice until I got a replacement drive or computer. Hell, if I was traveling somewhere and I knew whomever I was visiting had a Mac, I could bring my whole computer just by bringing my external drive.

Anyways, I’ve really enjoyed using SuperDuper and thought I’d point it out.

darwin’s visor. very handy if you’re a mac based developer and use the terminal a lot. this is a nice improvement on the blacktree version.

browserwars.png. an interesting data visualization.

Cruz – A Social Browser for Mac OS X Leopard. from the guy who did fluid. basically just gives you a pluggable safari.

First look: iPhone OS loses beta feel with 2.1 update. i really hope the SMS typing lag has been fixed.

Dropbox – Secure backup, sync and sharing made easy.. I’ve been using this for a month. It’s awesome.

YouTube – Mach Dice for the iPhone. the app makes good use of the iPhones accelerometer. via ram.

IPhone Software Sales Take Off: WSJ.com. they did $30M in the first 30 days. $3M was super monkey ball alone.

Matches for the iPhone. this game is oddly addictive.

DataCase iPhone App Video: Turn Your iPhone Into A Wireless Drive. iphone screen was kinda ugly but that’s a pretty cool demo.

Silverback — guerrilla usability testing. really slick app for recording usability testing sessions.

macosxhints.com – Force ‘new window’ links to open in new tabs in Safari. added preference for safari 3.1. think it’s time to uninstall saft.

iTunes 7.7 to allow remote iPhone/iTouch control. that’s cool. via ram.

ToDo’s On Your Desktop // RailsTips.org by John Nunemaker. some interesting tools i’ve never heard of (todoist and geektool).

Cocoia Blog » Swiss Interface Syndrome.. on the misuse of helvetica in MacOS.

Muxtape + Fluid + AirFoil. turn muxtapes into a stand-alone app and pump it to your airport express.

Daring Fireball: Firefox 3 vs. Safari 3. i’m going to wait for a prod release to try out firefox 3.