I’ve been using this new program that is a replacement utility for Activity Monitor, the Apple created software for tracking resource on your Mac in real time. AtMonitor is Activity Monitor times ten. Very useful, very cool. Here is an excellent review of AtMonitor on MacFixit. Probably explains this better than I’m willing to do on my blog. You can download AtMonitor direct from the developer website.
Below video looks best in full screen view.
Mac users who have been using their Macs for some years are probably familiar with the Windows Media player application. This small, poorly supported Microsoft application ran on OS X with the sole function of playing .wmv video clips. It usually ran pretty poorly and looked pretty buggy compared to Quicktime player.
In the past couple of years, Microsoft gave up on supporting Windows Media player and licensed their player rights to Flip4Mac, which now produces the Flip4Mac player which can also play Windows media files. Real Player is another media player, once somewhat ubiquitous, now becoming a sidenote in media playback that also handles .wmv files.
When you want really robust media playback, VLC Player is the application to download.
From their site:
VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player supporting most audio and video formats (H.264, Ogg, DivX, MKV, TS, MPEG-2, mp3, MPEG-4, aac, …) from files, physical media (DVDs, VCD, Audio-CD), TV capture cards and many network streaming protocols.
It can also convert media files, transcode and act as a streaming server over unicast or multicast and IPv4 or IPv6. It doesn’t need any external codec, program or codec pack to work.
So, do yourself a favor and download this freeware application.
I’ve been using Apple Remote Desktop for about a year and a half. In case you’re not familiar with this program, ARD is Apple’s management interface for managing Macintosh computers on a network. If you’ve never seen or used ARD, here’s a brief overview of its functions.
There’s probably a lot more that ARD can do but that’s the gist of what I use it for.
For a quite a while, I used ARD somewhat sporadically. The interface seemed a little un-Mac like for some reason. I didn’t ‘cotton’ to it. But lately as my time available to do updates has diminished, I’ve begun to find ARD indispensable.
My latest technique is to use the Energy Saver control panel to set Macs in a network to start up on a certain day of the week at midnight. At 12:05 AM, ARD runs a scheduled task to install software. At 5 AM, ARD does a software update report to see if there is anything that didn’t get installed. And at 6 AM, the machines shut down.
I think that’s really cool. Instead of going machine by machine installing updates, all I have to do is set it up once in ARD after hours. No more asking people to vacate their workstations so I can get the updates installed.
From there, I’ve been looking at the UNIX capability of ARD. In one scenario, I’m thinking I’ll use the UNIX broadcast to tell all workstations on a LAN to upload their user directory to a backup file server. If my command line chops aren’t up to this, then I’ll use the command line to instruct the machines to run an Applescript which does the same thing.
Best of all, ARD doesn’t need a user to be logged in to do its work. In many cases, workstations do not have auto-login enabled. They start up and sit at the login prompt. If ARD couldn’t run commands with a user being logged in, that would eliminate its usefulness.
Macs are getting to be ubiquitous in work places. At one time business environments eschewed Macintosh systems. Macs had a reputation for being for graphic artists and other ‘creative’ types who didn’t really fit into the straight business world. When I went to one of these types of businesses to assist the Mac users, you’d usually find them shoehorned into a metaphorical back alley. The IT administrator would wring his or her hands while pleading ignorance of even the basic elements of Macintosh systems.
When Macs ran OS 9, that was perhaps understandable. The cooperative multi-tasking operating system was user friendly but not stable enough for intensive business applications and services. Which isn’t to say that businesses didn’t use OS 9 for all sorts of purposes, only that you usually didn’t find OS 9 running corporate data base servers for example.
That all changed with OS X, with its BSD UNIX kernel, multi-threaded kernel and protected memory architecture. Nowaways OS X is best-of-class in operating systems. Along with its highly rated support, terrific hardware designs and easy to operate interface, OS X is showing up in corporations more and more.
The ability of Intel Macs to run virtual environments that can be used to run Windows and Linux operating systems concurrently with OS X is one more reason to use OS X. With a wealth of Apple and open source software to choose from, Mac users can also run a virtual Windows machine in order to run whatever application they may need to use.
The astounding success of the iPhone and iPhone apps store plus the iPod have given Apple an aura of success that is also drawing in Windows users who previously wouldn’t have considered Macs for being outside the mainstream. No longer! You can find Macintosh systems being integrated into corporations at every level as employees and staff are asking for their hardware of choice to be made available for their use.
A word to the wise. Never let a repair trip occur without a full backup at home before your computer leaves your hands. There are absolutely no guarantees by any repair entity that a drive will return with its data intact after a warranty visit for repairs.
I suggest the following:
The reason for the backups is pretty obvious. You should be doing both regularly. An archive that has file history so you can restore old, deleted files, and a duplicate so you can restore your working environment immediately if you should suffer a total drive crash.
The file vault suggestion is so that your personal data files are protected if you should not want to delete them from the computer. Another suggestion – make an administrator user login, and change your login to be a standard user. Then you can give someone the admin. password but not your own and they will be able to do repairs within the operating system without being able to access your files with file vault enabled.
Zeroing the drive with a 7-pass (or more) security sweep writing zeros to disk is the most effective way to protect your data. With up-to-date backups in hand, the computer can go off for repair with zero chances of having your data compromised while away from your control.
I personally don’t envision Applecare technicians trying to penentrate any security I might have on a drive, yet, simply to feel safe and not have it be a mental worry, getting the backup and security areas correct means a computer can go off for repair with you getting a good night’s sleep instead of getting nagging thoughts about what ‘might’ happen.
