Apr 27 2009
The Freeware in Rick’s iBook
As Brian celebrates Thanksgiving with his family, the job of bringing you all
your weekly dose of free software tips falls on me. I agreed to this job without
first asking myself, “Do you know what you’re doing?” If I had asked
that question I would have realized that the answer was “No.” So rather
than totally cop out, I’m going to offer you a list of the freeware I carry
with me in my iBook as I go about my day.
Adium
I can’t believe we have never covered this program here yet! This is the
AOL IM client for Mac OS X — customization up the wazoo. If you are familiar
with America Online’s Instant Messager, then you pretty much know the basics
of Adium: set up your account, set up a buddy list, go online and chat away.
The difference with using Adium is it has none of the unwanted banners, news
tickers and stock information that comes with AOL IM and it has not of the cutsie
buddy pictures and candy coated dialog balloons that come with iChat. And, if
you so desire, all your chats and your buddy list can all be held in one tabbed
window. Clean and neat.
There seems to be an additional
version of Adium floating around at a different location so I’ll include
that too.
MacStumbler
This is the Mac equivalent of NetStumbler. It allows an 802.11b (aka: Wi-Fi,
aka: Airport) enabled Mac to scan for signals in the area. It shows SSID, MAC
address, channel, signal strength, the vendor of the access point and whether
WEP has been enabled. If you’ve got a Wi-Fi card in your portable Mac, load
this utility, hop in the car and see how many wireless access points you can
find in your neighborhood. It even announces newly discovered servers using
the Mac’s speech synthesizer so you can keep you eyes on the road while you’re
wardriving.
BackLight
Okay this one is not all that productive…in fact, it’s counterproductive.
What Backlight does is displays whatever Screen Effect you specify as your Desktop
picture — LIVE. As you might imagine this dominates your processor quite
a bit and, even at the lowest priority setting, will render most Macs pretty
useless for anything other than watching BackLight.
That’s it for this week. Brian will be back with more free Mac software next
week. If you have any suggestions for freeware we should feature here that we
haven’t covered already, send
Brian a message about it.
