The Gizmo Project is a Mac OS X Voice-over-IP application brought to you by the SIPphone team. Gizmo project is a better VoIP client than frontrunner Skype, which I wrote about in my February 2005 column for Macworld magazine Dialing for Less. Here are some reasons Gizmo Project is better than Skype. Read More…

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Azureus is a Java BitTorrent client that works with Mac OS X and comes bundled with many invaluable features for both beginners and advanced users, including: Upload and download speed limiting, both globally and per torrent, advanced seeding rules and an embedded tracker. What makes Azareus even cooler are the third-party plugins that are available to auto-adjustment of your upload and download speeds according to your network charge, an RSS feed scanner and a Swing Web Interface that allows remote control of Azureus. Because it’s Java, the UI isn’t quite as fast as BitTorrent, but the additional control and features make Azareus an O’Grady’s PowerPick for 2005.

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Mozilla.org has released Firefox 1.0.5, the Official Browser™ of the PowerPage. According to the release notes the dot upgrade adds several security fixes and improves stability. (Duh!)
Now I just wish they’d fix the goofy bug where the download folder selection doesn’t stick and often reverts back to desktop. While we’re at it I wish they’d remember the bookmark sub-folder I select instead of reverting back to the Bookmarks folder.

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Manila Bulletin: Friends often ask me why I am using an Apple powerbook whilst still advocating Linux. The truth is, I advocate both. However, there are some things that may require a little explanation as to why I chose one over the other.

The beauty of Open Source is that anybody can modify the source code and redistribute it. A side-effect of this, however, is the tendency of forking, i.e. having several versions rising from a single root. Although Linux does not suffer from this since only one kernel version is released at a time, the number of distributions, however, are quite astounding. Check out distrowatch.com or linuxiso.org and you will see dozens and dozens of distributions available for download. The problem will be in choosing the best one for your use but evaluating all distributions will eat up a quarter of your life! [OK, I exaggerate] You can, of course, create your own but then again, that is on a different level that is higher than the ordinary user.
Contrast this to the Mac OS – it is not free but it is only distributed by one entity and provides support for the product.

Read more at Manila Bulletin.

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I recently caught up with a friend who works for Google. I was curious and asked him what servers and storage Google uses in their data center, the answer is interesting and against my expectation: they use thousands of commodity PCs and cheap, off-the-shelf hard drives and rely on Google’s in-house fault-tolerant software. Here’s some of the juice…

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MacOSXHints.com: Like many 2005 PowerBook owners, I have been frustrated with the apparent bug in Apple’s new USB trackpad driver on these machines which forces idle kernel_task utilization upwards of 7% at all times, dramatically reducing battery life, lowering system performance, and preventing the machine from cooling down while relatively idle. Well, after several months living with this frustrating bug, I was further frustrated to see that there were still no widely-publicized solutions. I decided to stop waiting and try to address the bug myself by simply removing Apple’s trackpad driver from the equation.
Click through for the juice.

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There are a huge number of Google hacks out there (just Google that term, of course, to find examples). Combine that with the huge number of devices out there that have IP addresses (e.g. printers, network drives, IP cameras, etc.) and there are some interesting things you can do, like Googling “inurl” scripting/search functions. Read more…

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I have always partitioned my PowerBook’s hard drive, usually with 80 percent dedicated to my production environment and around 20 percent reserved for software testing and general dorking around. The benefit to partitioning your HDD is that you can safely install beta software on the “spare” partition without compromising the integrity of your main (“production”) partition. The down side is that if you ever need to re-partition you drive, you’ve got to back everything up, then “nuke and pave” the drive (to borrow an old friend’s saying). This re-format and re-install exercise can take the better part of a day. Read More…

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MetroFreeFi has integrated Google Maps into their site to make finding free wi-fi even easier. Read More…

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Works perfectly with the Mac (developed first for Mac, in fact). This PC and Mac VoIP softphone offers everything Skype does and more, including call recording, call hold with music and cool call mapping feature. Plus it is all SIP based, which means you can call other networks. Read More for the link…

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