Month: December 2007

Apart from holidays and parties, the other great thing about Christmas is the food. It’s an excuse for total indulgence in everything from meat to pastries. It’s also a good time to get your apron out and try making something yourself. Even someone like me with minimal cooking skills, enjoys baking and making mince pies at Christmas. And this year, I’ve even offered to help make the roast turkey so I decided to see if there’s any software to help.

There are several apps out there that can help you with your Christmas cooking. If it’s ideas you’re short of, probably the best for recipes is Recipe Cookbook which has almost 2,500 recipes to keep you going over the festive season. Recipe4win is a simpler application that also has a few thousand recipes and has the unusual option of letting you search for dishes by region of origin in the world. If on the other hand you want to record that secret family recipe for posterity, then Cooking Aficionado has a nice look and means you’ll never be searching for that scrap of paper again. Finally, to help you navigate the madness during the Christmas rush at the supermarket, Grocery List Generator helps you compile quick and comprehensive lists for those all important ingredients.

System Explorer lets you see what’s going on in your system with a detailed analysis of currently active processes, applications, system performance and a lot more. You’ll be able to check startup apps and installed drivers, as well as obtain extended information about each process and check any file with an online antivirus.

Iris adds some cool extra features to your Mac’s iSight camera. The application is easy to set up and use. You can take snapshots or make movies in real time or via time lapse, which you can then share with your friends. Iris can also turn your iSight camera into a monitoring system for your Mac.

One of the best things about Christmas and New Year is all the parties that take place. If you’re organising your own however, it can quickly turn into more hassle than it’s worth if you’re not organised or have everything arranged well in advance. To make sure you don’t spend this Christmas or New Year more stressed about whether your party is going to turn out OK rather than actually enjoying it, here are 5 top tools to help you party like it’s 1999.

• FunParty Make-Over – Design your own fancy dress for the party

• PartyDJ – Compile playlists and mix your favourite party anthems

• Ots CD Scratch – Virtual turntables for if you really fancy yourself as the party DJ

• KaraFun – For if you’re thinking of adding karaoke to the proceedings

• Snap – Use your webcam to take shots of the party in case you don’t remember it

I’m a little worried that before too long I’ll be forced to betray my trusted old friend Wikipedia, as the mighty Google has deemed it a good idea to create its own Web 2.0 encylopedia, which I can already guarantee will be better. Granted, Wikipedia is a little rough around the edges – the legitimacy of some of its user-generated content can be questionable, it lacks a decent rating system, and the quality of the images isn’t what it used to be. But it’s served me well over the years and I don’t want to jack in a long-term relationship just because there’s a younger, better-looking model craving my attention.

So, I’ve decided to spend more quality time with my current online encylopedia in the hope I will get so attached I won’t desert to Google, like I do with everything else (maps, RSS, instant messaging, email – heck, I’ll soon be brushing my teeth with a Google toothbrush if they keep bettering every other product out there). Let’s start by installing the Wikipedia Search Bar. OK, now when I want to perform a search from within my browser I can plunder Wikis straight away without getting distracted by that alluring Google search field in my IE toolbar.

If I don’t want to leave Wikipedia feeling left out when I turn to the “Big G” for searches, I’ll simply download the Googlepedia extension. This displays Wikipedia entries besides the Google results, so I can enjoy the best of both worlds (and it wouldn’t be classed as two-timing).

In order to increase my exposure to the wonderful user-made database, I’ll install WikiReader, which allows me to open a Wiki document from any Windows application I happen to be using at the time. Oh, and I’ll also get hold of Quickipedia, so I can search and browse the site from my Palm handheld. Finally, by adding MediaWiki, I will be able to create my own Wikis and share them with others online.

There, now there’s no reason why I would possibly want to run off into the sunset with Google’s poxy new encyclopedia when it gets released, it there? Yeah, right!

I admit it: I joined the Twitter community only yesterday. You know, I’m not the kind of person who blindly joins any social community for no apparent reason. Having already two blogs to work on, I didn’t feel the urge to adopt another personal site and add more updating tasks to my spare time… until now. Because it’s now, well after the Twitter hype has definitely settled down, that I feel like exploring the world of microblogging: sharing small bits of information, seeing what other people are up to, following your friends’ updates, so many things to do!

Fortunately I’ve also discovered a few software applications that can make my compulsory twittering even easier. Partially covered in Cyril’s previous post about twittering from Firefox, this list features a good bunch of Twitter clients that enable you to send updates and stay in touch with friends and followers without having to visit the Twitter website every time!

• Twitbox – Handle several Twitter accounts simultaneously
• TwitterBar – Post toy our Twitter from the Firefox address bar
• triQQr – A small desktop app to stay connected to Twitter at all times
• TwitterBin – Read and post twits from a sidebar in Firefox
• Twitterfox – Another Firefox extension to twitter from the browser’s interface
• Twiterrific – A sleek desktop client for Mac twitterholics

A while back I looked at a few tools to help you keep synchronised between separate machines. Recently however, I discovered a sychronisation tool that beats them all when it comes to folders – and it’s free. Synkron is a simple application that allows you to sync folders, even on a flash disk or USB device, with all your folders on your hard disk.

What’s great about this program is that it allows you to have more than one sychronisation running at one time through the use of tabs. So basically, you can set up as many sychronisation combinations and processes as you like and just let it run. Another excellent feature is the fact that I’m always overwriting files that I don’t want to whenever I backup or synchronise. With Synkron, you have an undo feature if you realise you’ve synced over essential files. If you’ve got programming knowledge, you can also modify it according to your needs as it is completely open source. For some reason though, I noticed it was slowing down my other applications during the syncing process, especially when I had multiple tabs open. It’s a good idea to keep it down to 5 or 6 tabs at the most depending on your hardware.

I’ll still stick to Foxmarks as regards syncing by bookmarks but from now on, I’m going to use Synkron for backups or syncing to my external hard drive.