I figured before my first official post I should let you know about myself and my standpoint on the geeky things I plan to share.
I’m a Mac Geek. I believe that computers should (and are) able to actually make our lives easier and I strive to make my Mac that way. I’m a grad student and therefore poor poor poor, so I heavily favor free software. As a rule, excepting the vitally necessary, I don’t buy software. I don’t steal it either. Rather I evaluate the best freeware/opensource options and use them.
Once upon a time, I had a dream of setting my computer up to do absolutely anything I could imagine. I went through several programs a day and kept an external harddrive filled with “just in case” apps that I made sure were the best of the best and always up to date.
The hobby had become a dangerous obsession, what’s worse, it had made my computer kruffty, so it all had to go. My new philosophy is when I find a task that I want my Mac to do, I solve it with the triage below. I refrain from solving problems I may someday have.
1) When encountering a task you want the computer to do, see if it’s built into Mac OS X.
I had a number of freeware programs doing things that Tiger could do fine. For example I used OSXVNC when my Mac could run a VNC server all by itself. There are a lot of features and tools built-in to the OS itself, I’ve have yet to stop learning about them.
2) If Tiger doesn’t already do it see if an existing tool (i.e. Quicksilver) does.
As you will see in my next post, there are a million programs that will control iTunes for you. It just so happens that QS is one of them, and I use QS for other things anyway. I figure it’s better to have one tool than nine, so I try to keep as many solutions “in the family” of apps that I’ve gathered, so that everyone plays nice and I don’t squander system resources.
3) If 1 and 2 fail, seek out a freeware tool solution.
Favoring those that are streamlined, functional and strike you as a good member of “the family.”
In this way I strive to keep my hacks productive. The quest for gadgets can quickly become a profound distraction. This way, I try to make my computer a great place to work, not a never ending fix-it-up project.
