Ok, well I failed and didn’t do this over Christmas. Had too much to do giving advice to my parents about their own PC’s to worry about mine. But here it is, the fourth and final part of my Great Mac Apps segment.

GimmeSomeTune – This is the most useful iTunes plugin I use (and the only but thats beside the point). What it does is simple. It does loads. I will give you on-screen displays (like Growl) of your currently playing tracks, add hotkeys to control iTunes globally. It will fetch album art from Amazon, it will even fetch song lyrics from Leo’s Lyrics (which I find particularly useful). Basically, its a nice little plugin to have running. Only downside is upgrading it isn’t the easiest thing to do.

Missing Sync for Windows – I won’t say much about this since I don’t use it now. I was using it to sync my iPaq 5450 PDA with Address Book, and iCal. Its still really useful, but since I got my iPhone, I don’t use it. Still worth checking out if you own a PDA.

Miro (Formerly Democracy) -Its like TV on your computer, from the internet, like IPTV almost. Its a massively useful program that will let you watch video and audio from the web. There is a built in directory for videos, and you can subscribe to podcast feeds and (here is the best bit) you can subscribe to bit torrent RSS feeds and get your fave shows as soon as they are released. I tend to use it for any shows I don’t wanna watch on my iPhone, like Command-N, Webnation, Unwired, Diggnation (sometimes) and so on. Check. It. Out.

Microsoft Office – Now we all love our Macs, how could we not, but the fact is, there is a large amount of people who don’t know about them, so use Windows, and they are likely to have Office (99% for Word) so to help them in their niche little world, we can get Microsoft Office for Mac. And guess what? It’s actually better than the Windows version. I could tell you why, but why don’t you just try out the 30-day trial and see for yourself.
If you’re not bothered about the tracking features, and other advanced stuff, try iWork ’08 from Apple. Its lurvly.

Onxy – Another little utility which you can use to keep your Mac running smoothly. Great for laptop users. The most useful tools are clearing caches (to free up some much needed free space) and running the cron jobs that should run to help maintain your disk which usually run at 3am.

Original List, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Well thats your lot. I’m done with this. I might put up some more suggestions as I think of them, but for now, I can close this chapter of my blog.

It just occured to me that I never did part 4 of my Great Mac Apps list (see part 1, 2, and 3). So my objective for this weekend is to do just that.

As I posted before, I took my A+ 220-601 exam recently and as part of the study, I got a few books that came with CD-ROM’s. They all contained test engine software which I was looking forward to using, but of course, cos of the narrow minded people, it was Windows only. Since I don’t have Leopard yet (Jan ’08 after payday and I get an external drive to backup so I can clean install) I was encouraged by a friend to get VMWare Fusion. So I took the plunge and forked out the £45-odd quid for the software.

I downloaded the dmg file and installed the software, and put in the serial number supplied via email. And there I was, ready to install Windows. I pulled out a disc I had nearby and got to work on the dreaded install. I’ve already done this a few times with Boot Camp beta, so was more than familiar with the many many many many updates needed when you install Windows, and because they don’t do bulk updates like Mac OS gets (only their infrequent Service Packs) It took about 4 reboots, to install around about 90 updates, hotfixes, bug fixes and new software, included the fantastic(!) IE7.

So I finally got that sorted, downloaded Firefox, TweakUI, Acrobat Reader, and got them installed. Finally I was ready to actually get studying, but before that, a good nights sleep.

Well it seemed to do the trick cos I passed the exam, and now I have XP working for the future. I’m going to keep the virtual image on my laptop cos it will no doubt come in handy next time I need to tech support for my parents.

The next step for me is to set up a Ubuntu install. Its all done (off the Live/Desktop CD) and now just updating that. To make it work smoother, I need to install VMWare Tools, to allow shared folders and other business. Luckily, this website provides a great step-by-step for this  as it seems a bit tricky.

So I’ll be a triple boot system soon, which is nice to have. And certainly one to impress the friends and family, and people at MMUG.

I have a few backup systems in force after a hard drive crash on my last Powerbook. Firstly I backup the main stuff using Mozy.com‘s online backup system. I also backup to CD every few months for a local copy. And lastly, I backup to my 80GB iPod which I have plugged in very often during the week.

I got this idea from the In The Trenches podcast  and saw the post on George Starcher’s blog about how he set his up, and with some adjustment, I got mine working. Here’s what I do.

First, follow all the instructions on the blog post. I created a 5GB image first, but am now moving that to a 10GB one as I’ve decided to include backup of my Photo Library.

All the rest is the same, with the exception of the Script file. I built into mine some logging (thanks to google searches) which I then pump through and display on my desktop using GeekTool. Just choose a File to be shown, and type in the path to the log file (in my case /Users/username/.rsync.log)

Below is the script I use, which logs to a hidden log file in my home directory.

echo ================================ rsync Backup script ================================= >>~/.rsync.log
date >>~/.rsync.log
echo ==Mounting Backup Disk: >>~/.rsync.log
hdiutil attach /Volumes/Dom\’s\ iPod\ Video/Backup/EncryptedBackup.sparseimage
echo : Backup Disk Mounted >>~/.rsync.log
echo ==start rsync logging== >>~/.rsync.log
rsync -aE –progress –exclude=Library/Fonts/ –exclude=Library/Application\ Support/iDVD –exclude=Library/Application\ Support/iMovie –exclude=Library/Application\ Support/Garageband –exclude=Desktop/BitTorrents –exclude=.cpan/ –exclude=.Trash –exclude=.DS_Store –exclude=Library/Favorites –exclude=Library/Print* –exclude=Library/Icons/ –exclude=Library/Indexes/ –exclude=Library/iMovie/ –exclude=Library/iTunes/ –exclude=Library/Safari/Icons/ –exclude=.Trash/ –exclude=Library/Caches/ –exclude=Movies/ –exclude=Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/iPod\ Photo\ Cache –exclude=Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music –exclude=*.mp3 –exclude=*.m4p –exclude=*.m4a ~/ /Volumes/EncryptedBackup/>>~/.rsync.log || echo -n
sleep 2m
hdiutil dettach /Volumes/Dom\’s\ iPod\ Video/Backup/EncryptedBackup.sparseimage
echo =====Backup Complete===== >>~/.rsync.log

A few points to note. I have two folders on my desktop, Downloads and Bit Torrents which I don’t want to backup. I also exclude some cache folders in the ~/Library folder, some font folders, Indexes, etc. I also exclude my music files, so I exclude the iTunes Music folder, any MP3 and AAC files, and the iPod cached Photo files (whats the point?)

You’ll see that my disk image is located in /Backup on my iPod and the script is located in /Scripts.

Like George, all this is executed via an Automator action which sits on my Desktop.

The only thing to watch

So thats it. Just plug in your iPod, run the action, and watch it fly by on your desktop.

This tip is widely shown on the interweb but I thought I’d post it too for some reference. Thanks to AppleFritter for this tip.

Once you have your VIDEO_TS folder (from a personally owned DVD, not copyrighted materials*) make sure its somewhere handy (in say ~/MOVIE_NAME/VIDEO_TS). Then fire up the Terminal from Applications>Utilities and type the following magic command:

hdiutil makehybrid -o MOVIE_NAME ~/MOVIE_NAME/ -udf

Then sit and wait. A .iso file will slowly be created in your home folder with the movie name as its title. It will take a while depending on the size of the VIDEO_TS folder.
REMEMBER: You must have enough free space to fit a file the same size as the VIDEO_TS folder plus some spare. So don’t go making a .iso of a 8Gb folder when you only have 3Gb free!
And thats it. Now you can test that ISO by mounting it, then you can open up DVD Player, or burn that out to a disc with DisK Utility or Burn

Simple!