Category: Utils / Tools

There seem to be plenty of utilities available for this kind of housekeeping on MAC systems on which iTunes is a native application. But it took a little digging to find these helpful little utilities. There are about 20 utilities of which I see a use for about 3 of them for my purposes.

Every once in a while I like to re-evaluate some of my playlists and/or create new ones. I don’t necessarily want to throw away my previous work (although sometimes I do that too…), so I wanted to be able to toss songs into, say, my “Driving” playlist without concern for whether or not those songs were already represented there.

Running Teridon’s script allows me to simply purge all the duplicates after I’m done. A handy little time saver.

These are the two resources I currently use for testing my broadband connection speed. This first one I was turned onto by Darrel Orpen and it is my current first choice: testmy.net. Look for their new “dual test” option to test first your download speed, then your upload speed in sequence. They even have a, not quite ready for primetime, automated test available if you register with them (for free) that is supposed to test your speeds periodically throughout the day so you can gather stats on whether you really are getting what you pay for. I tried it and it seems to work for a couple of hours and then simply stop working. I imagine it will be fine when they’ve had a chance to iron some of the kinks out.

The second one, which I’ve been using for years I found through broadbandreports.com (it *was* dslreports.com back when I first started using the site to see what might be available to me. You can see this from the fact that it’s URL is still the old name), and it’s the speakeasy.net speed test. I moved away from speakeasy since the upload test always seemed to take so long to load on my system.

As of this moment (Saturday July 1, 2006 – a long weekend so it’s a skewed result) my results through my Comcast ISP are:

Testmy.net:
Download :: 5998 Kbps or 6 Mbps (732 kB/s)
Upload :: 362 Kbps or 0.36 Mbps (44 kB/s)

Speakeasy:
Download Speed: 5872 kbps (734 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 352 kbps (44 KB/sec transfer rate)

I’m currently test driving ActiveWords and have to say that I’m impressed so far. The premise initially sounded a little shaky but as I keep working I find more and more uses for it.

I like the fact that I now have an easily configurable word corrector that is active in every application. So I only need to maintain the one set of words. I’m talking about capitalizing proper nouns, correcting dyslexic typing, removing double caps at the beginning of words.

I can also assign short forms to things like “adr” which will expand into my street address or “mp” which will expand into my general email address.

You can even go so far as to create entire macros that will pull windows to the fore and then perform actions against them. A great time saver if you have some repetitive tasks. For me – I don’t like all my apps starting up at once when I (infrequently) reboot the machine. Often if I reboot it’s because I’m troubleshooting or focused on doing something specific. So I have a macro called “Start” that will sequentially initiate (and manipulate) all the applications that I like to have running when I’m ready to have them run.

Irfanview is a free image viewer for the Windows platform with a small footprint that can display almost any still image format.

With plug-ins it can also deal with sound and video files but to my mind its real strength is it’s ability to simply and easily walk through directories of images and perform rudimentary operations against the files such as resizing and reorienting them.

It can also handily capture screen shots and crop images in a basic way.

A great value for the price (free!).