We interrupt your irregularly scheduled blogging to bring you this message from our sponsor:

Okay, in reality, I’m not being sponsored by anyone, but I did want to share an indispensable tool I’ve been using with you all. It’s called Dropbox, and it’s pretty darn cool. In short, it makes your files accessible from wherever you go. I’ve been using it to keep files synchronized between my iMac and my MacBook, and I don’t think I could do without it anymore. I could go on and on about it, but that’s no good for a blog post on my homepage, so I made a dedicated page for it. Who knows, maybe this will be the first in a series of technology recommendations, and that page on the left will become a repository for useful, fun software and services. We’ll see.

Anyway, if you want to give it a shot, I ask that you read my Recommendations page first. If you sign up using the information on that page, we can both benefit and get some extra storage out of it!

So I recently upgraded from my original, first generation iPhone to a shnazzy new iPhone 3G S, and that meant that my old dock would no longer fit my phone. When contemplating the cost of a new dock, Mel and I realized it would be cheaper and a heck of a lot cooler to build a dock of our own! That’s where this sweet diecast 1966 Adam West style Batmobile came in (I assure you, I paid super-cheap TJ Maxx price!). Combine that with a dock adapter, an iPhone cable, and a few hours of ingenuity, whaddya get? A Mel Chao/Mark Grambau original BATMODOCK!  Begin geeky adoration…NOW!

Spidey sure looks sharp in that red and blue suit!

OH DEAR GOD, HE’S BEEN DECAPITATED

Oh don’t worry, it’s for a good cause.

The internets (or in this case, ars technica) brought me a present today. The makers of FileMaker just released a new piece of software called Bento! Bento is a database program “for the rest of us,” made to work alongside other Apple “iApps.” I once tried using FileMaker to create a personal finance system and found it to be incredibly complex. However, after an hour or so with Bento I had a really cool job organization tool completed. Here it is (with a sample job filled in, one of the posters I did for the 8×10 over the summer). Sorry it’s small, I’m still getting the hang of images in Blogger:

Bento uses customizable drag and drop fields to create incredibly smart forms. It integrates with iCal and Address Book, and supports smart folders, much like iTunes, iPhoto, and the Finder. For example, after putting together said job organization tool, I made a smart collection that looks for jobs that are to pay more than $0 (non-pro bono work) that are “complete” but not “paid.” This smart collection is called “outstanding payments.”

Bento comes under two primary tests for me. One: Is it easy to configure as you like? It passes that test with flying colors. The second test is, of course, will I actually use my database when I get freelance work? Only time will tell. No matter what, though, it’s nice to have an organizing scheme in place for when I finally do graduate and start looking for work.

Bento is Leopard only and is available for download as a 30 day trial. After that, though, the program costs $49.

Hey folks,

So for all the geeks out there who are constantly called upon to fix this or set up that, check out this link. It’s a list containing the default password for hundreds upon hundreds of wireless routers. So if you’re helping someone with their LG LAM200E and they don’t know the pw, you can bet it’ll be “epicrouter” or your money back (provided they didn’t put in their own password back when it was set up).

I got this from Digg a few weeks back, but I thought I’d point it out for the non-Digg-obsessed.

Ta ta!

Ok, so I found a great piece of software for the Mac that you’re all bound to love, because it’s not a total geek-out niche product, it’s incredibly useful, and best of all, it’s free! It’s a plugin for Sarari called Inquisitor. David Watanabe, the fellow who wrote the software, describes it best on the site:

Inquisitor… it’s like Spotlight for the web.

Start typing and websites pop up immediately, along with ideas to refine your search.

It’ll autocomplete your words (is it reading your mind?) and you can add more search engines to Safari with customized keyboard shortcuts.

It really is amazing how well it predicts what you want to type. I find that it’s incredibly useful when I don’t quite know the spelling of something. Inquisitor figures it out and gives me what I’m looking for. You can set up hot-keys to automatically jump to the results in a particular browser or site, say yahoo, amazon, or wikipedia. Perhaps the feature is that it’s totally transparent. It’s woven right into the Safari interface, replacing the standard Google search field.

So check out Inquisitor. It’s free, it’s easy, and it’s incredibly useful.

Mark

First off, I’d like to point out to anybody in Improv who is reading this that I searched for City Slickers II, and it is in fact the “Legend of” – not “Search for” – Curly’s Gold. Check it out!

Ok, that being said, this post will be another exercise in great geekery. Last week I pointed you all to Twitter. This week I’m going to blog about a fantastic app for the Mac. Actually, no, it’s geekier than that. It’s a preference pane.

The preference pane is called TextExpander, by “Smile on my Mac.” It’s a simple but incredibly versatile utility. With TextExpander, you can create automated text blocks with specific “cues.” It allows you to automate typing chunks of text you find yourself spitting out all the time. For example, I get pretty tired of writing Maryland Institute College of Art, so I made a block with the trigger “mmica.” All I have to do is type those 5 characters in succession and the larger block is automatically substituted. You can give it an execute key, such as esc, so that you don’t accidentally set it off at the wrong time. You can use generators, such as date, time, clipboard, etc. You can choose between plain text and formatted text, and you can even designate where the cursor lands when the command is executed.

I use this for my email signature, to spell out MICA, and my favorite, to insert links. Instead of dealing with the tedious html of inserting an outgoing link into a block of text, I simply copy the link I want to make into the clipboard. I then type “llink,” and the URL is pasted within the appropriate tags, and my cursor is placed just next to the end, so that I can type the word or words that will link to the site. I use this for every link that I write in these blog entries! It saves me a lot of time, even if only in small chunks.

The software is $20.96 from the Smile on my Mac Education Store. You can also download a 30 day trial version here, which looks like it’ll work without limitations and just start reminding you to buy it after that month is up. So check it out!

Mark