Keep your Mac Tip-Top with OnyX
Have you heard of OnyX? It’s a free utility that lets you maintain and tweak your Mac to keep it healthy and squeeze every drop of processing power from it.
In their own words:
OnyX is a multifunction utility that enables you to verify the startup disk and the structure of its system files, to run miscellaneous maintenance and cleaning tasks, to configure parameters in Finder, Dock and some of the Apple-own applications, to delete caches, to remove certain problematic folders and files, to rebuild various databases and indexes and more.
I use it at home on my 7-year-old PowerMac G5. Without OnyX, I would have junked this computer years ago, but it’s still humming along and works well enough for some light Photoshop and Illustrator work.
Whether you’ve got a late model Mac Pro or something a little more vintage, OnyX can help you out and might even save your hide some day.
Roll Your Own Digital Signage 2.0
A while back, I wrote a series of posts detailing how I created a digital signage solution of Henderson Hills Baptist Church using modified AppleTV.
While the hacked AppleTV worked well enough, it was not quite as robust as I wanted, could not play video well, and would not auto-scale for different display sizes. So I’ve been working on a new solution.
Now I have something ready to show. We’re using this solution at our Edmond Campus and it’s been received well. The video below shows it working:
Here’s a graphic that shows how everything works.
I’ve created a website to help your church do the same thing with DIY digital signage. Check it out at http://www.getsignboard.com
Dropzone and Dropbox: Two things I Love
I’d been meaning to write about how awesome Dropzone and Dropbox are but TUAW has a good writeup on Dropzone at the above link. You’ve likely heard about Dropbox already. It’s the wicked easy, multi-platform cloud storage and backup tool that gets you 2GB of storage for free. It also makes sharing files a snap.
But what is Dropzone? Dropzone is a simple Mac app that resides in the dock. You can drag all sorts of files to Dropzone and do stuff like:
- Mount a disk image, install the app on the image, unmount the image and put it in the image trash ALL BY DRAGGING AND DROPPING THE IMAGE ONCE!
- Move all your stock images to a folder on your network.
- Upload images for your weekly email newsletter (we call ours Top 5) via FTP.
Here is where Dropbox and Dropzone work together to make magic:
- Upload a file to your public Dropbox folder and copy the file’s URL to your clipboard…with one drag and drop of the mouse. Boom!
Dropzone and Dropbox has made many mundane tasks a snap for me! I’m sure the time I save mounting disk images, uploading stuff, fumbling through YouSendIt, etc. really ads up. The coolest thing about Dropzone is it is expandable with some script wizardry and it’s only $10! Go check it!
