Google Precipitate is a personal Open Source contributions from a member of the Google Mac team. It lets you search through your Google Bookmarks or Google Docs from the Mac OS X (Tiger or Leopard) Spotlight. You can find the blog item announcing it here...

Precipitate: search your local and online docs

I was all set to diss TechJunk, before looking at it, as yet another tech news old-school-Digg or TechMeme wanna-be. But, the simplicity and news mix on the page really appealed to me. And, although it has a mobile friendly version, the regular web page looks fine on an iPhone or iPod touch. Check it out.

LifeHacker, a great site that is on my RSS feed list, has a post titled...

Five Best Windows Maintenance Tools

Best lists are always subjective of course. And, since I don't expect people to agree with my best lists, I'm taking the opportunity to list some alternatives to LifeHacker's list with some reasons why. Here's LifeHacker's list and my alternatives. LH indicates a LifeHacker pick.

The Miniblog sidebar to the left used to be a Twitter feed. However, we all know the problems with using Twitter for the last couple of weeks (months?). Still, I like Twitter' simplicity and didn't want to stop using it. However, everytime it went down, the site's Drupal feedreader freezes up and prevents this blog from rendering. After looking at a couple of options, I decided to use Friendfeed...

http://friendfeed.com/toddogasawara

I wrote about the tools I used to create my first podcast for O'Reilly Digital Media Mac Center. You can find it at...

A Newbie Looks at Podcasting Tools: Garageband, Audacity, and Levelator

I have a bunch of screencaps of using Garageband (not freeware but it is available on every new Mac as part of the iLife suite), Audacity (Open Source), and Levelator (freeware).

Let me know if you have any suggestions for podcast topics.

I wrote a document using Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac this evening and saved it out to the Word 2007(Windows)/2008(Mac) DOCX format. I decided to test it with the Adobe Buzzword web word processor. I was shocked but happy to find that the file imported into Buzzword very quickly and that the resulting web based document retained the simple formatting I had applied (header and multi-level outline numbering). Good stuff...

My first OgasaWalrus Podcast (under 8 minutes) is posted to Blogr.com. Click on the link below...

OgasaWalrus Podcast 20080701

...to get to browser based podcast player to listen to it. You don't need to download it or subscribe to it to give it a try.

Here's a list links to items I mentioned in the podcast...

Tools Mentioned:
Apple iLife Garageband
Audacity Sound Editor

The IMSLP Petrucci Music Library provides free PDF downloads of public domain music scores. It apparently shut down a while ago but has just been revived.

I just noticed that Audacity 1.3.5 (beta) was released on May 12. Audacity is a powerful Open Source multiplatform (Mac, Windows, Linux) audio editor. As you might guess, I'm making another attempt to figure out a fast and easy way to create regular (say weekly) podcasts. Basically, I don't want to work too hard or spend a lot of time creating podcasts. If it is difficult and takes too much time, that will seem more like work than a fun project :-)

Feedbooks.com takes public domain books and provides them for free for a variety of electronic book readers (including Windows Mobile mobile phones and the Kindle). Windows Mobile smartphones can use either the Mobipocket or ePub formats provided by Feedbooks. I've installed Mobipocket (also free) on a Windows Mobile Professional Edition (Pocket PC) device and will be looking at it closer on my MobileViews.com blog.

I blogged about the Open Source Census project in the O'Reilly Media Inside Port 25 blog earlier this week. The project claims that the tool (written in Ruby) is non-invasive. But, I'm still not comfortable letting an unknown app crawl around my computers. I think I'll try it on a virtual machine that can be tossed out if neeed be.

EverNote has become a mainstay in my toolkit. It is still in beta, but the it is now available for everyone to signup. And, more importantly, they have a business model to drive revenue. The free service is limited to 40MB of monthly uploads. That seems pretty generous. However, for $5/month or $45/year, you get a 500MB/month upload allowance, more security, and support.

The GrandPerspective 0.9.12.1 update was releaesd on June 14. This Open Source utility for Mac OS X displays a graphical representation of file space use on a Mac. It seemed a bit sluggish on a Core 2 Duo iMac. It seems better suited to looking at specific folders rather than an entire large disk based on my experience. That aside, it is a very useful tool for checking for files hogging space on your Mac.

PortableApps 1.1 is an Open Source utility for Microsoft Windows that lets you run applications directly from an attached USB storage device such as a USB flash drive or Apple iPod. One obvious but useful example is carrying fully configured versions of Firefox (with your bookmarks, etc.) for web browsing and Thunderbird (with all your accounts configured) for email.

Can't believe I did this. I mentioned that twhirl can now play Seesmic videos but never talked about twhirl itself here before (I think). I wrote about it as part of an Adobe Air blog/article for O'Reilly's Digital Media Center though :-) So...

twhirl