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 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.

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.

FYI: My long-form (more than a few sentences) overview of the VirtualBox virtualization software I've mentioned here went live on the O'Reilly DigitalMedia Center site. You can find it at...

VirtualBox 1.6.2: Open Source Virtualization for Macs

There's a bunch of screenshots in this blog-article. So, be sure to click on the thumbnails to see the larger images.

Has anyone tried...

Rescue Kit for Mac OS X Lite

This beta product is free. But, I hate filling out registration forms for an unknown quantity. Moreover, it looks like this product will not remain free after the beta (hey, who can blame them for wanting to make some money for their hard work?). If anyone has tried it, please let me know what you think of it.

Microsoft has a bunch of free software for the Mac. I discussed some of them over in a long-form blog entry on the O'Reilly DigitalMedia Mac Center. You can find it at...

Microsoft Goodies for the Mac

Both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 for Windows Vista have been giving me fits for many months with their respective memory leak issues. Firefox 2 has been a bit more stable on my Mac but blows up there now and then too.

I just wrote about Google Mac Apps You May NOT Know About for the O'Reilly Mac Center last week and noted that lesser known but interesting Google created applications are available at the Google Mac Playground. The playground introduced another Google created app this week...

vidnik

Transmission is an Open Source Mac (also Linux) BitTorrent client that seems to be getting some buzz. I've never used a BitTorrent client on my Mac (the only place I used it is on my Linux box to download various gigantic Linux ISO files). If you've tried Transmission, let us know how it is working for you.

Sitting at an airport gate last week, I began wondering about my MacBook's battery and then starting thinking about the other kinds of sensors Macs have. The result is a long-form blog item I wrote for the O'Reilly Mac Center titled...

Monitoring Mac Battery Levels, Temperature, and Motion with Freeware/Open Source Apps

I was just thinking about finally upgrading my 1st generation Macbook RAM from 1GB to 2GB. And, what do you know, Crucial finally has a Mac RAM scanner.

Mac System Scanner from Crucial

Here's the longer form overview I wrote for O'Reilly Media's Mac Center about the iSquint 1.5.2: Freeware Mac iPod Video Converter I mentioned a few days ago.

Just an FYI for those who wondered what would happen when the Mac Remote Desktop Connection Client Beta 2 expired on March 31. It should be still working even though the beta period for Beta 2 is over. Here's the official blog entry on this topic from the Microsoft Mac Mojo blog...

RDC Beta Users: Beta2 is Expiring, But Don’t Panic

SMARTReporter 2.3.7 is an Open Source Mac OS X utility that can warn you of some hard disk drive failures before they actually happen! It does so by periodically polling the S.M.A.R.T. status of your hard disk drive. I tried it out and found that unlike other similar utilities (for example the SMART monitor that is part of Webmin for Linux systems), it does not provide current status. It just warns you if something is actually wrong.

The two big X Windows windows managers for Linux are Gnome (what I usually use) and KDE. However, if you want to try KDE on top of Mac OS X, you can try out...

KDE on Mac OS X

The stable version is 3.5. The brave among you can try the 4.0 development release. Me? I'll just change my Linux X window manager when I want to use a different interface. The Mac OS X GUI is just fine for me. :-)

Bare Bones released TextWrangler 2.3 for Mac OS X on January 15. It remains freeware (yay! :-) and requires Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or newer. There's a long list of new features on the release notes page. One of the new features is support for the Lua programming language. If you are looking for a good free general purpose text/programmer's editor for the Mac, take a look at TextWrangler.