I've got a (hopefully) solid post on hope in the pipelines for later this evening or tomorrow morning. First, some plugs.

-Music-

Some of the release dates I had written down turned out to be wrong, and there's not much I'm interested in until October now. Instead, it's been a good week for scouring the internet for loose singles. Tracks by Sugababes, Sunset Rubdown, Scanners, the Whigs, Scanners, Grizzly Bear, the Rapture and a bunch of DFA remixes will make the October playlist if iTunes cooperates.



-TV-

I've got three shows I'm addicted to - The Office, Scrubs & Lost. This week The Office returned and Lost is coming up in a couple weeks. This season I find that there's a whole lot of shows that I want to watch, but I just don't have the time. So, if there's anything worth checking out, let me know. I watched Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and I really enjoyed it. I hope episode two is a little less self-aware and has a more coherent story, but I can see myself getting hooked. I also just received disc one of season one of The Wire in the mail, so I'll be checking that out and reporting back.

-Software-

Finally, I don't normally do this, but I was surprised by how many Mac users were hitting my site. I wanted to give you a quick list of software I find indispensable (or mostly so). Most of these are Mac-only and can be found at Version Tracker unless otherwise noted. I think almost all of these are free as well.

VLC - The king of the movie playing software for the Mac. I believe there's a Windows version as well.

Deerpark (Firefox) - For my money, you can't beat Firefox. Extensions, search engines, themes, and it's open source so there's pretty much an extension to do anything. I've got add-ons that make tabbed browsing night and day better than Safari, one-click del.icio.us tags, programs to block specific ads of my choosing, a lightweight RSS reader, a download status bar and much much more. Deerpark is specifically designed for Macintosh computers, and I've found it to be a bit faster and smoother than normal Firefox builds for the Mac. Click the link to get it.

Zulupad - a wiki-style textpad. Usually I'm happy with Microsoft Word (or AbiWord / OpenOffice if you want a perfectly-good and free version of Word) and TextEdit, but for writing sermons, meaty blogs, grants for work and other fun stuff, I think the linking features on Zulupad are fantastic. This is available for Windows too.

Adium - A customizable chat program that's simply way cooler than all of the other ones I've seen. Supports AIM, G-talk, Yahoo and everything else you can think of.

Appzapper - "The uninstall program Mac forgot to include."

Growl - I don't know how to describe Growl, but it makes using my computer even easier.

Macjanitor - because it's just a more efficient way to do all of the little things I forget to do, like repair permissions.

Monolingual - There's over a gig of languages that Mac installs on your computer. Since I only know english, I don't really see a need for them. Just make sure you don't delete english.

Service Scrubber - Under the Apple menu there's a section called "Services". It contains seemingly tons of tasks that I never use, so I just ignore it. The thing is, it's a pretty useful feature, and Service Scrubber can take care of the excess making it far easier to use.

Some people swear by Quicksilver, but I haven't spent the time to understand the program yet.

There's also a program called Midnight Inbox by Midnight Beep that's in a beta phase right now. It's not free like some of these other programs, but it's the best Getting Things Done (GTD) program I've ever seen. I don't use Kinkless Getting Things Done (kGTD) so I don't know how it compares, but so far so good.

And if you're not using a Mac, make the switch. You'll never regret it.

Labels: music