Today, I’ll be featuring a tool that takes the functions of Activity Monitor and pushes them into overdrive. The tool in question is called atMonitor and it’s like Activity Monitor on a ton of steroids. The interface is almost the same. One of the many noticeable differences, though, is the addition of an information panel in the Top Window.

If you find that a particular runaway process, let’s say for example, ATSServer, is constantly using up 100% CPU power in Activity Monitor; the standard response is to perform a Google search and determine whether or not it’s safe to quit the process. Not required in atMonitor. That’s where the information panel comes in. It will display all the necessary information about every process or application that’s selected and allows you to make a judgement on the spot.

If an application is selected, it will query osx.iusethis.com for its description and latest version. It will then compare the latest version against the version installed on your Mac and tell you if an update is available. Besides that, there’s a Version column which displays the current version of every app/process running and an icon next to it that symbolizes if it’s up to date.

If there’s an app which is outdated, just click on its icon in the information panel and you’ll be taken directly to the app’s web page. How cool is that?

Another awesome feature is Reveal. Let’s say you find a fishy rogue process running in atMonitor, you can use the Information Panel to read more about it. Subsequently, let’s assume that you decide that it shouldn’t be running because it belongs to an app which you’ve deleted; you can easily kill the process, then use the Reveal button to display the particular file in Finder – then Trash it!

Another cool function is Renice Process. atMonitor allows you to alter the processing priority of particular apps. You can increase or decrease the priority, providing more CPU power to more important apps. This function will definitely come in handy while performing CPU-intensive tasks like applying layers in Photoshop or encoding video.

atMonitor comes in three different forms of view: in the menu bar (essentially replacing a few of the monitoring menu bar apps I know), a floating window and a Dock icon (can only monitor one parameter). These three views provide you with real-time monitoring and reporting so that you have a general idea of what’s going on and can easily scan for the most memory- and CPU-intensive apps. To be absolutely honest, I’m a creature of habit and I already use iStat Menus and couldn’t be bothered to switch. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try atMonitor’s menu bar view. Personally, I prefer using Top Window because it resembles Activity Monitor.

Those are just a few of atMonitor’s features, there are several advanced functions I haven’t tapped into yet. Triggers, for example, allows you to set up and run a certain script whenever a particular parameter (CPU, RAM, Temp) reaches a predefined level. Just think of the possibilities!

atMonitor is available for free and runs on Mac OS X 10.5 and higher (Snow Leopard supported). Download it and give it a try. Do you think that it has potential to replace Activity Monitor?

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Thankfully, there’s Sporcle – a site full of games that’s the best way to learn cool things, and make it fun, for adults (or really anyone). Sporcle is a site of what it calls “mentally stimulating diversions,” and it’s exactly that – games that are fun, exciting, and actually educational.

There are a ton of different games on the site, most following a similar format. You’ve got a blank list to fill out, and a time limit to do it – when you finish typing a correct answer, it’s automatically added to the list. Name all 50 US states – Go! How about all the elements of the periodic table? Go!

What’s funny is that these games don’t actually sound that much fun- until you start playing. They’re incredibly addicting, and I’m always surprised how hard it is to recall all kinds of similar information all at once. What’s that darn state next to Louisiana? But I did name all 44 US Presidents in 85 seconds (true story). Can you beat me?

The games range over a ton of different categories, from geography to television to religion, and everything in between. There’s a whole range of difficulty levels as well, ranging from the incredibly easy to the unbelievably difficult. The one I’m playing right now is called “The Great Game,” and it asks you to come up with a whole series of things with the word “great” in the title. Wayne Gretzky’s “The Great One” – things like that.

My favorite part of Sporcle is the “Random Game” button – it’s like StumbleUpon for brain stimulation. Every time you click the button, it picks one of the 1349 games currently on Sporcle for you to play – like maybe the “Crayola Colors” game.

If you start to Sporcle on a regular basis, you might want to create an account. It’ll track your stats for you, and help you figure out just how great you are at naming all the classes offered at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books.

For the real Sporcle addicts, there’s both a Twitter feed and an RSS feed from Sporcle that updates every time there’s a new game available. The library of games is growing surprisingly fast, and there’s always a new game to be played on the site.

Sporcle’s a pretty dangerous site – I’ve had more than a few occasions of looking at the clock at realizing I just spent three hours trying to name all the corporate logos (Safeway and Atari threw me off) on Sporcle. The way I see it, though, if you’re going to waste some time, and find a fun diversion from all the other things you have to do, why not do it in a way that helps you learn something? That’s Sporcle’s thought, anyway.

I got all 32 NFL teams in 1 minute, 19 seconds. Beat me. Go!

What’s your favorite online game or time-waster?

image credit: damclean

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Doing this is nothing to be ashamed of, at least if you’re playing it offline. Of course, opinions may vary widely on this subject.

Cheating can help you achieve something, which would otherwise be out of your reach. It also enables you to experience a game in the way you like it. I for one always use cheats while playing Grand Theft Auto, not because I think it’s too hard a game but just because I like it that way.

Another example. If you’ve ever played The Sims, it’s almost certain you’ve cheated.  Does “rosebud” ring any bells? I tried to play it once without using this money cheat, but I didn’t like it. The best thing in The Sims is building houses, so it bothered me having to go to work every day just so we could succeed in laying a carpet.

Most often, cheats are embedded by the game makers. We activate them by pressing a series of buttons, or by entering them in a specific menu. Sadly, not all games have cheats available.

For those games that don’t have any cheats, or to make the cheating easier, there’s Poke. This nifty application gives you the ability to cheat in nearly every game!

Poke

Several years ago, Márton Anka developed Poke for commercial purposes. However, it was never released as a product and was forgotten about. Now he has decided to give it away for free!

How does it work?

If you want to know how Poke works, you need to understand the basics of how games work, and how RAM works.

RAM is the temporary memory of your computer. In contrast to your hard drive, which is static memory and which will stay the same unless you or a program changes it, RAM memory is maintained for each computer session. As soon as you pull the plug, everything will disappear. This memory is, among other things, used by applications to store temporary data, like the contents of that Word document you haven’t saved.

Also in this memory is game data, like the amount of experience points you’ve obtained, or the number of bullets you’ve got left.

Poke searches through this memory to find out where those numbers are stored, after which you can change it to any value you like. If we go back to our Sims example for instance, Poke can find the amount of money you have, and change it to any given number.

How to use Poke

Upon opening Poke, you’ll be asked to choose a process. Select the game in which you want to cheat.

I’ll be using Far Cry 2 to illustrate the process.

As you can see below, I’ve got very few bullets left. We’ll be using Poke to find the memory location of the amount of bullets, and change it.

To do this, press the ‘Add’ button in Poke. In the window that opens, you’ll be able to set your search parameters. In the case of Far Cry 2, ‘18′.

If you’re using a 32 or 64 bit application, you’ll have to search for a DWORD value type.

Enter the value and press Next.

Poke will now look through the RAM and take all locations which contains the value 18. It’s normal that there are a number of locations where this value is represented, therefore we’ll narrow down the possibilities by performing another search.

Shoot a few bullets and search again with the new value. You can repeat this process until you’ve got only one location left. You’ll be prompted to name the value and it will be added to the main screen.

You can change this number by pressing ‘Current Value’, and also set it by checking the box. This is something you should do in this case, as it will give you infinite ammunition, likewise with financial data.

That’s all there is to it!

What do you think of Poke? Easy to use?

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As a reply to this huge part of the free gaming community, there will be one weekly MUO Gaming compilation of Flash games.

For this very first episode, we have pointed the theme towards a very important aspect of ourselves and our lives. It’s the thing that keeps the drool in our mouth and our feet on the ground nearly every day. As you may have guessed, I’m talking about our brain.

Featured in this article are five web-based games to kick-start your brain in the morning, or to keep it going in the evening. Our favorite logic and memory flash games.

Z-Rox

Z-Rox is a brilliant game. It’s a game that’ll make you use parts of your brain that you probably haven’t used before, maybe even parts you don’t realise you have.

Here’s the concept. On your screen is a line. This line is getting longer, shorter or breaking up into different parts. The thing is, you don’t have to look at it as a line, you have to look at it as a very slim window.

Behind this window, several things will fly upwards, be it letters, numbers or shapes. By looking at the changing line, you have to determine the global form of the object.

It’s almost impossible to guess all of them, but because it’d be a huge shame to miss out on half of the levels, just because you’re stuck at one, a walk-through is provided here. Try to use it as less as possible.

Loops of Zen

You’ll probably recognize the principle behind “Loops of Zen”. Your screen is filled with lines, which you can turn respectively 90, 180, 270 or 360 degrees. Hereby, you must reach the point wherein all the lines are properly connected.

At the beginning of the game this looks pretty easy, but the levels gradually get harder, towards the point where you’ll be staring in despair at the screen.

Use your mouse to tilt the tiles, the arrow keys to skip back and forth through the levels and the ‘m’ key to mute the sound.

light-Bot

Meet light-Bot. He’s like Wall-E. Only less cute, less patented and less smart. You can help him with that last one, though.

Your job (no, you won’t get paid) is to program little light-Bot. Using simple commands (like walk, turn jump, etc.) and repeating functions, you can make him maneuver through the environment and light up specific tiles.

Logic Problems – Mom Goes Shopping

A woman took her four kids shopping one afternoon. To keep the peace, she said she’d buy one item each of their choice. As she shopped, she discovered that there were four extra items in her shopping cart that she hadn’t added or approved. After leaving the store, they stopped at an ice cream stand for a snack. She bought each child got an ice cream cone and a drink. From the clues, determine the item each child got, the extra item each child snuck into the cart, the flavor of ice cream each got, and the type of drink.

1. Amanda, who had maple walnut ice cream, didn’t get the fruit juice or the coloring book.
2. Sara didn’t get the comic book or the doll but she did slip the board game into the cart.
3. The boy who got the toy car didn’t add the action figure and didn’t have strawberry ice cream.
4. Each child is represented by the following: the girl who got the doll, the boy who got chocolate chip ice cream, Chris, and the girl who got milk.
5. Sara didn’t have vanilla ice cream. The boy who added the baseball cards got water to drink.
6. The child who got the computer game got iced tea. Larry didn’t get water.

Now which is connected to what item? This is a very classic type of riddle, but one that never gets old. Push your deduction skills to the limit and learn to make connections.

Puzzles.com hosts tons of different entertaining and mind-breaking puzzles.

We’ll bring you more compilations of flash games next time. In the meantime, do you have any favourites of online brain games that you’d like to share with us? What games get you thinking?

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Remember that not all programs should be optimized with Minimem. Some programs manage memory usage well on their own, so you won’t see a difference when trying to optimize that process. It might also have a good reason to keep information in memory, and using Minimem to force it to unload that information will therefore not be a good idea. It might be holding data in memory to help performance (since reading from the hard drive is slower). It is possible that using Minimem to “optimize” a process that doesn’t need it might actually make it run slower, so only optimize where you have to.

Minimem is good for programs that run in the background but you don’t use all the time. Kallout is a good example, it gives options to look up highlighted terms on a bunch of search, reference, video, news and other sites. It gives some handy features but I don’t use them all the time, and it tends to have a pretty big memory footprint.

Another good use is for programs with memory leaks like Firefox 2. Programs like this keep information in memory for longer than they should, and continue to build up more clutter as you use them. Chances are that it will not need most of the information it accumulates, so optimizing with Minimem will help.

I highly recommend Minimem for any power user, especially if you’re running on older hardware. It requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, which is supported on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003 or Server 2008 (Linux and Mac users probably don’t have any performance issues anyway, right? ).

What do you think? Are apps like Minimem necessary? Would you use it? Do you know of anything similar? Let’s hear about them in the comments!

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