Sometime last year, you bought yourself an iPhone and then realised that a better user experience is indeed possible! So sometime this year, you took the next logical step and upgraded your PC to a Mac - perhaps a Mac Mini to start out small, or a laptop, or even a sexy 20″ iMac.
Now you are that insufferable know-it-all at family gatherings who descends from his Mac OS X Leopard nirvana only to lecture the rest of the brood on their miserable digital lives. In which case, brace yourself for what I am about to say: It’s true - you can make the user experience on your Mac even better!
We all love free apps. MakeUseOf is all about free apps! Why pay for certain applications when you can get another which works almost (or just) as well for free? While there are a few applications which have no free counterparts, you can most definitely find a majority of others which carry one or several alternatives that performs about the same tasks; and it won’t burn a hole in your pocket!
For your convenience, I’ve managed to gather a short list of the most frequently used Mac applications and provided a free counterpart for each of them. Hopefully, they’ll serve you as well as the paid versions.
Linux is for geeks right? And you gotta know command prompts and all that stuff yeah?
Not exactly, in fact that kind of image is starting to fade away somewhat as Linux distros such as Ubuntu gain traction and mind share with each new release.
OK so Linux still has a market share closer to 1.5%. However things are beginning to change. Linux has never before been so easy to try. Here’s three ways you can install Linux on your computer.
This week on the show I take a look at the new iTunes app store, ways to raise money online, how to install Windows on your Mac for free — sort of, how to work well with others online and how to schedule and manage messages. My guest this week is Make Use Of author Abhijeet Mukherjee and we chat a bit about some of his posts on Make Use Of and his own blog, Jeetblog.com
I’d love to hear from you. Send me your MP3 files containing comments about the show, reviews of your favourite websites or just general chitchat. I’ll choose a few to play on the show each week. Send them to podcast [at] makeuseof [dot] com.
Virtualization seems to be one of the great buzzwords these days. Everyone wants to be running an operating system other than their own. My first experience with this sort of thing was trying to run Linux alongside Windows XP using VMware. My second was with Parallels, running XP on my Mac.
The big problem with those two programs is the cost. There’s a free trial of Parallels and a free VMware player, but that’s not what I was looking for. I wanted a full version piece of software that would cost very little or nothing. Well I’ve found it. Varun Kashyap wrote about VirtualBox back in May as part of an article on free open source counterparts to Windows software. In this article I will expand on that and show you just how easy it is to install on a Mac and how great it really is.
Microsoft is offering their users a piece of free magic software, called SteadyState. We have all been there late at night and our virtual guard is down. Maybe you hopped on an unsecured network and decided to browse some hardcore porn sites bit torrent trackers um er let’s just say some not so reputable sites. Either way you have exposed your machine to a potentially bad neighborhood and if your protection on your machine isn’t up to snuff then who knows what could have happened already!
There are thousands and thousands of applications available for Linux, and even more being developed as you read this. As much as I love Linux and Open Source, sometimes you happen to love a Windows application so much that you wonder if only this was available on Linux I would completely switch. It has happened to me in the past when I would switch over into Windows to play Counter Strike and Half Life and some people also wanted Photoshop on Linux because the GIMP requires some adjusting to on the interface.
When it comes to your security, no web browser is perfect - and no malware app is going to catch everything. I came across BufferZone Free a few weeks ago and have been running it since, and I’m pretty impressed.
BufferZone adds another layer of protection to your browser by setting up a sandbox (an isolated “virtual directory” on your hard drive). As Trustware puts it, the program “transparently redirects modifications in your PC to a virtual, isolated environment, so that unauthorized modifications cannot be applied to your actual PC.” Malicious apps can’t write changes to your actual system files or registry - only BufferZone’s virtualized versions. Anything you download - temp files, images, executables, you name it - gets sandboxed. Why is that a big deal?
Why would you want to have Open Source software on your computer? Let’s consider a few reasons:
| (1) First reason that every one thinks of is that Open Source software is free of cost, well it certainly is about 95% of the time but it can be paid too although the license will be less restrictive. Nevertheless it can save you hundreds of dollars. |
(2) Another often overlooked aspect is that you can have full access to the source code of the software. This is a great blessing for someone who needs the ultimate customization.
Why would you want to map a folder to a drive letter? Maybe some folder you work with constantly is hidden under a convoluted folder structure, like:
Wouldn’t it be easier to refer to it as: R:\ ?
This is pretty common to do with network locations under Tools -> Map Network Drive. However I didn’t know of a way to do this with local folders until recently. You can either do it via command line or use a simple program known as Visual Subst.
(1) Using “subst” command
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