10 Things I Love About OS X

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

So, chances are that you may be receiving or considering purchasing a new computer for a loved one this holiday season. My obvious recommendation to you before you consider picking up a Dell or something from a Black Friday ad at Best Buy is to go for a Mac. It should come as no surprise to you that I’m making this recommendation due to my persistent gushing about everything Apple on this blog and my twitter.

First, a little background that you probably don’t care about (you’re probably just reading this to kill some time anyway, so who are you to complain ;-) ). I was an avid Windows user until the Fall of ‘05; truth be told I really hated Macs before then. I always thought OS X was slow, unstable and just not as powerful as my rock solid copy of Windows XP. However, Apple fixed all of my concerns with OS X Tiger; the operating system had matured with enough powerful features to lure me away from the Windows world I had been attached to for so long.

Let me be clear… I don’t necessarily dislike Windows; I still work in XP almost every day doing debugging, and it’s a fine, generally stable operating system once you’re used to it. I just feel that OS X has grown over the last few years to be the OS that everyone should be using. The user interface is just so much more powerful and well thought out that I lose productivity when I have to work on a PC for an extended period of time.

With all of that said, here’s a list of my favorite OS X features as they relate to my field and experience. Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments below!

10 - Stacks

To be honest, I wasn’t a big fan of stacks until just a few days ago. They’re basically just little expandable icons than sit in your dock acting as bookmarks for commonly used programs and folders.

My feelings changes once I began organizing my new MacBook Pro. I now have a stack for frequently accessed FTPs and a stack for my freelance client directory, both of which save me an average of 10-15 seconds each time I use them. More so, I don’t have to lose my train of though to open programs and dig through frequently accessed files. I’m a big fan now.

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By Eric in Geek Stuff, Lists

First attempt at an apron

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

I actually completed this cafe apron a month or so ago, but decided to show off my mad (in both senses of the word) sewing skills. You know when you get so excited about a project or doing something new that you jump the gun and don’t really execute like you should? I just realized I put gun and execute in the same sentence - that wasn’t intentional. I had all the pieces cut out, ironed down the hem and wound my red thread through the bobbin and machine. I do all that great, no problems there. The problem came when I was actually sewing the pieces together. Most of the stitches are fairly straight, but the strings were harder than I thought and some of them are off.

I wasn’t planning on posting this thinking I was going to give it as a gift, but I may just have to keep this one for myself - I really like the hen pattern and bright colors. I think it turned out well for my first try.

Cafe Apron

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By Lauren in Design

A Dose of Cute

Thursday, November 20, 2008

In honor of Eric’s love of animals - particularly monkeys. How is it that even baby monkeys look really old?

 

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By Lauren in Interesting

If You’re Feeling Down Today…

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

… this little video clip should make you feel better about yourself.

This should serve as overwhelming proof that access to affordable video equipment and cheap editing software is not necessarily a good thing.

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By Eric in Funny

Creating and Enforcing a Perimeter

Monday, November 3, 2008

Whether you’re watching a military movie or playing something like Halo or paintball, one of the first things smart leaders do when establishing a base is to create and maintain a perimeter of safety. You fortify the interior with needed items, get rid of any trash inside, and station guards along the edge to enforce the integrity of the perimeter. As guys, this is a macho, universally understood strategy.

So why don’t more of us do that with our spiritual lives and our homes? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately thanks to our small group discussions and some good time spent in God’s Word.

First off, my interior. For the last few months, I haven’t spent a lot of quality time in God’s word. I’ll normally try to read a chapter of scripture along with breakfast in the morning, but most days I just rushed through this and said a quick prayer so I could get along with my day. I was being spiritually lazy, and was just passively engaging God’s word.

In our Small Group time over the past few weeks, the following verse keeps coming up and hitting me hard:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.

Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” - Deuteronomy 6:5-9

I definitely wasn’t binding God’s word on my forehead… heck, I was paying more attention to my Fruit Loops than what I was reading. I decided that the first part of setting up a perimeter for myself was to really try to fortify the interior or my heart with more scripture. As part of this, I’ve been following this Bible-in-a-year plan I found through You Version. It’s pretty cool, taking you through a chapter or two out of three books a day (the goal is to have you read through the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice a year). I can honestly tell you that taking the time to turn off the TV and spend some more time with God has been huge for me over the past few weeks. It feels good to cut off the steady flow of junk and feast on some truth for a change.

Speaking of cutting out the junk, the second part of my plan has been to enforce the perimeter we’ve set up for ourselves at home. We’re trying to cut down on the types of movies we watch, and are striving to be better about turning the channel instead of just subjecting ourselves to a lot of the junk on TV.

Probably the biggest change we’ve made is putting a strict filter on our internet connection to keep out the junk. I was always bad about making excuses about this since we do so much online (both of our fields are internet related) and filters can be an over-protective pain; I can say with certainty now that I was wrong. As a guy, it feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders knowing that I’ve simply cut off the availability of that junk in my house. Why give the enemy a chance at a foothold when it’s possible to eliminate the temptation all together?

I highly recommend the Safe Eyes software from Internet Safety; it’s cheap, works on Macs and PCs and it’s extremely flexible. After only a few minutes of configuration, we had it set up and configured to block only certain things and allow others. If it’s blocking something it shouldn’t, you can easily white list certain pages or entire sites (it was blocking our blog as porn(!), for instance). Have accountability partners? It can also be configured to send logs to them if you slip up.

Coming from a geek who’s tried this stuff out, there’s really no good reason why you shouldn’t man up and get a filter now. The speed impact is imperceptible, and you’ll barely notice it’s there unless you try to access a blocked site. Fellas, I don’t care where you are or how much you struggle, you need this software. Don’t give me the “we should just trust each other” speech; it’s time to quit making excuses like me and eliminate the threat.

What if you have other ways of getting to the internet throughout the house besides your computers? We have a few video game consoles with full web browsers, so I’m going to play around with OpenDNS tonight to filter the connection even further from our router to everything on our network. For now, I’ve just had Lauren lock us out of those browsers through the parental controls built into those systems.

Am I being too over protective or paranoid? Maybe. But God’s word says we have an enemy that “prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for some victim to devour.” I’m going to take every precaution to build a perimeter and keep that garbage out of home.

Want a good deal on the Safe Eyes software mentioned above? They’ve given Long Hollow a promo code to use online that’ll drop the cost to about $37 out the gate (use the coupon code “LHB” when checking out). By the way, one license will cover three computers, so no excuses there. Guys, have you wife be in charge of the administrator password so you can’t be sneaky.

Also, if you’ve got an iPhone, you really should check out the YouVersion Bible on there. It’s got that daily reading plan built in, so you always have a Bible in a lot of different translations on you.

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By Eric in Faith, Geek Stuff