Don’t believe me? Think about it: Abba. Ikea. Dynamite. GPS. Green-living communities. Lord of the Rings-inspired metal music. Statuesque blond ski instructors.

And Spotify.

Way back in 2008, a software development company in Sweden kicked back and thought about how great it would be to offer DRM-free, streaming music to the masses. Granted, lots of people have had this thought. I’m sure you’ve all spent some time on websites like Pandora, last.fm, and maybe even Grooveshark. But you probably don’t have an iTunes-like desktop client that will do what those sites will do. That’s what Spotify is all about.

Spotify lets you pick and choose what music you want to hear from their seemingly bottomless catalog, track by track, album by album, or artist by artist. It will also automatically import any existing audio files on your computer into its directory, so can play those songs along with stuff from Spotify. You can drag things directly into your play queue or create custom playlists. The stuff you make is saved to your account, so you can access the same playlists and history from any computer. You can also link your Spotify account to your Facebook, so you can share playlists with your friends and subscribe to their playlists in turn. Lists are also provided from time to time by the Spotify staff, and other commercial interests like Rolling Stone magazine and various record labels.

All for free.

That’s right. Free. You’ll get an ad or two for every 15 minutes of playback, but even those are easily muted with free apps like Blockify (Windows) or Smutefy (Mac), or you can shell out for an unlimited or premium membership ($5-10 a month) that will get rid of the ads. It will also allow you to stream that same music to your smartphone or mobile device, play music even when offline, and more.

And up until last month, Spotify was only available in a few select countries in Europe. But now, it’s our turn. Spotify has finally come to the US. And I highly recommend you give it a shot as a means of welcome. It’s still on an invite-only basis right now, but it only takes a day or two for your invite to arrive. You can sign up for one here. And once you’re all set, check out their automated playlist site suggestions to get yourself started with some great lists, or use Spotiseek to create some of your own using artist seeds like you would on Pandora or iTunes Genius.

And if you come up with any good ones, let us know! We’re looking for summer party music!

Macs are well-known for their user-friendliness and relatively low-maintenance operating systems, and it’s true: as long as you’re conscientious about keeping your software up-to-date and don’t drop it off a cliff, you’ll likely never have a problem with your trusty Mac.  But that said, there are some things that remain veiled behind the curtain of mystery—like keyboard shortcuts. Or Flash. So it is in the spirit of discovery that we present this list of apps that can make your iLife (HA! See what we did there?) that much easier.

Automator – How-to & Training

Automator is, hands-down, the most awesome piece of Apple software that’s already on your computer that you’ve probably never touched. It’s exactly what its name (and logo) implies: a little engine to perform repetitive tasks and actions for you. You can save your workflows as services or plugins to be accessed from the specific applications to which they apply, or just drag and drop the files you want to process onto the workflow itself.  Its interface reads like an a la carte menu of potential actions and processes, and (like lots of Mac apps) constructing a workflow is as simple as dragging and dropping. The link above will take you to a site with a wonderfully comprehensive intro video, and even some step-by-step instructions to create workflows and scripts for some commonly automated tasks.

Apple Hardware Test – How-to

We’re sure you were so overcome with joy when you first got your Mac that you couldn’t be bothered to look through all the other stuff that came in the box (a cleaning cloth? SCORE!), but you might want to fish out those gray and white “system disks” and put them in a very, very safe place. Not only do they hold the operating system your computer shipped with and all the bundled software (like iLife), they have the particular version of AHT, or Apple Hardware Test, that goes with your computer’s model. AHT is a diagnostic tool that can tell you if all the major hardware components of your machine are doing their jobs, and the test results appear with a simple pass/fail. If your machine is acting funny, it’s always a good idea to run the test before spending a day waiting around at the Genius Bar or otherwise bringing out the big guns.

AppleJack - download

One thing about Macs: when they do fail, they tend to fail pretty catastrophically. Often the crashes or weird behavior that play harbinger to full-on system failure can be fixed through terminal actions, and therefore avoid the explosion every user dreads. But if you’re like a lot of computer users, you haven’t had to run a command line script since, you know, ever. AppleJack can help you with that. It’s a simple utility you can install that will create “shortcuts” in Terminal to some of those magical restorative processes that will fix your corrupt OS woes. All you have to do is boot into single user mode (not scary, just holding down buttons), and type the word “applejack” before hitting the return key. The app will walk you through the rest. With luck, you may never need it. But the day you do, you’ll be really, really glad it’s there.

Onyx - download

Onyx is like one of those crazy Swiss Army knives with the butane lighters that they don’t sell in the US… that’s how many random tools are packed into it. It will do almost anything, from repairing your directory to cleaning up registry or plist errors, to showing you some of the hidden preferences for your system or applications you might not have known you wanted changed. Rather like AppleJack, it’s sort of hard to pin down exactly why you’d want to download Onyx, just because its uses are so varied. But in any case, it’s free. So do yourself a favor and install it, and figure out how awesome it can be for yourself.

GrandPerspective – download

Remember last week, when we talked about the PC Program Sequoia View that displayed the various items taking up space on your hard drive in a graphical, color-coded, and scaled representation? Yeah, GrandPerspective does the same thing for your Mac. It’s a great tool to have when you’re pruning your files, since you can see what’s taking up the most space without having to navigate through every folder one at a time. It’s also just interesting to look at.

Secrets – download

This app is meant to lift that veil of mystery we mentioned in the intro. It’s a Preference Pane plugin (so after installing, it shows up in the System Preference application), and it short cuts you to some of the most sought-after but well-hidden Mac user preferences and shortcuts. It not only has shortcuts for your OS, but also for a handful of popular third-party apps you might be using. If you don’t have the patience to sort through every single preference menu to customize everything your liking, Secrets is the app for you.

Thanks to Appstorm for the image

Your Windows system may come with software to tell you all about your hardware or play video, and nearly everyone has a PDF reader program on their computers these days. But we’ve selected this handful of programs because they truly go above and beyond—either by improving upon the standard performance of other “utilities,” or by outright changing the game in how you interact with your computer.  We hope that you’ll find at least a couple of them (if not all!) useful in your everyday computing.

System Information for Windows – download

SIW is a portable freeware program you can use to obtain, among other things, a complete software and hardware inventory of your computer system.  It will detail all the components of your machine, from brand to speed to size, and every program you have installed, whether good or bad.  It’s also got some handy tools for recovering lost passwords and optimizing your network connections. It will even export the data it collects to easy-to-share formats like CSV and Excel. If you have multiple computers, or tend to inherit machines with suspect pedigrees, you might get a lot of use from this nifty utility.

Speccy - download

Speccy is another system inventory tool, but unlike SIW, it focuses on a more concise presentation of your hardware specifications.  The interface is a little more user-friendly and easy to read, and it will also export to other text-based formats like CSV or HTML for sharing or taking to-go. Unless you really want the software and license inventory that comes along with SIW, Speccy is the softer, nicer inventory software for the slightly less technically inclined among us.

SequoiaView – download

Even if your middle school Biology days are far behind you, you’ll probably remember that the cross-section of a cut tree shows rings of varying widths that correlate to years of the tree’s life.  SequoiaView does something similar for your computer’s hard drive.  It scans all the files and folders in your system and then arranges them in a color-coded and scaled graphical representation, so you can see exactly how much space your collection of funny LolCats images takes up.

Recuva - download

Don’t lie, it’s happened to you. You get to your computer to open up that super-important file that you were working on before you decided to clean up your desktop in a fit of good intentions, and—oh no. It’s gone. You’ve deleted the super-important file, and now life as you know it is effectively over.  Of course it’s happened to you. It’s happened to me three times already today. Luckily, I use Recuva. It’s a nifty little program that will search the depths of your directory for those files that “accidentally” got erased. You can use it on your computer’s hard drive, but also on any external drives, cameras, memory cards, or even your iPod. It’s also got a “secure erase” feature to make sure the files you really and truly want to delete will get gone for good.

DriverEasy – download

Anyone who’s used a Windows system with new hardware before knows what a pain it can be.  Even so-called “plug and play” accessories require a minute or two of setup to begin working, and the worst ones might never work at all if you don’t have the proper device drivers or know where to get them. Enter Driver Easy. This program will scan your system to get a gander at all your hardware peripherals, search the web for the most up-to-date or applicable drivers, and present them for your convenience. What could be better? Your stuff will work better with the most current software and bug fixes, and you won’t have to worry about a thing!

VLC – download

VLC is the do-it-all video player. This fabulous open-source software runs without ads or junk, and will play pretty much anything you can throw at it without the need to download endless codecs. It’s famously virus-safe, fast, and powerful.  You can say goodbye to skipping video, or opening six different programs for all  your different media filetypes.

Foxit Reader - download

While Adobe might have developed the PDF filetype, most people these days will agree that their program for reading these useful files is bloated, buggy, and not very functional (unless, of course, you shell out the big bucks for Acrobat Pro).  That’s where Foxit Reader comes in.  It’s a lightweight PDF reader that starts and loads in a flash, but not before making sure the file you’re trying to open isn’t carrying some extra baggage in the form of unwanted malware. It will print without crashing Print Spooler, and opens multiple documents in handy tabs to keep your desktop clear. It’s compatible with interactive forms, and allows you to comment, bookmark, and even validate digital signatures on your PDF documents.

Sumatra PDF - download

Sumatra is another alternative to Acrobat that deserves a recommendation. I admit its desktop view before you open a file is maybe more yellow than anything ever should be. But viewing actual files is an elegant and minimalist experience. Sumatra is a great option for big multi-page files, since its presentation view just fades into the background and lets you focus on the content without distraction. While it does not have as many security or comment features as Foxit, you can view and print your documents speedily and with no crashes.

FileHippo Update Checker - download

If you run a lot of third-party software on your computer, you’re either constantly annoyed by alerts to update, or are running significantly out-of-date versions of most of those programs.  If you’d rather download and install those third-party updates in one fell swoop, then FileHippo’s Update Checker is the program for you. It will scan your installed software in a flash (as little as a second or two!) and contact the FileHippo website to check for any available updates. It then presents them to you in an easy-to-access list, and you can pick and choose the updates you want to run. Quick, simple, and ever so convenient.

Thanks to Income Insiders for the image. And yeah, we know it’s a MacBook Pro. But it looked cool.

In spite of all the wonderful things computers have added to modern life, they’ve given us some pretty rotten things too: sentient AI along the lines of HAL and SkyNet, diminished capacity for social interaction, FarmVille. But of all these modern inconveniences, repetitive strain injuries have to be the most prevalent, persistent, and downright annoying. From headaches to hand cramps, there are myriad ailments you can blame on your PC.

Including sleeping poorly.

Ever since computers stopped using interfaces made up of neon green fixed-width type on an empty black screen, the light emitted by your PC’s display was meant to mimic daylight. Specifically, the color temperature of most displays is set to around 6000K by default.  And if you leave your display’s brightness setting at the higher end of its range, it means your eyes are getting bombarded with an awful lot of photons.  Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to stare into the sun?

And burning holes into your retinas aside, staring long and hard at your computer screen after dark can actually affect your circadian rhythms—the biological clockwork that tells you when it’s time to eat, time to wake up, and time to sleep.  Since your body interprets the cooler temperature light coming from your display as sunlight, it thinks computer time equals party time, even if it’s actually nighttime and you want to retire shortly after that last round of Spider Solitaire.

So what’s a self-respecting technophile to do? Luckily, the kind folks who designed F.lux made it just for you.

F.lux is a simple, free application (for Mac, Windows, and Linux) designed to run in the background on your computer and create a gradually changing color overlay for your display to affect the temperature of the light it emits. It’s tailored to your geographic location and the kind of indoor lighting you already have to make its changes in time with the sun’s movements and to create overlays that look like the artificial lighting you already have. You can make the transitions a quick 20-second flip, or an hour-long fade. There’s even an option to disable the whole program for an hour at a time when you need to do color-sensitive work like photo editing or graphic design.

While F.lux doesn’t affect your display’s brightness settings, the less intense contrast from the overlays helps reduce eye strain in addition to helping your body clock remember what time it is.  It’s a sneaky utility.  You will barely notice it’s there, but take stock a week or so after installing it.  If you’re anything like me, you’ll notice you haven’t had nearly as many headaches as usual and your eyes don’t feel like they’re made of sand after hours in front of the computer.

And hey, maybe you’ll even sleep better!

Thanks to IRPC on Flickr for the image!

So last week we served up some sites and programs you could use to watch television programming on your computer or mobile device.  While some people have certainly embraced the glory of streaming internet television, some people still prefer getting their fix from the 60″ flatscreen holding court in their living room. But what if you could get all that lovely internet TV on your actual TV?  Without the pesky bother of paying for cable?  Well, look no farther.  Here are a handful of options you can use to accomplish just that feat.

Just connect them!

Lots of newer televisions and computers come with the inputs for proper connection built right in: VGA, DVI, S-Video, HDMI… with a paltry $30 investment in a nice long cable, you can connect your computer directly to your television and treat it like an extra-large display. Newer operating systems (Tiger through Snow Leopard for Mac, and Windows 7 for PC) even have custom interfaces like Front Row and Media Center for watching videos. Some even support the use of remote control devices.  If your hardware is new enough, this might be the cheapest and simplest option. A tip: take photos of the ports on your television and computer, take them in to your local electronics store, and make sure you walk out with the proper adapters for your system. And keep in mind, that may have to include audio cables.

Game Systems

If you enjoy video games as well as videos, you might have a streaming option available to you already. Most of the newest major gaming consoles have some option for streaming video through their internet connection to your television.  The Nintendo Wii has a Netflix “channel,” so you can enjoy all the titles available to Watch Instantly. The Sony PlayStation 3 also has the Netflix option, with other portals to MLB.tv, Hulu+, and additional Sony content. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 has Netflix, ESPN3, and Zune content portals, and will soon feature Hulu+ as well.  You should note, however, that in addition to the cost of the console, Xbox requires you to pay for a yearly Xbox Live membership in order to access any of its online features.  And of course, Netflix and Hulu+ are only available to users who have paid for a membership.  While using your gaming console (either with an online account for video streaming or the system’s built-in browser on a site like YouTube) to watch video can be easy, it’s not particularly cost-effective unless you already own the system or will use it just as much for gaming as watching.

Magic Boxes

If you’re not much of a gamer, but connecting your TV directly to your computer is impractical, one of the “magic box” systems might be perfect for you. The two most popular are the Roku player and AppleTV. The boxes are separate components, like a cable box or DVD player, that you connect to your TV and an internet source (both have the option to connect via ethernet or wirelessly.  They stream content from either your PC or the internet through a series of “channels.” AppleTV, of course, gives you full access to the downloads and rentals available on the iTunes Store, as well as YouTube.  Roku has access to Hulu+ and Amazon Connect. Both boxes support Netflix Watch instantly.  The AppleTV has MLB.tv, while Roku has the UFC and NHL.  Both boxes have NBA GameTime. Just like the gaming consoles, subscription fees apply for all streaming content, but since these boxes are single purpose, the hardware is cheaper (AppleTV is $99, Roku runs $60-$100).

Boxee

As the name implies, Boxee could technically qualify as a “magic box,” since you can buy the system from them directly on their website for $199.  However, anyone with a spare computer and a little technical know-how can make their own Boxee. The software, which actually does the heavy lifting in a Boxee system, is free. What it provides is a streamlined, easy-to-use interface for navigating different “channels” of content, from Netflix to YouTube to your computer’s hard drive. It has an excellent search function that lets you search for specific content across all channels, and even a Watch Later feature that lets you save programming to a list so you don’t have to search for it again. Boxee is also the most social of the streaming options, since it links your activity to your login and lets you share it with friends in the form of recommendations. If you have a spare computer that will successfully connect (à la the first section) to your television and feel comfortable following the instructions on their website, creating your own Boxee is the least expensive way to get a great user interface for watching internet TV on your TV.  If you choose the DIY-route, you’re only paying for cables and content subscriptions and rentals.

So those are the methods we’ve come across to watch streaming online content on your TV.  What have you guys been using to do the job?

Image courtesy of netflix.com

Anyone who works or has worked in an office environment has come up against this problem at some point or another.  You create a document in a feverish frenzy, send it to the printer with a flourish, and go stand by the industrial monolith to await the hard copy of your genius.

And wait.

There’s no telling how many times you’ll try to reprint before you finally realize that you neglected to change back to your “usual” printer after some other anomalous print job.  And while the worst case scenario is having to rescue a hapless coworker from the pile of copies you sent to the “wrong” printer next to his desk, it’s still a time-consuming and frustrating error.  As such, I’m sure you’ll be thrilled to hear there’s a free program that will render this irritating gaffe obsolete.

Enter Automatic Printer Switcher from Computed Synergy! This program runs in the background of Windows to redirect print jobs according to your every whim.  You simply download and run the program, open the other programs whose print jobs you wish to control, and use the handy interface to pair program with printer.  With a few clicks of a mouse, Word documents will print in your office, Excel spreadsheets will become PDFs, and that funny email forward from Aunt Mabel or your plane tickets to Maui will emerge from that printer in the corner that your boss can’t see.

I encourage you to give it a try.  If nothing else, the poor guy who gets buried in the avalanche of mistaken reprints will thank you.

For more control over how you print, check out this entry about a bookmarklet that lets you print selections from your web browser!

I love having multiple monitors. It makes working in multiple application so much easier. Most of the time I’ll have several browser windows, email, a couple servers, some windows explorer windows and other various things open and dual monitors makes switching between the programs much more fluid. What do you do if you don’t have the room (or budget) for a second monitor? Adding virtual desktops gives you almost the same functionality, for free!

What is the benefit of multiple virtual desktops?  For me, when I’m working on several projects at once virtual desktops allow me to segment the windows into groups and makes it so that I only see the windows that I don’t get lost in the shuffle of open apps.

I’m a big fan of a program called Dexpot.  It’s compatible with all modern verisons of Windows (XP, Vista, and 7) and allows you to have up to 20 virtual monitors (the default is 4) with alpha transparency, fast screen switching options and the ability to move windows back and forth between different virtual desktops.

Dexpot is totally free, lightweight and fast.  Give it a try.

http://www.dexpot.de/index.php?lang=en

Loosely defined, spyware is any software on your computer that is monitoring you (internet usage, web habits, or even possibly stealing passwords), adware is any software that tries to display ads on your computer either when you’re browsing websites that don’t have pop-ups windows or sometimes when you’re not even on the internet.  Malware is both spyware and adware, plus any number of programs that pretend to be antivirus, antispyware or other types of utilities but actually don’t do anything except ask you for money.

There are some really great free tools out there to remove spyware.  If these don’t get rid of your infection we’d recommend either calling a professional or just backing up your data and reinstalling your entire operating system and all programs.

SUPERAntiSpyware

Right now, SUPERAntiSpyware is the best of the bunch (IMO).  It’s fast, and seems to catch more than the others.  Their scanner/removal tool is totally free, but if you want extra protection (or just want to support their development) you can purchase the full version and get real time protection and a couple other goodies.

Malwarebytes

Another great tool, but it’s been around for a while and some of the more advanced malware programs have been specially coded to work around Malwarebytes defenses these days.  I personally still use it along side SUPERAntiSpyware as a one-two combo to get rid of stubborn infestations.

Combofix

The smallest and most purpose driven (also the one with the easiest name to pronounce) is also a great tool. There’s not really a user interface and there aren’t any options.  You run it, and it will scan and remove a number of different infections from your system and give you a list of what it changed at the end.  Even though it only runs out of a command prompt, don’t underestimate it.

Ad-aware and Spybot

I put these two on here for nostalgia.  Several years ago Ad-aware and Spybot were the best of the bunch, but over the years I’ve found them to be less effective than the others higher up in the list.  Still, I’d rather have Spybot on my side than nothing at all.