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Applications I Use 2: gfxCardStatus

3rd April, 2012 / posted in Applications, Mac / No Comments

Heres a little handy app that works quite well. Specific to Macs with Dual Graphics cards, normally the only way to change cards is to log out and log in again, after changing the preference under Power Settings. You have one for Power Saving and one for High Performance graphics.

Cody Krieger (@codykrieger) wrote a handy little App that will let you change Graphic Cards without having to logout, quite handy if you want to just muck about for a bit and then open up Team Fortress 2, or do some Video work.

So I present today gfxCardStatus.

As the Author writes:

gfxCardStatus is a menu bar application for OS X that allows users of dual-GPU 15” and 17” MacBook Pros to view which GPU is in use at a glance, and switch between them on-demand.

Most of the time it spends all its time just in my Task Bar sleeping showing which card I have enabled (i for the power saving low powered card, and d for the high-powered card).

It works quite well, sometimes you request a change and your machine won’t honour it straight away, normally this is down to another application doing something graphics heavy, so locking the control out.

One useful feature built-in is the ability to auto switch the graphics card in use based on the current power source.
Which I don’t personally use, but then I tend to hot swap between on/off PSU far too often.

I’ve a couple of options missing and some different settings available, but it depends on what model of Mac you have and the Graphics Card present in your machine.

All in all its quite a handy little app, and its Free. You can download it from http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus and start using it straight away.

Applications I Use 1: Caffeine

17th January, 2012 / posted in Applications, Mac / 1 Comment

Because I don’t often have a lot to write about, thought I would start a new string of posts on Applications I use on a regular or semi-regular basis.

Today I’m starting with a little App that sits in my Mac Menu Bar. And Looks like a coffee cup.

Its called Caffeine and has a single function.
When enabled it stops the screensaver from running and the Mac itself from going to Sleep.


In addition to just enable/disable, it can be enabled for a 5/10/15/30 mins or 1/2/5 hours.

Quite a handy app if you are running something like a flash video that doesn’t quite trigger the no screensaver rule, or if you need to stop the screensaver running, and munching system resources, like video rendering. Or of course Power Point/Keynote Presentations.

There is nothing else to say about it really. It’s a handy little App with no little task and just sits there waiting to be enabled.

The odd person has had the odd issue with it, probably down to running other Power setting adjuster programs but it’s generally well reviewed in the App Store.

Its available in the Mac App Store and its Free.

Summer

8th August, 2010 / posted in 360gaming [dot] net, Carlyon_CMS, Events, GeekUp, H3W, Halo Reach, Halo3, jQuery, Katie, LUU, Mac, Work, Xbox360 / No Comments

So that middle part of Summer has been a bit sucky. So we shall skip all that, don’t really want to go into it….

Now things are better!

I lost my mac for a week and a half, hard drive failed, followed by back for two hours, followed by hard drive fail.
In the end Clockwork (Leeds Apple Care), replaced the drive and the drive’s cable, and shes all good now!

I’m off to Moor Fest next week, I’m doing the lighting for the Green Room, with Chamsys and whatever fixtures I get given, learnt some useful things from their Chamsys Guide for that matter, (and I fixed up the tab box on the home page for them!) Nice bit of jQuery!

Made a shoutbox for Halo3Wheelmen its hosted on 360gaming.net so had to do a lot of fudging and built a mini phpBB api to get user/ban data out of the forum, its all built in jQuery and PHP, jQuery makes ajax stuff, and append/prepend so much easier than pure javascript.

Job wise I am still waiting to hear back from Firebox.com, but it looks like I shall be staying in Leeds for another year at least, being a Venue Tech, which should, with the new boss, hopefully lead to more external work, but I shall still be working as a freelance web developer. Tho there have been some interesting local jobs come up on the GeekUp jobs Board. (I need to start going to GeekUp again….)

In that vein I currently have a bit of work on building a Asset/Event Manager for LUU Events, details on that to follow, but as a project it keeps me out of trouble, since Google fell thru.

Hopefully I should be getting back into modding phpBB which is even easier now since they now use GitHub to host their repository, so I’m gonna have to get to grips with forks, and loading parent data into the child repo…. (If that makes sense).

So essentially things are busy, not perfect but good. Could be better could be worse…

Hopefully at some point I will get around to doing a Carlyon CMS release candidate, tho I am thinking I need to rip out my CSS boilerplate and thus the relevant core html template files, we shall see.

In other news, I now have completely new graphics for 360gaming [dot] net, I was approached and offered the services of O Sheep Dip, and now I have graphics! Woot!
360gaming.net now has a HogBall league tracker on top of the 1v1 challenger system, tho no one has tested it yet, and I only have the one team, people don’t seem interested…

Tho there is a BTBhub on the way, it was suggested to me that building a BTB league is the way to go, and now I have the core Bungie Code checker, and with the advent of Reach, its data API (POTATO!) and of course, its massive ForgeWorld, the future is bright for Halo and 360gaming.net, now all I need is to find more games with similar developer offerings, and getting myself access to the true Xbox API……

So that summarizes the later part of summer… O and Katie is now home.

Also checkout my tumbleblog

Catch you after Moor Fest, (which will be my first ever festival, I’ve never been to one, and now the first one I am going to is also going to be my first external lighting job….)

Off to watch Sherlock on BBC1

And Happy Birthday to Kayleigh (The GirlFriend) :-)

The End of an Era

12th May, 2010 / posted in 360gaming [dot] net, Halo Reach, LSRfm.com, Mac, Student Radio, Work, Xbox360 / No Comments

So, as of this moment of writing I am sat playing the Halo Reach Beta, got the LSRfm.com Office Remote Control Camera on the go (it has night vision tooooo) and Portal for Mac downloading on Steam for Mac….

Oh and I am a total of 3000 words away from the end of my degree, have today presented my project of 360gaming [dot] net post the basic video phase….

So the end is nigh for my university career…

What next?

Freelance Web Development,
Proper Job Web Development,
Freelance Events Teching,
Lighting and AV

Who knows the future is bright, but defo not Orange…. :-P

MacHeist nanoBundle 2

3rd March, 2010 / posted in Mac / No Comments

So, its my first MacHeist!

I’ve been aware of MacHeist for a while, but since I now own a Mac I am participating.

MacHeist to me is a way to get software, on the cheap, as well as donating money to charity.

The apps available this time around are:

  • MacJournal
  • RipIt
  • Clips
  • CoverScout
  • Flow
  • Tales of Monkey Island
  • RapidWeaver

This as a bundle costs $260, but you get it all for $19.95, with 25% going to your choice of charity, or, as I selected, spreading it between all the charities listed on http://www.macheist.com/.

The Apps

MacJournal from what I can tell is just a diary, so something I’m not likely to use.

RipIt is DVD ripping, which could be useful when I want to rip something out for Motion Graphics, or making any animation type work.

Clips is a Clipboard manager, so keeps a history of stuff you have copied/cut out of a program for recall a old clipboard entry.

Coverscout, is a audio data fixer, ID3 tags for example.

Flow, is a FTP client, with decent inbuilt editing capacity as well as ready access to Web storage like Amazon S3, but lacks SCP support.

Tales of Monkey Island, is of course part of the Monkey Island series, tho 50,000 bundles need to be purchased in order to unlock it.
At the time of writing 17,250 bundles have been sold. Raising $84,979 for Charity.

Finally RapidWeaver appears to be akin to dreamweaver, thats also locked, its unlock requirements hidden for the time.

Not forgetting that Squeeze fell off the MacHeist truck last week as a free app, it compresses the folders you tell it to watch, in order to free up space on your system without making the files unusable.
Useful if your running short of space, I currently have it watching my Personal folder, it tells me it has saved just under 500Mb.

Most of my HD is full of VM’s and MP3′s, ignoring software so, they won’t get compressed much….

So if you have a Mac and don’t know about MacHeist, check it out, and if one of the app’s is useful to you, buy the bundle, and help some charities!

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