Whenever I notice my Mac is starting to run a little sluggish or when my laptop’s small solid state drive is running low on space I usually run one or the combination of Cocktail and CleanMyMac. Also, because I have a Macbook Pro and a Hackintosh the MacBook Pro is only used when I’m traveling or at a remote location where I can’t use my Hackintosh. The problem with this is OSX runs daily, weekly, and monthly scripts that get skipped if the laptop is not on, causing things to slow down a bit.

Cocktail - Pilot Tab

Cocktail

The first one I want to talk about is Cocktail. Cocktail is the free one of the two and by itself can do most of the work. All you need to do is download the app, install it, open it and go to the “Pilot” tab. From the “Pilot” tab select all the check boxes and hit run. This will run all the tasks at once. You can have it play a sound or quit when it is done as well. If you don’t want to do things automatically you also have the option of going through each one of the settings and doing them that way. Cocktail will run those daily, weekly, monthly scripts I was telling you about as well as clear caches, repair disk permissions, and clear log files. There is also a bunch of other cool things it can do such as tweak your Network settings and enable/disable certain default Mac settings that could slow or speed up your computer.

CleanMyMac

CleanMyMac

While this next one is not free, it is also not that expensive, only costing $14 dollars for a 6 month membership or $29 for a lifetime membership to the application. It is also not absolutely needed to get your Mac running smoothly but it is nice to have as a backup to catch what Cocktail misses. When you get this and open it just click the green “Scan” button and when it is done scanning hit the blue “Clean” button and your done. When it is finished it will tell you how much space you saved. The Application itself cleans your Caches, Logs Unneeded Langauge Files, Universal Binaries, System Junk, and Trash. It also comes with a Quick Erase to quickly erase files and an Uninstall Applications utility ,and lastly it comes with a Extensions Manager. So overall you are getting more features than just some basic maintenance program. 

If you don’t k now what Usenet is then maybe now is a good time to find out because Ghacks has pointed out that  XSUsenet is now offering free 1Mbit lifetime accounts. I’ll give you a hint, usually files go to Usenet type groups before they hit BitTorrent groups. Ghacks points out that with your free account “You get free life time access, a solid 600 day retention, no IP retention, no personal details on file. All you need to do to sign up is to enter information into the registration form on the providers homepage.”

If you have never tried to code because you are unsure where to start or just afraid of what it would be like or any other reason like that then you should take the time to check out this really cool website called Codecademy.com where you learn to do basic coding such as; variables, strings, arrays, while loops, and if statements.  With this simple to use and understand but still very educational interface you will soon be on your way to becoming a well tuned coder.

I think one of the coolest things about the site is the fact that it is social. What this means is you can easily keep track and share your progress with anyone. I even think with this feature we might see beginner programing classes using this as a entry level tool to begin and learn how to code.

According to WinRumors Microsoft will be making a beta public release of Windows 8 next month. The best part about it is Microsoft has confirmed it will be easy to get. By the way “Public” means everyone gets it. But beware betas do expire so I do not recommend using it on a PC where you hold valuable data.

The software giant is currently preparing a Windows Developer Preview build of Windows 8 to be made available next month. Microsoft’s official BUILD Twitter account revealed on Friday that pre-release bits would not be secret and easy to get hold of.

WinRumors reported that a Microsoft official made a tweet offering free phones among other things to WebOS developers. I guess we should all hurry up and become a developer then?

Brandon Watson, Senior Director of Windows Phone 7 development at Microsoft made the offer in a twitter message on Friday. “Any Published WebOS Devs: We’ll give you what you need to be successful on #WindowsPhone, incl. free phones, dev tools, and training, etc.,” said Watson. The offer comes hot on the heels of HP announcing its plans to discontinue its TouchPad and pre phones and halt all further webOS device development.

Yes, that is right, I have 5 more invites for Spotify to give out. This time I’m going to make it a little bit harder to get a free invite. First 5 people to respond with the answer to the question asked in the full version of this article gets a invite.

The Question: How long was i in the Military and when did I get out?  What are three ways you can contact me?

CLUE: The answer is somewhere on the site

Don’t forget to Google Plus and Facebook Like this article!

If you don’t know what Skitch is, it’s probably the best screen capturing tool for the Mac and now Android. It has now been acquired by Evernote and made free to use. Also there is no longer any more advertisments or restrictions on the free version.  Skitch also works well with Evernote making it easy to draw or capture screen images and quickly edit them and drag/drop them into Evernote. Skitch is not a “must have” for the Mac when running Evernote.

You can grab Skitch for free at the Apple Store

Hurry up and head on over to Engadget for the chance to win some really cool prizes in their “Back To School Sweepstakes“.  Some of the items they are giving away includes, laptops, phones, tablets, subscriptions to services like Spotify, and much much more. It is also really easy to enter you just basically have to be a US resident and be able to comment on the post, so what are you waiting for?

With Lion Tweaks by iFredrik you can easily fix or change some of the annoying features found in OS X Lion. This is a must have if you miss some of the old features like the built in FTP server or natural scrolling, and you just need a quick way to get the “Work around”. The best thing about this tool is its completely free, just head on over to iFredrik and grab it.

What you can change is:

• Enable/Disable the user Library folder.
• Change to a 2D or 3D dock.
• Enable/Disable system window animation.
• Enable/Disable mail reply animation.
• Remove/Add Reading List Icon in Safari.
• Enable/Disable Spelling Correction.
• Enable/Disable repeating keys.
• Enable/Disable permanent scrollbars.
• Show Hidden Files.
• Disable Crash Dialog Pop-Up.
• Get a new Stack List View.
• Highlight Stack items on mouseover.
• Change iCal leather interface to aluminium
• Change Address Book leather interface to aluminium
• NEW: Disable resume for a single app
• NEW: Enable the hidden FTP-server
• NEW: Customize Launchpad folder background

Here is a list of some of the most common Mac applications that I use. I think I use just about every one of these at least once a day, and I would hate to not have any of these applications as they are all very important. They start out as simple word processing applications to torrent applications to coding applications. This is also not everything I use.