spring cleaning
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The best eco-friendly phone cases for 2024
You don't have to settle for plastic when buying a new phone case. Here are some eco-friendly alternatives.
The Tripod Desk Pro is a portable standing desk that upgraded my WFH setup
Engadget editor Mat Smith never found a standing desk that balanced versatility and compactness. But Intension's tripod standing desk, with a collapsible design and adjustable height, might be the solution. There are several ‘portable’ standing desks, but Intension’s ‘pro’ model, with particularly industrial legs and an optional wheel add-on, seemed the perfect fit.
Litter Robot 4 review: A great, but imperfect, self-cleaning litter box
The Litter Robot 4 is the best self-cleaning litter box you can buy today, but it still has issues.
Disk Art visualizes hard drive space usage
When an email from the Clean Cut Code, the makers of Disk Art, showed up in our inbox yesterday, I jumped at the chance to take a peek. I'm a huge fan of Grand Perspective's space visualization software and am always happy to try out another app to see how it compares. Disk Art, which is launching at US$0.99 (regular retail $4.99), aims to provide a "colorful and interactive map" of your drive, help you find "large unwanted files." On the positive side, Disk Art is quite pretty to look at. Its drive/folder selection screen (following image) is especially eye-catching. And while I wouldn't quite call the disk presentation "art" (see the screen capture at the top of this post), it's pretty enough with block patterned layouts. The problem with Disk Art is that it's not terribly good at performing the task its meant to complete: detecting disk use so you can identify and remove unneeded files, especially big ones. That's because Disk Art uses a hierarchical presentation. You have to navigate up and down the file system to find those large files. Compare and contrast with Grand Perspective which shows all the files at once, regardless of where they are in the file hierarchy. With Grand Perspective, you see what's big and unwieldy because the larger items immediately catch your eye. Everything is out there, so you get that sense of, forgive me, perspective. With Disk Art, you're looking at Folders much more often than you're looking at files. You can see which folders are taking up more space, but it's hard to detect the outlier files -- the ones most ripe for deletion. Admittedly, Disk Art does make it easy to collect files for deletion. It provides a handy drag and drop area, so you can add files that you want to mark as ready-for-trash. Grand Perspective's take on this is to reveal items in Finder, letting you drag them directly to the trash, plus a handy Rescan option lets you take a second look after you've deleted an item so you can pick the next most-ready target in your clean-up. Both apps let you scan either folders or entire disks. And here is where Disk Art does succeed better. Its scanning progress window (towards the top of this post) is much prettier and glossier. It's a pity then that the rest of the app just doesn't feel as functional to me.
It's time for spring cleaning!
Void storage was an amazing addition to WoW, as far as I'm concerned. I've gone from having absolutely no bag space to having about 20 slots free (give or take 10) at a time. As you can see from the screenshot above, however, I could use more space. It's not a major concern right now, mind you, but we're about to head into a new expansion, which means even more stuff to gather and squirrel away for a rainy day. While you might be spending your days dawdling in Dragon Soul or messing around with dungeons, the subject of an upcoming expansion is actually one you might want to turn your attention to. A new expansion isn't just more levels to play -- it's more items to collect, a new market of trade goods to delve into, and a host of game changes you may want to prepare for. Prepare for? Yes, absolutely. After playing through three separate expansions myself, I can tell you with certainty that preparing for an expansion before it's released will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.
Spring clean your Mac with Erica and Steve: A TUAW live chat
Join us as we chat about breathing new life into your current Mac. As many of us have experienced, our once speedy Macs eventually seem to slow down and start wheezing. Most of the slowness can be avoided or reversed with a little spring cleaning now and then. During today's live chat, we'll be sharing tips, answering questions, and letting you jump in to help share your own expertise with others. Feel free to comment, ask questions, and otherwise be part of the crowd, but be forewarned that being snarky or mean to your hosts or other guests will cause the banhammer to descend on you. And here we go! <a data-cke-saved-href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=de06d8bc9d" href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=de06d8bc9d" >Clinic: Spring Clean Your Mac</a>
Friday TUAW Clinic: Spring clean your Mac with Erica and Steve
Spring is the traditional time to shake off the clutter of winter and do some cleaning. With Mac owners, it's a good time to think about doing the same thing -- getting rid of the junk that piles up on your machine, cleaning out excess log files, etc... To get you prepared for some spring Mac cleaning over the weekend, Erica Sadun and I will be hosting a live "clinic" tomorrow at 11 AM EDT here on TUAW. We'll start at 11 AM sharp, but you may wish to arrive a few minutes early to log into the CoverItLive system, which is what we'll be using to host the talk. Throughout the chat, we'll be capturing questions and providing answers as best we can, and we always like to hear from our readers about their favorite Mac spring cleaning tips. See you here tomorrow morning bright and early! And don't forget to bring your can of Lemon Pledge!
Addon Spotlight: Minimap mayhem
In the shadow of an ominous sense of addon doom, I wanted to talk about a problem that some of you may relate with. I have issues with cluttered user interfaces, specifically a messy minimap. I should really consider myself blessed that this one can be near the top of my list. Either my life is boring or I am very much a control freak.I've recently taken it upon myself to combat the rude nature of a cluttered minimap, only to find myself somewhat frustrated by a lack of viable options. I'm going to guess that many of you many be screaming Ace right now. To that, I say stow your bilge, my pretties. The Ace solution fails, which simultaneously surprises me and makes me sad. In my efforts to enforce my Spring Cleaning initiative, I recruited MinimapButtonBag to wipe up the little buttons that surrounded my minimap. This little Ace addon did the job about as perfectly as possible, with one glaring flaw. The little "addon that could" was a memory hog; a beast that defiled my allocated addon memory. The fact that it was stomping around with the same clout as my beloved AtlasLoot Enhanced and the godly QuestHelper irked me to no end.
Spring Cleaning now Universal
Spring Cleaning, the system optimization, cleaning, and uninstaller utility from Smith Micro is now a Universal Binary. Completely rewritten from the ground up, version 9 introduces a wealth of new features and tools, such as a Task Scheduler, Permissions Fixer, a Housekeeping Scripts Runner, Spotlight Index Rebuilder, System Cache Cleaner, and others, in addition to a reworked interface. $49.99 for the package, or $19.99 for upgrades. Requires OS X 10.4. Although I can't vouch for this application, I will recommend OnyX for folks looking for something similar, and for free. I usually make sure to crack OnyX open every month or so for a bit of housekeeping of my own.(via Macworld)
