I’ve always been on the lookout for a small application to remind me to take regular breaks from my computer, as it’s easy to get totally involved in what you’re doing and lose track of time.
The few I’ve found in the past have always had their problems, from terrible interfaces to being overly intrusive – think alarm calls and locking the computer. Thankfully I’ve found the perfect app for the task – AntiRSI.
As well as reminding you to take breaks, it’s small, unobtrusive and highly configurable. As an added bonus it even takes idle time into account so if you’ve told it you want to take 5 minute breaks each hour and leave the machine idle, the counter for your next break will adjust appropriately, clever!
I was trying to share a folder across our local network a moment ago and no matter what permissions I gave it, it wouldn’t appear for anyone accessing my computer as a Guest. Cue one of those head-slapping moments when the problem, and solution, suddenly becomes alarmingly obvious.
If you’re having the same problems, chances are you’re sharing a sub-folder whose parent isn’t configured for sharing. In my case, I was trying to share the iTunes Music folder (full path from home directory Music/iTunes/iTunes Music) but in this case, both the Music/ and Music/iTunes/ folders didn’t have the appropriate permissions for sharing, so OS X was correctly preventing anyone else from accessing it.
Solution is simple – I shared the Music/ folder instead.
Discovered a handy open–source application for OS X on Sourceforge last night called Grand Perspective, which allows you to create a visualisation of the relative size of your files. You can specify a specific folder or your entire disk and the program will scan all your files and create an interactive graphic that lets you identify what’s using the most space – great for finding things you’ve forgotten!
