Murphy’s Product Picks

Some readers have suggested a PayPal button on Murphy Mac. Murphy’s not going that way for various reasons. But here’s another idea: Let the big players like Amazon support Murphy. If you’re making a purchase, just enter the Amazon site through Murphy Mac or Murphy’s new store.

Murphy’s listed some products he uses that you might like. If you’ve got specific questions about any of them send an email to murphy at murphymac dot com. We’ll try to send you a prompt reply.

Before you head to the store we’ll tell you a little bit about why we like some of the listed gadgets:

• Macbook Pro - Rock solid laptop. Picked over the Macbook for the video card and the display size. It runs a little hot, but there are fan utilities that make a difference.
• Mac Pro - Murphy doesn’t have one. But he’s got a G5 that’s easily the best desktop he ever owned.
• Breville Ikon Electric Kettle - Cool blue light, nice power switch and plug, slow eject lid, like your tape deck from 1986.
• iPod Shuffle - The perfect car iPod. No display to look at, no collision. Great for podcasts. Perfect for the gym.
• Nikon 50mm Lens - Great for portrait work. Murphy hates to use a flash. This lens is a bargain and takes maximum advantage of available light. The D70 is a fantastic camera, with stellar battery life. Hundreds and hundreds of exposures without a charge. Check out Nikon’s newer cameras in their digital SLR lineup.
• Netgear Routers and Hubs - Murphy has never used the Linksys products. No reason. The Netgear stuff works well with Macs and is easy to set up. Netgear has plastic hubs, and metal ones like you’ll see in the store. Murphy likes the form factor and solid feel of the metal cases.

This iPod Nano Case is free - after a rebate.

There’s a CSS book in the store, it’s one of the better tech books Murphy’s ever read. There’s also a John Sandford book about a Minneapolis cop. The whole series is really good.

We’ll probably be adding to the store before too long, especially if someone buys something.

Nothing in the store that interests you? Not a problem, anything you buy at Amazon supports Murphy when you enter Amazon through this link. Not buying anything? We still want you to visit Murphy Mac. Click here for the RSS feed.

Out of the Office

Murphy is out for the rest of the week. A little vacation, and a little work on an entry for the Tutorama tutorial contest. Get your entries in, there are some good prizes at stake!

In the meantime there’s plenty to do. Browse through Murphy’s archive of screencasts. You can use the categories in the sidebar to find what interests you.

We’ve got some good stuff coming up next week. Have a request for a screencast? Post it in the comments for this post.

Check out some other tech sites, but don’t forget your old friend Murphy on Monday.

• MacPlus (click for English translation) - Get yourself some European perspective !
• Check out Digg March Madness at Techpwn.
• Mac Utopia has interesting OS X tidbits, as does OSXDaily.

Enjoy your week.

-Murph

Odds and Ends

RSS: Don’t forget to add Murphy Mac to your favorite feed reader. There are links on the main page for adding the feed to Google and My Yahoo. You can use this address for other RSS applications.

Remember, your friends can add your iWeb Blogs to My Yahoo and other RSS friendly sites too. Murphy has a screencast that shows how you can make it easy for them.

Links: From here on out Murphy Mac links won’t be opening in a new window. This is more in line with most web sites and has been requested by a number of readers. Screencasts will continue to open in a new window.

Update: We posted a screencast a while back about Autofill, podcasts, and the iPod Shuffle. MacOSXHints has posted a script that helps with the issue.

Weekend Screencasts

If you’ve been a regular on MurphyMac you probably know Murph tends to take the weekends off. But you’ve still got a hunger for Screencasts, right? Take a look at the eContent blog. It’s got all kinds of resources for web-based and podcast learning.

The site is run by a Honeywell corporate education manager who’s a pretty interesting guy! He’s also developed a series of custom search engines using Google Co-op, including one for screencast search.  If you’ve got a favorite site for software education go ahead and ask him to add it to the index.

If you’re not familiar with Google Co-op it’s a free service that lets you create a custom search engine that indexes the sites you specify. You can then place the search box on your own site. The eContent site covers its use in a Google Co-op screencast.