First 10 Programs To Install on a New Mac - All For Free

Yesterday’s post was part one: What to Put on a New Firefox Install. After you get that on your Mac, there are 9 more Free programs you’ll want to throw on.

Acrobat Reader - A program for viewing PDF files (duh?)

Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more. After loading, make sure to turn off that dreadful duck quacking sound or you’ll probably end up launching your new computer right out the window. Other than that, though, it’s a great program.

Cyberduck is an FTP and SFTP Browser for Mac OS X. It works great and it’s something you’ll clearly need as a web developer.

Smultron is a free text editor For Mac OS X which is both powerful and easy to use.

Skype allows users to make telephone calls over the Internet to other Skype users free of charge and to landlines and cell phones for a fee.

NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database programs. Is it as Good as MS Office? No. Is it good enough? Yes, it is.

Azureus is the most popular BitTorrent client

Instant Handbrake is a stripped-down, iPod/PSP-dedicated version of HandBrake, called "Instant HandBrake". It lets you create iPod-compatible MPEG-4 or H.264 files, or PSP-compatible MPEG-4 files. The default is to automatically crop the picture to fill the screen (4:3 on the iPod, 16:9 on the PSP), or you can choose to keep the original format.

VLC Media Player I never have a codex problem because I use VLC - The Best Video Player.

Those 10 Freebees and Photoshop just went on my shinny new Mac Book Air. I’m far from the most l33t Mac enthusiast: my first Macs were the Mac Book Pros last year and I’ve just finished weaning myself off Windows in the past 3 months. So if you feel like I’ve missed something crucial, the comment section is the place to set the record straight.

What to Put on a New Firefox Install

There are tons of great firefox extensions to choose from - this post does not attempt to catalog them all.

This setup does everything I need as an SEO and Web Developer, is lite, and rarely (if ever) crashes:

Download Firefox 2.

Web Developer - Hands down the most useful Firefox Plugin Ever.

SearchStatus - Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.

ShowIp Show the IP address of the current page in the status bar. It also allows querying custom services by IP (right mouse button) and Hostname (left mouse button), like whois, netcraft. Additionally you can copy the IP address to the clipboard.

Dom Inspector - Inspect the DOM of HTML, XUL, and XML pages, including the mail.

Downloadhelper - The easy way to download Web videos from hundreds of YouTube-like sites. Also works for audio and picture galleries.

Youtorrent Search Plugin - THE best way to search for torrents: Search all the torrent sites at ones.

Custom US Google Search - Click the "OpenSearch plug-in Google USGoogle Toolbar" link near the bottom, after the "Change the plugin"-button. If you'd want more options with different localization, just change the 'gl' parameter in the url to be the country code for the localization you want.

Via File -> Preferences, I set homepage(s) to:
http://popurls.com/|http://mail.google.com|http://www.seoblackhat.com/forums/|http://bloglines.com/myblogs

The | allows for multiple tabs to be opened on launch.

Add a couple of bookmarks to the quicklaunch bar and we’re done.

Nice Catch from Rachel Lucas:

Megan Carpenter's Glamour magazine blog asks "Why are all the big political bloggers men?," and in the process says this:

Ezra Klein agreed with Amy about the ghettoization of female voices, noting that while male political bloggers are known as "political" bloggers, women are more often known as "feminist" bloggers. "There's this rich and broad feminist blogosphere, which is heavily female and very political, but considered a different sort of animal. Is Jill Filipovic a political blogger? Ann Friedman?" he says. Male bloggers are seen as talking about politics with a universal point of view, but when we women bring our perspective to the field, it's seen as as a minority opinion.

Rachel Lucas responds in some detail, but I particularly liked this response to the passage quoted above:

I clicked on the hyperlinks of both those names to decide for myself if they were "political" and not "feminist" bloggers, and in so doing, I discovered the names of their actual blogs. And I shit you not, these two blogs, which it is apparently so very wrong to label "feminist," are called:

Feministing.com

and

Feministe.us

Bam. Game over, pal. You lose.

It's like trying to claim that John Hawkins is unfairly labeled a "right wing news blogger," and then providing a link to his site, which is called RIGHT WING NEWS. Sure, he writes about things other than right wing news, and those female bloggers write about things other than feminism and even women in general, but not a lot.

Plus, as Rachel Lucas points out, how do you ask "Why are all the big political bloggers men?" and miss Michelle Malkin? And if you mention some of the somewhat lower-traffic but still prominent bloggers, why ignore Megan McArdle and Ann Althouse (an omniblogger, but with a good deal of political and policy content)?

Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.

Give More Tomorrow and Choice Architecture

Libertarian paternalists and behavioral economists are enthusiastic about the Save More Tomorrow plan, by which employees agree that some portion of their future wage increases will go to savings. Save More Tomorrow helps overcome the two behavioral obstacles of loss aversion and inertia. The plan is making it more likely that many thousands of Americans will have more comfortable retirements.

Those of us who like Save More Tomorrow do not want to require private or public employers to offer the plan. But we hope that it will be made increasingly available as a nudge.

Richard Thaler and I think that it is possible to build on Save More Tomorrow. In Nudge, we observe that many people have strong charitable impulses, and they give less than they might because of inertia. Many of us decide, at one or another time, that we ought to give more, but we fail to do so because time passes and we focus on other things.

A Give More Tomorrow plan might help. The basic idea is to ask people whether they would like to donate a small amount to their favorite charities in the near future, and then agree to increase their donations every year. Such a plan might even be offered through the workplace, in which employers and employees might agree to devote a small percentage of future wage increases to charity. A pilot Give More Tomorrow experiment, conducted by Amy Bremen, has found some exceedingly promising results.

There is a larger point here. Often private and public institutions seek to alter behavior by changing material incentives (sometimes, in the case of government, at taxpayer expense). But the most effective approaches sometimes put material incentives to one side and change what Thaler and I call "choice architecture," which is the background against which people make their decisions. Good choice architects maintain liberty while also making it easy for us, and for what Lincoln called the "better angels" of our nature, to do what we would like to do.