I managed to get a ticket for BarcampLondon2 so now I have to give a small talk on a topic. As some of the cool plans that I could have talked about haven’t really started yet, I have to talk about my thesis. Let’s hope I can impress someone with my research because I really need to create a new network here in London.
Ever had a bunch of MP3’s without proper name and tags? You could obviously buy your MP3’s on iTunes in the first place, but sometimes it is just handy to give those MP3’s the proper tags. In comes iEatBrainz (freeware) which doesn’t need any help from you or the filename to decide what song it is. To do this it calculates a audio fingerprint of the music and compares this to the data at MusicBrainz.org. Then it downloads the tags and it even updates iTunes for you. For me this is the best tool ever because I had some MP3’s that needed this tool badly.
Only one downside: some songs have appeared on so many albums that you have to make sure that the tool selected the right album. Maybe a new feature might to have the tool look on what songs you have and then decide what album they make up?
Ever wondered how well your Mac performs in comparison to that new Mac Pro? Try using XBench. It is a simple app that benchmarks a variety of things and then provides you with a score. Although it does not provide a nice screen like FutureMark, it does provide you with all the statistics of every test it ran. My MacBook CD 1.8GHz with 2GB DDR2 benched a score of 44.73. What is your score? Download for free at www.xbench.com.
Update: After Martijn’s wooping score of 101.12 on his MacBook C2D I decided to try XBecnh again with all programs closed and on the power adapter. This time I managed to squeeze out a 83.81. Much better!
Not too many people use the Service menu but there are some functions which are quite useful. I personally like the Summarize and Checksum services but most of them are useless.
In comes Service Scrubber to clean up the Service menu to make sure that you can get rid of all those useless services and give the menu a fresh look. Additionally it enables the user to make add keyboard shortcuts to services. The product is freeware, extremely simple to use, and can be downloaded here.
Cristiano on Tech/Life 
