Evan Primakow Online

Growing up, I always had macs. From my first MacSE sporting the lightning-fast 8mhz 68000 processor to college when I had a Power Mac running a 200mhz PowerPC 603e processor, I was always a Mac person. Even after that last Power Mac died, when I was exclusively running PCs, I still considered myself a Mac addict while I secretly longed for the day that I would once again have a nice shiny new Mac. Well, several months ago I got a nice new iMac and I love it. Although not new to Mac OS X, I had never owned a computer that ran it, so its taken me a while to feel out what software I like and I have some recommendations. So, without further ado, here’s my top 5 list of freeware applications every Mac user should have:

1. Adium
   This is easily the absolute best chat client for Mac OS X. I’m way more fond of it than I was Trillian on my XP machines and I swore by Trillian. Adium supprts just about every chat platform ever right out of the “box”, with the exception of IRC and video chat (supposedly coming soon). I’m pretty sure some of the platforms it supports went extinct along with the dinosaurs, but it still would work with Adium. The dock notifications are awesome, it integrates extremely well with Growl, and the styling, sounds, icon, and just about anything else are extremely customizable, which is fun. Sure, Mac OS X comes with iChat, but this just embarrasses it.
2. ClamXav
   Sure, there aren’t many viruses out there for the Mac, but you can never be too safe. ClamAV is an open source anti-virus solution for *nix-based operating systems. ClamXav is the Mac OS X front end for it. Its easy to install, easy to configure, works well, and is well supported. What more can you ask for in virus protection?
3. VLC
   I was debating whether or not to list this, because it is available on just about any operating system, but its just too good pass up. It’s a video player that can be both extremely basic to use and extremely advanced to configure, depending on your needs. It plays just about anything and that’s what makes it great.
4. Transmission
   Hands-down the best torrent client for Mac OS X. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it’s easy to configure. If that’s not enough, it also has an extremely small footprint. I’ve tried at least a dozen different torrent clients over multiple platforms over the last few years and this is certainly my favorite thus far, no matter what the operating system.
5. MagiCal
   This innocent little application does two incredible things that should by all means just be built in to the next version of Mac OS X. It displays a small icon with the month and date next to the clock on the menu bar and when clicked, it displays a small calendar that even allows you to flip through the months. Why this is not just a part of the OS is beyond me, but thankfully MagiCal is available to help.

Honorable Mentions: Firefox, Thunderbird, Stuffit Expander, and Fetch.

At first it was all over the news that some company in Miami named “Psystar” is selling Mac clones. Compatible PC hardware hacked to run Mac OS X. The term Hackintosh made its way in to mainstream media for the first time since the mid-90s when Mac clones were actually licensed. The Mac community has been in an uproar wondering about legal actions, EULAs, and all sorts of other boring things. Then, looking past the initial buzz, The Guardian’s Charles Arthur dug a little deeper and discovers that the company itself may just be a fraud. No one seems to be talking, there’s no actual support or sales team, they aren’t responding to emails, they company never seemed to exist prior to last week (even though they domain name has been around since 2000), and best of all, the address that was supplied on their website up until a day or so ago showed a generic suburban house in Miami.

The only name that has ever even been given to the media is Robert. No last name given, just Robert. No one really knows who “Robert” is, but with the new information of how new and unestablished the company is, he’s probably the owner and only employee. Well, I’ve got a last name for you. It you dig a little bit on Archive.org, you’ll see that the snapshot of the site that was taken in September, 2001 shows a different domain name: razorfx.com. The site is currently just a placeholder (although it shares a favicon with psystar.com and is hosted on the same host). So visiting razorfx.com didn’t help in it’s current state, but what if you use the Wayback Machine again and see how razorfx.com looked in November, 2002. Now we’re getting somewhere! Razofx.com was the online portfolio of Robert Pedraza.

Wanna make a bet as to if that’s the same Robert running things at Psystar?