iStat Pro

iStat Pro is a Dashboard widget by iSlayer that monitors your system status. Uptime, CPU/Memory/Disk Drive usage, Network Connection info, Temperatures and more laid out in front of you.

With the widget installed, click the info icon in the top corner to configure each one of the display sections. You can choose any, some, or no info for each section. When one widget isn’t enough, you can fire up the iStat Nano widget can be loaded multiple times, with each instance set to display a unique bit of info.

If dashboard widgets aren’t your thing, iSlayer also offers an extensive collection of menu bar items. Personally, I prefer the pro widget over the menu bar items, because the widget stays out of the way until you need it.

iSlayer provides these widgets free of charge, but when you’re wowed, they’d be happy to take a donation.

That being said, I do use the menu bar widgets on my os x server, since I want to have a birds eye view of system performance in real time. On my laptop, having to hit an extra key/click to view the info isn’t a deal breaker.

Adium

Adium is the most feature-full, flexible im client. Ever. If you own a mac, and you don’t have Adium installed, chances are you suck as a person.

I could probably write until I forgot what I was talking about in regards to all of the awesome things you can do with Adium. Plugins, themes, window options, sounds, notifications, growl, window layering, icons… See? I told you!

Adium supports every im protocol I’ve ever heard of, and some I haven’t. Get it. Use it.

Growl

Growl is one of the most useful applications you can install on your mac. It creates a messaging layer that is available for any application to post notifications. These notifications can be in the form of small display overlays (that are only visible briefly, or that stay on the screen until dismissed), email messages, spoken notices, or simply logged. On top of all of that, notices can be broadcast and received from one mac to another.

How your notifications are handled depends on you. As I mentioned, there are several ways Growl can handle the alerts, but in my experience, having them displayed on screen is the most common. There are countless themes available to customize what you see.

Most of Growl’s config can be done on a per application level; that is you can configure your Adium notifications to be completely different than your Tweetie notifications.

There’s a lot to configure with growl, but to get started all you have to do is make sure growl is running. Every time you launch an app that supports growl (if growl is running of course), that app will add itself to growl’s config and begin showing notifications.

Hardware Growler

Hardware Growler

Hardware Growler is one of the first apps that I install after Growl (it’s included in the extras folder, I just drag it to /Applications/Utilities). It sits in the background and sends notifications when any of your hardware config changes. Unplug a thumb drive, change wireless networks, or unplug your mac, and you’ll be reminded. It might sound redundant, but I can’t imagine using OS X without it.

Growl Tunes

Growl Tunes

Growl Tunes is also nifty. It pops up a notification whenever the track you’re listening to in iTunes changes. Combined with the music video or cd styles, this is a great way to avoid the question “Who’s this song by?”

Other Apps

There are several other apps that support growl. Check the official list for more info!

The Unarchiver

One of the first applications I install, The Unarchiver is a replacement for OS X’s built in archive extractor, Archive Utility (in Leopard). My favorite feature of The Unarchiver is it’s ability to automagically remove the archive after successful extraction. It also recognizes any of a customizable list of pretty much every archive format I’ve ever encountered.

The very first thing I do is disable auto opening of “safe” downloads. There is no such thing as a safe download. Don’t auto open anything. Ever.

Second, get rid of the annoying default start page. I use http://google.com/ig, and have new windows open with blank pages. I almost never open my browser to go to a home page, why waste time loading something I don’t want to see.

Next, enable username and password saving. OSX Keychain rocks. Use it.

We’re consistently setting up Ubuntu Hardy slices on Slicehost, and I’m always having to read through several docs to do the basic setup. Well, no more!

Basic Slice Config

Default Nginx Config

Sample Cap Deploy

Update

Line 29 of the Cap Deploy script sets up a file socket, but the nginx config specifies IP based access. Line 29 should be changed to read

run "thin config --user #{user} --group #{user} -e production -a 127.0.0.1 -p 5000 --servers 2
-C #{shared_path}/config/thin_#{application}.yml -c #{deploy_to}/current/"

[Update: fixed the link!]