Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Grand Perspective helps you free diskspace + a few other apps

  • Grand Perspective - Overview of your disk usage using gorgeous mipmap infographics and a simple, effective interface. Each box in the pic to the right is a file; each top-level directory takes a continuous rectangular portion of the view. Scanning a 350GB disk with a /lot/ of tiny files (5+ million for just the far top left corner, the MLB gameday dataset) took < 5 minutes. You can click on any box in a segment and hit "down" to make that segment fill the screen. (Hit 'more', then 'focus' for the most helpful view).

    The giant orange box in the top left was a 15GB file that was pure junk -- I was doing some screenscraping, and the CGI-script generating the page went crazy and sent me 15GB of junk data. Gone! The giant cluster in the bottom right corner is a huge (~51GB) collection of videos I only kinda cared about; I was planning to figure out which I wanted someday, but not worth it at 51GB. Gone! By killing only junk files I really didn't need, and zipping up some stuff I wanted to keep but don't need direct access, I was able free up almost 100GB on this drive alone. Free, though I would pay for it.
  • BusySync 2.0 (not out yet) promises to sync your iCal and Google calendars. I may buy this if it works as promised.
  • I've moved fully over to Mailplane for my email -- it's just a front end to Gmail, but it makes switching among accounts seamless (among several nifty tricks), which is important as I'm trying to keep work-flip and personal-flip separate. I bought this.
  • NetNewsWire is free now. I haven't actually set it up to use besides downloading and going 'oh, cool', and I'm going to keep using Google Reader for my blogsurftimewasting. However, NNW looks perfect for music browsing -- subscribe to music blogs that post good songs as enclosure, then toss that directory into your iTunes when you need to hear something new and don't mind having to be quick with the 'next track'.