Youmail: Changing the Way We Look at Voicemail

Unless you have an iPhone, listening to your voicemail can be a real nuisance. Youmail.com solves this problem. Youmail provides a Free service to anyone that allows them to have their voicemail sent to their email address. One can still listen to their voicemails on their cellphone. The voicemails are sent to the email as either a sound file or as text. Another great feature of Youmail is that one can have their voicemails texted to their phone so they can read them. An added bonus is that one can select different greatings for different callers.

Automate Mac: Alarm + Apple Quick Start

Applescript is a powerful and useful tool for automation one’s mac. Here is a quick script I wrote to automate my mac in the mornings and have it serve as my alarm. This short guide allows you to automatically start your computer each morning at a specific time, start iCal, have iCal run the script which will play a playlist from iTunes to wake you up, then start Firefox and open iGoogle which can display the weather, news, you email, and anyother information, and finally open another tab for a different email such as my purdue webmail and log you in. If you think about this, it saves you about 5-10 minutes each morning between waiting for you computer to start up to opening all the different pages for information. Basically, it’s a great way to start your morning!

1. Download the script.
2. Open System Preferences -> Energy Saver -> Schedule… and schedule the time you want your mac to start up.
3. While still in System Preferences go to Accounts -> Login Items -> “+” to add iCal.
4. Open iCal, add new event, under alarm in the event creation choose ‘Run Script’, choose the script you downloaded.
5. Open the script you downloaded and change the iTunes playlist “SummerMix” to a playlist you make in iTunes.
6. Change the web address “https://webmail.purdue.edu/” to the email service you want.
7. Change “username” and “password” to your information for your email service.
8. Get an iGoogle Account if you don’t already have one and make sure you have Firefox remember the password.
9. Enjoy!

If anyone has any suggestions to add or can get BitPim to work so it automatically syncs with a Bluetooth phone please let me know!

Keep All of Your DVDs In One Place With Handbrake

Handbrake is an open source software that allows you to put your dvds on your computer and save them to your hard drive. This can be extremely useful when one is going away to college. This solution allows one to put the dvds they (or their family) currently own onto their laptop so they can watch them when they are away from home. Also, it reduces the space taken up by the dvds, and large collections take up a LOT of room!