Existing users, 
User Name RMFarr
Member Since 0000-00-00
Total number of Feedback Posts: 40
Total number of comments: 5
Last 10 Feedback Posts by RMFarr [ Search for All ]
Spamfire 2.23 (Mac OS X)
Longtime Spamfire User Quits Cold-Turkey 
Years ago, back in the OS 8.5 days in fact, I discovered Spamfire and loved it. I'd grown fond of using Microsoft Entourage as my email app and the one thing it lacked "bigtime" was a decent spam filter. Spamfire fit in nicely. I've been using Spamfire for years and used to be a big fan. I'm pretty sure I wrote a couple of laudatory reviews on Spamfire as well. But as Spamfire has grown in sophistication, it has continued to frustrate me. For instance: There may be something to the notion that one's spam hits increase with Spamfire. It can be configured with a proxy email client that checks all your accounts and then re-sends them to your client as a sort of invisible email server running on Localhost. I think that's where the additional spam might be coming from. It also became cumbersome to manage, occasionally something would crash and all the email account configurations would get corrupted. Then a reset would result in the last few days of emails being re-downloaded to my email client. Worse, Spamfire was slow. It seemed to work best if I started up my Mac and did left Spamfire running in the background for thirty minutes or so before trying to check my email. Otherwise I'd get error messages and stuff. And some of the same SPAM seemed to get through no matter how many times I flagged it. Still, the custom filters you could write were amazing. Finally, REVENGE didn't work very well. It was fun to try and fight back, but revenge almost always crashed if I tried to revenge more than a handful of messages. Over the years email clients have improved a great deal. Apple Mail and Thunderbird have very good spam filters built-in. I've made the switch to Thunderbird and I've tossed out Spamfire too. I'll miss some of the features of Entourage, but I can live with Thunderbird and I don't need Spamfire any longer. Guess what? I can check my email in about 5 seconds now instead of waiting 20 minutes. [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info | 5 of 5 users found this helpful
Wednesday, January 17 2007 @ 08:49 PM PST
TiVoDecode Manager 2.0 (Mac OS X)
A whole order of improvement in the interface of the previous version, TIVoDecode Manager 2 is simple and effective. The download and encode to MPG4 in one operation is a big time saver and works perfectly for me. This is just the thing to get one's TIVO recordings into iTunes & iPod and it doesn't cost a dime. Simply perfect. I wonder if the difficulties others seem to be having with this excellent program are network related or due to non-compatible TIVO hardware. After all, it only supports a pretty limited range of un-hacked TIVO models. [alert admin]
Wednesday, January 03 2007 @ 07:30 AM PST
TiVoDecode Manager 1.5.5 (Mac OS X)
Sweet! Congratulations to everyone responsible for this milestone. This deserves MAX STARS because a handful of puzzle solving heroes managed to provide something Tivo promised, and has long failed to provide to the Mac community all these years. FINALLY, we have Tivo-to-Go functionality on our Macs. No Tivo hacking required. This actually seems to download from the tivo and remove the Tivo encryption in one step. After wasting a day trying to get this neat little app to recognize my "Tivo media access key" I realized I was using the serial number instead. Dooh! Plugged in the right number and things worked perfectly for me. Well, almost perfectly. I've only downloaded about four shows so far, and one seemed to lock up in the final few MB of the show. Still, I was able to view the partial file just fine thanks in VLC media player and iSquint didn't have any trouble converting the MPG into an iPod compatible MP4. The missing part of the file was stuff I'd have fast forwarded through anyway. Actually, this is even better than Tivo-to-Go because, unlike the poor PeeCee slobs using Tivo-to-Go, we're free of Microsoft Media Player. We can launch -- and convert -- our downloaded Tivo files on any hardware or application robust enough to handle MPG files. Show the author some love. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Friday, December 29 2006 @ 05:54 PM PST
Hijack iT! 2.7 (Mac OS X)
You paid for it , now make it yours.
Yeah, I know you can turn your iTunes purchased protected AAC files into DRM-free MP3s by burning them to an audio disk and re-ripping them as MP3. But that's not as slick as Hijack IT combined with Audio Hijack Pro and also a bit slower. This way you don't need to spend tedious hours fixing track information thats often lost when you do the burn-a-disk workaround. Yes, you could do something like this with applescript. This is easier and more stable. Face it, jHymn is never going to get updated. Yes, Hijack IT requires Audio Hijack Pro and Growl. And setting things up isn't something my mother could figure out. But I did set it up and it's worth it for someone who wants his music back. Here's how it works: Create an iTunes hijack session in Audio Hijack Pro using the desired mp3 compression settings. Make an iTunes playlist of the protected AAC files you want converted to MP3 and then launch Hijack IT. Select the playlist and AHP session you just made in the dropdowns and sit back while your purchased tunes become truly portable. And you won't regret having Audio Hijack Pro in your toolbox either. Makes you glad you own a Mac. Growl is pretty cool too. Trust me, this combination works so much better at freeing up songs purchased from the iTunes store than everything else I tried. I'm giving it 5 stars because it saved my library and my sanity. [alert admin]
Friday, December 08 2006 @ 10:04 PM PST
Star 1.1 (Mac OS X)
This is something iTunes has needed for some time.
Sure it's easy to rate the playing song on your iPod, but what if you want to rate tunes as they play in iTunes on your Mac? Normally you'd have to click on the iTunes window and make sure the song that's currently playing is highlighted, then pull down a menu or click in the window to apply a star rating to the tune. Then you'd have to return to looking at porn or whatever it was you were doing before the interruption. Star is much better. It puts a little star in your menu bar that works even if iTunes is in the background behind a picture of Paris Hilton. Pull down the star menu and it shows you the title of the currently playing tune, the current star rating of that tune, and allows you to change the star rating by simply selecting from the various rows of stars in the same menu. Slick, simple, elegant and stable. I'm currently going through the 710 perfectly legal free MP3s I downloaded via the (South by Southwest) SXSW 2006 Showcasing Artist bittorrent download file. That's a lot of listening and rating. Star is a great little free helper. Thanks dudes, for thinking of folks like me. [alert admin]
Read Comments (6) | More Info | 2 of 3 users found this helpful
Monday, March 13 2006 @ 06:24 PM PST
iDupe 1.7.1 (Mac OS X)
iDupe works better than all the others. (I found two others) A few weeks ago I accidentally trashed and deleted my beloved 50-gig music library (don't laugh) and in the course of recovering songs with a rescue utilty and from every possible disk I could find, I ended up multiple copies of the same songs, many of which were trunciated or corrupted. Show Duplicate Songs in iTunes revealed over 6000 duplicate titles. Arrrgh! iDupes works in concert with iTunes to scan selected songs in iTunes and further evaluate them. Here's what I did:
- 1. In iTunes library view with Browser enabled; SHOW DUPLICATE SONGS and then sort by Artist. Cross fingers.
- 2. Select the range (a few hundred at most, like A's thru C's for instance)
- 3. Run iDupes scan which will evaluate the selecteed songs and show a report of what it found.
- 4. Click iDupes "Mark Results in iTunes" button
- 5. Click the final "Ditto" button which removes unchecked in current selection from playlist, removes them from the library playlist, and then moves them to the trash.
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Saturday, February 04 2006 @ 09:13 AM PST
1st Page 2000 2.0 (Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows 2000)
I guessed right. This "virus" report is just a false positive on of one of the canned javascript templates. Here's the developer FAQ. http://developers.evrsoft.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=6270#post6270 [alert admin]
Wednesday, December 07 2005 @ 11:38 AM PST
1st Page 2000 2.0 (Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows 2000)
Dude, this looks exactly like Homesite! Functions much the same way too, but this is totally free. Can't get it to simultaniously open a list of files, as I do in Homesite, I'm forced to double-click each one. Norton AntiVirus Auto-Protect reports JS.WindowBomb among the install files, but I suspect it's actually detecting code supplied as one of the canned (and somewhat dated) JavaScripts with the program designed to insert into your web pages. The web site has some encouraging hints at a 2006 Beta version of this app. [alert admin]
Wednesday, December 07 2005 @ 11:26 AM PST
Audio Hijack 2.2.3 (Mac OS X)
Before I got hold of Audio Hijack I'd been recording through my iMic using the high end (and over priced) Bias Peak. It worked OK but barely. Constant problems with managing volume changes via the attached HiFi system and picking up system sounds on my recordings. For those who've never tried Hijack, I'd say the best thing about the recordings it makes are that the audio is pulled straight off the digital stream directly from the application being hijacked. Therefore it's clean, free from system sounds and the limitations of my analog HiFi. And most importantly, I can change the volume of my speaker output without affecting the recording. Took a little while to get used to the interface, but it works reliably with every application I've tried to hijack, including: iTunes, Radio365 player, and VLC player. Since I've already paid for it, I'm comfortable with Bias Peak to split the hours long AIFF files I tend to hijack into svelte sized MP3s for the iPod. Therefore this version suits me well. I'm sure Hijack Pro would have been a much cheaper way to go. (sigh) [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 5 of 5 users found this helpful
Thursday, November 10 2005 @ 05:52 PM PST
pearLabelizer 0.5 (Mac OS X)
Dead simple. Just what I needed. It's a mystery Apple hasn't hired the author to build similar functionality into the address book after all these years. Thank you, W. Ritter [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Saturday, November 05 2005 @ 07:40 PM PST
Last 10 Comments by RMFarr [ Search for All ]
Your comment didn't do much to improve on the lack of description. Thanks for nothing.
Original feedback item : Read More
Monday, March 13 2006 @ 06:26 PM PST
More of an update. Version 2.1 indeed does have problems. Each time I tried to use it, it crashed after sending the first or second email on a list of 2000 or so addresses.
Original feedback item : Read More
Monday, April 11 2005 @ 11:24 AM PDT
too limited in formats it handles
If you want to edit Word docs, quit complaining and pay for Microsoft Word. NOBODY but Microsoft makes anything that can reliably open and edit Microsoft Word docs, because that's the way Microsoft wants it. All the "professional" products I've paid for that purport to open and edit Word docs eventually fall short. Think of the registration fee as a business expense. If you just want to grab the text from Word docs, (or anything else)…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Tuesday, September 14 2004 @ 08:40 PM PDT
Yes and no. But it does have English options now. Expand your tiny little brain a little next time before slamming a nice piece of freeware.
Original feedback item : Read More
Saturday, March 13 2004 @ 06:07 PM PST
At least Font Reserve doesn't take 5 minutes to shut down. But I've only got 3,400 fonts.
Original feedback item : Read More
Friday, January 30 2004 @ 04:10 PM PST
