iStat Menus Goes “Paid”

OK, call me a gearhead.  I’ll admit, I like to see what my Mac is doing, how it's running and how much free memory remains, but the real reason I started using iStat Menus was because it looks so cool in my menu bar.  Blinking lights, perpetually updating graphs and pristinely drawn drop-down menus give my Macs that “highly instrumented” look that many of us geeks crave. You know how it is.  We’re drawn to blinking LEDs like moths to a flame.
All that aside, for me, a Mac without iStat Menus feels a bit incomplete.  It’s one of the first things I install when I get a new machine.  I’ve become so accustomed to using it, when I drive a Mac without it it feels like I’m in a car with no dashboard.  Discovering my Mac’s CPU load, network and disk activity and a host of other things with a half-second glance has become second nature.  I’m completely spoiled.  That’s why when Bjango popped up a message on each of my Macs stating that version 3 of their product was no longer free, I clicked the “Buy” button with less hesitation than a politician raising taxes.  Besides, its a good deal.  A single license goes for ten bucks, but a family pack of five is only $18.  I have to admit to feeling a bit guilty using the first two versions "por nada".  iStat has never looked or performed like free software.  Version 3 has been updated to work with the new Core i5 & i7 iMacs (version 2 had problems with the NIC monitor) and the Bjango boys have done their usual great job of “spit polishing” the app.  The new look is beautiful and perfectly complements their near flawless execution of providing a fully customizable menu bar app to monitor almost every measurable parameter of your Mac.  I’m not going to do a review here but I urge you to download the 14 day free trial and try it for yourself.  If you get hooked like I did, you’ll only need to skip one Big Mac meal to pay for it.

CronniX: Fills a Hole in OS X

One feature missing from "The world's most advanced operating system", is the ability to schedule tasks.  This is, admittedly, not something most users would notice since most software designed to run on a schedule like backups, e-mail retreival and the like come with the ability to schedule themselves.  Windows has included a task scheduler since Windows 95.  Most users don't even know this for the same reason.  For us hardcore geeks, a tool for running tasks on a schedule is something we don't need that often, but we need one nonetheless. That's why I was very surprised to learn OS X doesn't include a scheduling utility.  I've been a Mac guy for almost three years and it took until a week ago to make this discovery.  It's just not something I need that often.
This all came about because I couldn't keep a Western Digital MyBook external hard disk from going to sleep.  WD includes this "feature" to spin down their disks after ten minutes of non-use to save power.  The problem is, none of my Macs would wake the silly thing back up.  This caused all sorts of problems with OS X.  When the WD would go to sleep, my iMac would "beachball" for one or two minutes, completely locking up Finder.  This would make my machine almost unusable until Finder timed-out and displayed an error message about not being able to find the external drive.  The machine would also hang on a reboot until I unplugged the firewire cable from the drive.  After an hour on WD's support site and searching forums I discovered there was no official fix from WD but there was a workaround to keep the disk from sleeping.

This is where it gets geeky.  To keep the disk from going to sleep, you have to access the device once within a ten minute period.  There's a handy UNIX command, "touch", to access a file and change its modification date.  It looks like this:

touch /Volumes/MYBOOK/filename

Where "MYBOOK" is the name of the WD drive and "filename" is a file on that disk.  I tested this manually using Terminal and sure enough, it kept the drive from sleeping.  This is when I went looking for a way to schedule this simple command to run automatically.  There is a built-in UNIX process called cron used by OS X to schedule tasks at given intervals or at specific times.  To add tasks to this process, the crontab (short for cron table) needs to be edited.  Doing this requires making the transition from geek to full-blown nerd if you want to tackle it from the command line.  That's when I went looking for a GUI tool to do this and found CronniX.  (If you want to know how to edit crontab from the Terminal there's a good quick-n-dirty how-to here.)
While not nearly as user-friendly as Windows' Task Scheduler, Cronnix will get the job done if you understand just a little about crontab's format.  It's not hard to figure out and Cronnix is absolutely free.  It presents you with a straight-forward interface to execute a command on a schedule you configure.

I scheduled the above "touch" command to run every five minutes and now my WD external drive doesn't go to sleep.  Its a shame to have to do this, but like many hardware vendors, Western Digital doesn't do Macs very well.  Cronnix, while not elegant by any measure, gets the scheduling job done in OS X without turning you into a complete nerd.