Jon points out a handy program, FontParade, for previewing your fonts on paper. Sure, you can scroll through a list on screen, but referencing a tangible list is far easier. I’ve never found another program that accomplishes quite what this program does. If you have a ton of fonts to browse through in order to achieve just the right look, give FontParade a whirl.

Shortly after Google Analytics was released, I gave it a shot. Several days after properly setting it up, I still wasn’t getting results. Today, I read that it doesn’t work in Safari. So much for depending on Google for stats.

As a full time Safari user, I gave up on that front and purchased Mint, an easy to use (and wonderful to look at) web stats generator by Shaun Inman. While it doesn’t have graphical pie graphs like Google Analytics, it sure makes checking out my stats a breeze. Some webmasters go all-out and get very detailed with stats, but me, I just what to have a general idea of what’s going on and what’s hot. For the cost of the average shareware app, Mint reports all this and more with a clean, refreshing style. I couldn’t be happer with it. To top it all off, there’s a simple Tiger widget included in the purchase which displays total visitors.

(If you know me, I don’t purchase software too often, so it must be great if I buy it!)

Jaron showed me a great little tool for checking the life of your PowerBook (or iBook) battery, coconutBattery. It works by doing the appropriate ioreg command and extracting the relevant battery information. It can report the number of charge cycles, the current and maximum charges, and the age of your Mac. I wasn’t even aware all that information was even available to software running on every Mac. In any event, it’s time for me to buy a new PowerBook battery, and coconutBattery helped me easily make the decision by showing exactly where my battery life stands.

For those working on a Mac doing Xbox modifications, here’s a tip for handling BIOS files. Some Xboxes, such as the “version 1.0,” require a 1 MB sized file, but not all are distributed this way. On the Windows side of things, there are a number of tools available for dealing with Xbox BIOSes, however there’s nothing specifically made for Mac. With a little bit of command-line work, you can combine files without any special tools except the operating system. To join files, the general syntax is:

cat bios512.bin bios512.bin > bios1MB.bin, where bios512.bin is a 512 KB size BIOS.

You’re simply doubling over the file to obtain the 1 MB sized one the Xbox needs. It can be repeated four times for a 256 KB BIOS. Or, if your Xbox is wired with a switch into multiple banks, you could combine two separate files using ‘cat’ and the redirection operator ‘>’ to build a custom BIOS, and switch between them as needed.

While I haven’t tried, I’m sure the Unix ’split’ utlity can slice a file and do the reverse of the above (something along the lines of split -b 512k bios1MB.bin). Just be careful, as not all BIOSes are designed to be sliced into smaller pieces. Hopefully these two built-in tools should get you through any Xbox BIOS issues on the Mac.