I have set up a blog at http://stmug.blogspot.com/ If you have any questions that you would like to ask anonymously, then here is a good spot to do so.
I check it often and will give you an answer for your mac woes.
Smart stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology.
What it does it is if you hard drive is if your hard drive is about to fail or has already failed, you will get smart errors.
Now you computer does not always monitor smart, and that is what smart reporter does.
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/23232
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/smartreporter.html
Your can also run Disk Utility and do a smart check, it shows up in the lower right hand corner of the screen.
Onyx will also monitor smart, but will not give any details.
One big problem with smart on Macs is that if you plug in an external hard drive into a mac, it blocks SMART from working, one work around it to launch windows and use HDDScan, it does a much better job than most mac utilities.
When it comes to predicting failure, windows is a much better platform.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.
If you have a drive that is having smart errors, it may run a hour, a day, or for years. Be safe and backup and buy a new hard drive!
Google earth just keeps getting better with each iteration, now it will show you historical maps so that you can see when something was built, and how things looked 10-20 years in the past. To get to it, use 'View' and 'Historical Imagery'
Also you can mark up maps, and it has a flight simulator built in
http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html
This guy talks about a cradle to hold you iphone and take great video that has superior audio compared to the iphone microphone. It talks about Qik, which is an app that can stream video to a website.
This dandy program can make collages like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/csmoferret/3393759235/
http://www.vincentcheung.ca/shapecollage/
http://bighugelabs.com/mosaic.php
Is a blog about mac things. It has some good pictures of Comicon, and good advice for saving a wet macintosh.
Is a handy website for seeing if your loved one's plane ever left the ground!
Mozy has been talked about several times, but one caveat is that by default it does not backup pictures, music or movie files....!
While not really a search engine, it has some neat stuff. You can type in a variety of things and get reports, I typed in
tx vs mi unemploment and got a neat graph comparing unemployment of two states.
I also tried:
weather corpus christi
Rain corpus christi
One thing to remember is that all results made by wolframs alpha then are copyrighted and become property of wolfram. So if you are a reasearcher be careful!
Bing is a brand new search engine (at least, it has a new name) by microsoft.
The most noteable thing about bing is that microsoft is spending 100 million dollars on advertising on it!
Google is not new, nor has it been renamed, but one noteable feature is all of its web based programs are no longer 'beta'
While Gmail, docs and other google products have been pretty solid for a long time, google has kept the term 'beta' to imply that it was continuosly adding features. Google has finally decided it was hurting it's market share with business and all it's products are no longer in beta.
this one is a good one.