To do a ping, traceroute, or whois, this website works pretty good:
I did a little research, an it is only possible to watch hulu on appleTV by putting boxee on your apple tv.
Boxee is a program that will let you watch tv by grabbing programming off of a whole variety of websites.
This website tells you how to do it:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/watching_hulu_and_much_more_on_your_apple_tv/
BUT, this website says the apple TV is just not fast enough to get the job done.
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/05/21/boxee-on-apple-tv-do.html
The problem is that 1 GHZ is just fine for what apple needs it to do, but
the minimum for most new streaming sites is a 2GHZ dual core chip.
It is a13" macbook with a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo, 1 GB of ram and a 320 GB hard drive.
This website lets you know exactly when a flight is going to be in Corpus, no more nebulous delayed or no knowing when to go picked up you loved one at the airport. This website tracks each plane in the US, when it normally lands and the complete flight path. There are some other uses, on is if a pilot falls asleep and overshoots the airport you can get something like this:
This is an article of a flight that missed the airport
This gulfstream spelled out GV using the United States as a canvas:
http://digg.com/d35XTH
You can speed up your web browsing by running namebench. What happens whenever you go to www.anything.com, your computer has to "look up" the ip address. Name bench will measure the speed up your current DNS server, and compare it with a whole bunch of free DNS servers, and tell you which one is faster and how much faster.
I am on Charter Pipeline in portland, and the average DNS lookup is 80ms, and an openDNS (208.67.222.222) server was 40 ms. And web pages load much faster.
The fastest server happened to be a main openDNS server
You might be saying, how in the world can 40 ms seem 'a lot' faster. If you go to a blog page, usually the pictures on the blog are from all over the internet, and your computer has to do a dns lookup for every picture on the page.
It only measures you DNS, it does not change or fix it. You have to go to system preferences and set the DNS server by hand.
This website had 15 free guides that are really useful, of note is that 2 of them are mac guides, and one is a photoshop guide. (the media center guide mentions Apple TV)
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/pdf-manuals-round-up/
Every now an then I find a funny collegehumor video!
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1923605
Apparently, Iphoto faces had a bug where is would not recognize any more faces… You think they would beta test it a little better! They fix it in 8.1.1
The Chicago Tribune had a nice article on the top 10 iphone apps
I thought the most clever one was RedLaser that will scan a barcode of an item and tell you if it is any cheaper online.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-iphone-apps-top-pg,0,3166617.photogallery
http://www.macworld.com/article/143854/2009/11/movie_sources.html
My pick for the easiest one is Hulu Desktop
There are some rumblings that smoking can void your warranty…
http://blogs.computerworld.com/15136/apple_voids_applecare_warranty_for_smokers
If your hard drive dies on your computer, never fear, someone has written a tool that will at least get your music and pictures back!
They had to change the name to Irip recently.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/48266
The cheapest place to buy cables I have found is monoprice, there are also unusual cables here.
They even sell extra long cables like a 35 foot HDMI or VGA cable.
I recently hooked up some wireless speakers for someones surround sound system and found out that their wi-fi stopped working.
The fix is to change the channel on your wifi, but if you have wireless speakers, a wireless camera system, wi-fi, and 2.4 ghz wireless phone,
your performance will suffer on all the devices!
There are only 3 channels that do not overlap. They are 1, 7 and 11. All the channels in between overlap with 2 of the other channels and
cause a real problem.
Also almost all wifi routers default to channel 7, so you will get less interference by changing the router to 1 or 11.
I recommend buying a phone with either a 900 Mhz or 5 Ghz signal, that way the phone does not interfere with the other devices.