I've been using CrapCleaner (CCleaner) for years to clean Windows machines, now it's available for OS X. You can do most of these tasks manually, but having them all in one place is nice. CCleaner is 100% free.
I wouldn't worry about this unless they start forcing you to log onto these services in order to use the Internet. Facebook is an optional layer and isn't where I would go to get my news, it's where I get news about friends and acquaintances.
If you dislike this filtering simply don't log in to Google, or use Dogpile - also not logged in. They may still filter based on your country (ip address, etc.) so use a foreign search engine if you can read the language. Google can attempt to translate whole pages.
You can also use Tor , which picks an IP typically not from the US and anonymizes your session. You can also use Private browsing and cooky filtering in your browser to limit some other things....
I personally use news feeds from reputable sources and people (blogs) for all my informational needs; I haven't noticed it being filtered to cater to me, because I catered it! Twitter and Facebook are useless for news and it scares me that journalism is slowly dying to be replaced by a bunch of idiots with an opinion being taken as authority on day to day happenings. Don't get me wrong, it's a good place for opinions and discusions on current events and can even be a vehicle for reputable news sources, but it's not really a news tool!
Ultimately, everything you do can be tracked and compiled by your host regardless of the tools you use online to limit this "personalized" or "filtered" web. Everyone is capturing and storing info about you and the only way to stop that is to not use the web at all. Most of this is ad targeting for maximizing profit, but the police use it, the gov uses it, and I'm sure it's profiled for high level folks of interest so be smart with what you do and say on the Internet like you would in public if you worry about such things.
By the way, Rashomon is one of my favorite movies, not Ace Ventura. Toshirô Mifune rocks!
I absolutely love this free program for keeping my electronic books in order. It not only serves as a library, but you can also read, convert, rate, tag, upload to iPhone/Android devices (you name it) your ebooks! Bad ass, right? You can even search the major ebook store (free and not free) for new books! The developer has given a lot of free time to bring us this most useful tool so if you have a buck or two to give please do! They ask for nothing but donations for a piece of software that could easily sell for $29 to $59. Download Calibre for free; Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux:
Apple allowed too many other services into the mix, like Google, and now need to stand on their own and gain control over their empire. I imagine over time Apple will slowly remove the competition as their users adopt their services. I must admit, I like syncing between everything and I don't really care who has control; as long as you remember that all of your data will be flowing through some corporation's IT department from this point forward.
The second part of what iCloud is, in my opinion, is control over the content created in their apps. Pretty soon Apple can lock you out of the hard drive on all Mac products and hand you everything in a controlled iCloud environment, from the AppStore to iTunes....
I have been running OS X Lion for a few weeks now and I am pretty happy with it over all, but a few things are still on my wish list, and have been well before Lion was even conceived.
I love the fact that Notes syncs between my devices and mail client; although, it’s totally insane that this app doesn’t sync between my device and client without the need of a third party service. Why do notes need to be stored anywhere other than my phone, tablet, and PC? I think connecting my devices to my PC, WiFi or otherwise, to sync notes, contacts, etc. should be an option that’s not reliant solely upon iTunes or some cloud service if I don’t want to use them. Also, why are notes unaware of the Stickies application, and vice versa? It would be nice to click a note and have an option to make it sticky note on my desktop. Damn it, it only makes sense!
Another thing I was really hoping to see was a drop down calendar off the clock in the menu bar that also displayed my calendar events as well as a way to set events without opening the full calendar app. This has been a feature in Linux for years, and even Windows shows the calendar these days. I use a free little application for this, but I think this should be a part of the OS. If you’re interested in this, the product is MenuCalendarClock .
During my install of Lion I was forced to do a clean install since I had used BootCamp; rather annoying, but I honestly prefer a clean install. Anyway, I was amazed yet again that the home directory, /Users, is still in the main partition. I left it this way even though I am sure it may be possible to set up as it’s own partition in fear this may have repercussions with the next big release, so I chose the default. This is the wrong way though! In Linux I always set /home as it’s own partition. When I upgrade or switch to a new version/distribution of Linux, all my files and settings stay unaffected. It would have saved me time considering I had to backup and restore 200+ gigabyte of pictures and files.
One final complaint, put iDVD in the damned AppStore! Between that and HandBrake, life is happy, but doing a clean install of Lion wipes all the iLife files and iLife ’11 in the AppStore only has iPhoto, iMovie, and Garageband - that sucks!
My Snow Leopard to Lion upgrade, not a big deal....
I’ve been running Snow Leopard since day one and it’s been a pretty solid OS, but Lion looked very nice. I purchased a copy in the AppStore the day it was released and had it downloaded pretty quickly. I backed up a few things then tried to install, and after agreeing to the license I get a message telling me that my partition isn’t guid and to go into Disk Utilities. I go into disk utilities and the options selection they want me to select is greyed out. I tried everything, but to no avail. I had to backup 200gb of data and wipe my drive, why? Simply because I used Boot Camp I do believe.
So I create a Lion DVD and recreate my partition, be aware that guid wasn’t the default so make sure you check the options before creating the partition. I get Lion installed, that didn’t take too long either; although, the DVD to get loaded did, and I actually love it! It’s super fast and the new features rock, until I realized a clean install will not give you iPhoto. Be sure to back it up as well as iWeb unless you're willing to buy at least iPhoto.
I use Gimp and Inkscape so moving to Lion worried me, but they run better in Lion than they did in Snow Leopard, which was a relief considering my old copy of Photoshop CS will not run in Lion. I installed one Java application and Lion asked if I wanted to install the latest Java, which I did, worked perfectly. Then I downloaded Flash Player 11 beta from Adobe Labs and it’s working just fine in Firefox.
Even with some issues, I’m pretty happy with it and I'm glad I upgraded.
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