Peakhour mac11/6/2023 ![]() No, it’s not cheap-though as I write this it’s on sale for $262-but it’s a pretty amazing collection of tools. And for about a year now, I’ve been using the $349 iZotope RX 5 to do the job. Noises like that don’t make for good podcast audio, so the first thing I do before editing a podcast is strip the noise out of the audio files. Some people build themselves a home studio and buy an expensive microphone while other people keep it low cost and can’t escape the hum of a heater or the whine of their laptop fans. And I use Calibre frequently to convert ePubs into a Kindle-compatible format. ![]() ![]() Ever since I bought the Kobo Aura One ebook reader, I’ve used Calibre to convert some of my Kindle books to read on the Aura One’s larger screen. I use Calibre to convert ebooks to various formats. I don’t love the Calibre ebook software-it’s exactly as clunky as you’d expect an open-source cross-platform software project to be-but it’s free and it works, and that counts for an awful lot. If you want to know at a glance what your Mac is up to, it’ll take care of you. IStat Menus is utterly configurable, so you can make it as whizzy or non-whizzy as you like. I also monitor the speed of my storage and how much processing power my iMac is using, largely to keep an eye out for unexpected slowdowns, which usually come courtesy of some helpful background process that’s trying to do something utterly unimportant to my task at hand. As a podcaster I’m trying to control the amount of data I’m using when I’m recording audio or video with other people, and iStat’s network module lets me see how much data my Mac is transferring at any given time. I used to pooh-pooh the idea of keeping little whizzy graphs in my Mac’s menu bar, but in the past year I’ve found value in the $18 iStat Menus 5. I may end up paying an extra $50/month for unlimited data, but at least I’ll be well equipped with information about how we’re using our broadband before I get to that point. So far, what I’ve learned is that my kids are indeed the voracious Netflix and YouTube streamers that I knew them to be. I’m even able to tell PeakHour my data cap and it can give me a sense of how ahead (or behind) we are month to month. To get the best idea of usage, I need to leave it running all the time, but since I have a Mac Mini that’s running all the time, that fits the bill. I discovered the $6 PeakHour 3, which talks to my SNMP-enabled home router to display charts of our data usage. So I’m trying to figure out how we’re using that data, but it’s very hard to get a good idea of where the data is going, and when. And it turns out that my family uses about 1.1TB per month on average. Recently Comcast informed me that my home Internet data would be capped at 1TB per month. I’m not going to restate the stuff mentioned in those stories-yep, still writing this in BBEdit-but here are a few Mac apps that I’ve come to appreciate this past year. I’ve detailed my very favorite apps here in 2014 and Dan and I praised more apps last year. Note: This story has not been updated for several years. Our favorites: This year’s Mac app discoveries
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