If you’re like me, you’ve probably run into the problem of having your Mac’s screen dim while watching a long video. Or while you’re trying to demonstrate something, like software or a cool new data visualization tool.

Caffeine is a freeware software application that solves this problem by placing a tiny coffee cup in the menu bar that you can click on to keep your Mac awake for longer periods of time.

Just click to fill the coffee cup up with coffee, and you’ll be able to sit across the room and watch a DVD without having to touch the keypad every 5 minutes.

App Size

At 240 KB, Caffeine is a super-light app that won’t drag down your ability to run other processes (although if you leave it on, it will obviously drain your battery).

Download Caffeine for Mac

You can download Caffeine Mac App here (link is from Lightware software, Caffeine’s development team).

Turning Caffeine off and On

When you want your Mac to stay awake, simply click on the coffee cup and it will fill with awesome black coffee. And when you want to turn it off, just click the mug again, and the caffeine will disappear, giving your tired computer a much-needed break.

From a usability point of view, this simple on/off system makes Caffeine one of the simplest apps ever (binary sweetness).

I use this handy thing every day, so I figured I should probably let others know about it. Enjoy with a cup of real coffee.

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Tech Blogger from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online at @caseorganic.

If you currently use them, RSS feeds are a great way to accumulate timely information from reliable and influential sources. RSS feeds are one of the best ways to keep up on social trends, new tech gagets, people, and business ideas. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, there’s a 3.75 minute Commoncraft Video called RSS Feeds in Plain English.

One of the most useful ways I’ve been able to use RSS feeds has been through the use of an RSS aggregator as a search engine. My favorite platform to use is NewsFire (click to download) for Mac, but other RSS readers exist for Windows, Linux and Gmail.

The best part about Newsfire is that it has a search feature at the bottom right corner of the screen. The search tool allows many blog posts to be searched through at the same time.

This search feature can be used to search through all aggregated RSS feeds.

Categorizing Data:

Newsfire makes it easy to categorize data into groups. I chose Lifehacking-type blogs, Tech News, Design News, SEO, Marketing, Business Development, Usability/Architecture, Local Portland Groups, and Mail/Personal. I grabbed mail my mail from Gmail and my @caseorganic Twitter ID from Summize.

The only limitation is that you cannot rearrange the categories. This will hopefully probably be fixed with NewsFire’s next release.

The key to using RSS as a Search Engine is going out on the web and finding the best sources that aggregate the best data, and then storing it all in your NewsFire feedcapture device. Then, wait for the data to accumulate. Go to NewsFire –> Preferences –> Feeds, and set “Delete items” to “Never”. If you use Spotlight, you can enable indexing of content so that you can use Spotlight to search your feeds as well.

With this structure in place, I can search my RSS reader for “local SEO”, to check news related to these terms. Another option for maxxing out your RSS reader is to subscribe to Twitter topic feeds via Summize. That way, you not only get the topics that are being blogged about, but what everyone in the world is saying about those topics.

Introducing Fiddler

What is Fiddler?

Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.

Fiddler is freeware and can debug traffic from virtually any application, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and thousands more.

You can download Fiddler here.

Fiddler 2 is now available.

2 supports debugging HTTPS traffic, a richer extensibility model, and can by installed side-by-side with Fiddler 1.x if desired. Note that Fiddler 2 requires version 2.0 of the .NET Framework.