I had nothing to do with that, I swear…

Originally uploaded by eikon805.

Andy from the BOL forums posted this link to Super OS X Menubar Items. So, I thought I’d post what I’ve got, and ask what you guys can’t live without in your menubar.

1. Gizmo Project - Keep those cell phone bills down! Better than Skype, imho.

2. Adium - Since I use both Yahoo! Messenger (for work) and AIM/iChat for personal, it helps to have them combined into one happy program. Trust me, you’ll want to go with the default iChat options for sound… not the Adium sounds. Seriously.

3. WoW Status - This is an unlimited trial version that lets you know how crowded your favorite WoW server is. For a small fee, you can watch as many servers as you want, and also have it tell you when the wait time is low, or if the server is down, etc. Very nerdy (and useful!).

4. SMARTReporter - Make sure your hard drive is running all happy-like.

5. Gmail Notifier - Probably my favorite and most used item.

6. Synergy - I love this. Control iTunes from the menubar, so you never have to switch around applications to change tracks. Also displays what artist/track/album is playing as the songs change, in a semi-transparent window that pops up in the lower left of the screen. Worth the $15.

Of course, the little VPN icon is there for those days when I’ve got to phone it in. Missing from the group shot is the iScrobbler icon for Last.fm.

In yesterday’s edition of I, Cringely, PBS writer Robert Cringley wrote that he thinks it makes sense for Apple to buy the floundering Blockbuster. His plan is relatively simple:

Take your Video-out iPod to Blockbuster, drop it in a kiosk dock then download from the local xServe your choice of 50,000 movies. You can rent the movie or buy it and you can even choose the resolution, which may or may not affect the final price. Take the iPod home, drop it in the dock attached to your TV and watch the movie. H.264 decoding takes place in the iPod in hardware.

That sounds like a very pleasant idea, except for one thing: The reason Blockbuster is losing money is because… wait for it… PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO LEAVE THEIR HOUSES.

Why leave your house, go to Blockbuster, and plug your iPod in when you can do one of the following:

Get Netflix and have the movie delivered to your house.
Wait two months and TiVo it.
Bittorrent.
Vongo

If Blockbuster really wants to save itself, they should make some deals with the major movie houses and have movies available for download off of their website in multiple formats. That way, they won’t have to tether themselves to one company (read: Apple).

Someone on the Buzz Out Loud Flickr group said they installed Front Row on a older Mac (meaning, not one of the more recent iMacs). When it first came out, I noticed a lot of people talking about doing this, but I never got around to it myself. Has anyone actually tried this? What were the results for the long term? Let me know and I’ll give it a try.

Link to one of the download sites.