Tag: software

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GrandPerspective for Mac, WinDirStat for Windows – Visualizing Disk Usage

If you’ve ever wondered “Where did all my disk space go?”, a visual disk usage tool can answer that question in minutes.

On macOS, GrandPerspective has been a go-to for years. It scans your drive and displays a colorful treemap—each rectangle represents a file, sized by how much space it takes. Big blocks reveal large files instantly, whether it’s a forgotten video export or a massive cache folder.

On Windows, the closest match is WinDirStat. It works the same way: scan a drive, see a treemap, and drill down into directories. It also adds a handy file-type legend and a directory tree so you can clean up directly from the interface.

Both tools are free, open source, and lightweight. For moderately technical users, they’re faster and more insightful than manually poking through folders—and they make the “what’s eating my disk?” problem almost fun to solve.

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VisualPing.io

Do you ever need to check if a website changes? I use an automated site checker for this such as visualping.io. What’s this useful for?:

  • If you’re watching a product’s availability on a site, for example to buy a hard-to-find item such as a popular game console.
  • If you need to see if data or text changes on sites for your job, for whatever information is contained on those pages; this could be for data analysis or competitive research.
  • If you have your own website and want to see if it goes down for any reason.

There are probably many more reasons to check websites. Visualping and other sites make money by having you pay if you need checks more frequently than every day. There used to be many PC-installed software tools for this purpose, but this has largely moved to the cloud, which I think makes sense for simplicity and ease of use.