Intel Rumors

The rumors are all over the place this morning about Apple talking to Intel. Who wants to bet that instead of running on Intel chips they are in talking to Intel about manufacture their chips? Yes, yes...darwin runs on x86. I know that. I just don't see how a move to Intel chips could possibly help in the short or long term when you take into account binary incompatibly. What is Apple's biggest chip problem? Supply. Has been for quite some time... Update: Sanity prevails!

Fedora on a mini

RedHat has an article up on how to dual-boot Fedora Core 4 Test 3 with OS X on a mini. Honestly, I don't see the attraction with installing a linux distribution on mac hardware, but I like that there is support for the PPC chipset in Fedora (and other dists).

(via TUAW)

10.4.1

I learn from John Gruber's Linked List (the name still cracks me up) that 10.4.1 has arrived.

I Double Dog Dare® you to install it...

Update: (again via the Linked List)

What happened is that some third-party plug-ins were causing Mail to crash on 10.4.0, so for 10.4.1, Apple disabled all Mail plug-ins — including SpamSieve, which according Tsai caused no known conflicts. Sort of an “If it’s not our baby, why not throw it out with the bath water?” solution.

TextEdit tips

Though not updated for Tiger, this page of tips on using TextEdit is a nice reference for anyone who uses it regularly, or would if they knew all that it was capable of. I found the page when Googling around for ways to create a page break. This page had the ninja tip I needed.

Safari the Slug

It's been a hint at many a mac site, but I think it bears repeating. If Safari is spending more time spinning a rainbow pizza than rendering pages for you, try the Reset Safari option in the Safari menu. You will lose your history, your cookies, your google searches, and probably your first-born. But it worked for me.

Spotlight indexing

Spotlight is really frustrating to run on a Mac with a slower hard drive, such as an iBook. It doesn't seem like you can schedule the indexing at all, which means that it can really slow down the system with disk thrashing when you are trying to do something else. There is no UI that says "index less frequently" or "only index when inactive for nn minutes".

Other things I learned today:

• You can turn off indexing for a partition with "mdutil".
• You can reindex a partition with "mdutil".
• The indexes don't take up that much space. With ~33 Gigs filled, my index was taking up about .4 Gig.
• If you restrict indexing of a directory, the space that was used the first time is not regained until you delete the index and start over.
• The first estimates of how long it will take to index are wildly wrong. My estimates went from 15 hours to 20 hours to 3 hours. Then it took an hour.

iTunes 4.8 (Tiger Only)

iPod Lounge notices that 4.8 is out. As before, I wonder what it breaks...

Update: Thanks to an oh-so-kind commenter, we hear word that 4.8 is not Tiger only. Some small bug fixes and the ability to buy videos (although it seems as though for now most are freebies that come with songs) tag along with some new bugs.

Messing around with launchd

Mac Geekery reports on how to completely customize the actions of your Mac by mucking about with launchd. Either Very Good Stuff or Very Bad Stuff depending on your plist skilz and the size of your cojones.

Upgrading to Tiger: probably OK to just update

Following Chuq's lead, I upgraded to Tiger using a standard upgrade instead of the safer "back up your data, format your hard drive, install fresh, install all your apps again, and restore your data". It worked fine.

I did follow the piece of advice on MacInTouch that said: "I would recommend anyone who wants to upgrade install MacOS X 10.4 on a volume which has Mac OS X 10.3 and Xcode 1.5 installed first run the uninstall-devtools.pl on the target volume to remove Xcode 1.5. This will cause an install rather than an upgrade to Xcode 2.0 under MacOS X 10.4." That seemed prudent and probably caused no visible damage.

Major, major automatically-downloading-and-executing widget warning

This very scary article shows that Apple screwed up really, really badly on security in Tiger. If you have execution of "safe" content automatically displayed, someone can push a widget into your widget set, and you can't remove it. I have turned off that setting in Safari (and every other browser I use) since day 1, but it looks like this person is right.

If Apple is trying to compete with Microsoft on security cluelessness, Cupertino just moved a few miles closer to Redmond.

Flowers?

A database of the meaning of flowers?

cat /usr/share/misc/flowers | grep -i ivy

An Emacs for Tiger

Over at the other blog (plug, plug), I posted a link to a build of GNU Emacs for Tiger that my friend John made.

Tiger tired of Classic?

Well, Tiger's arrived and the first machine it got installed on here is my wife's dual-processor G4. One of the main things she uses it for is Photoshop -- specifically, running Photoshop 6.0.1, not Photoshop CS. (CS is slow, and she doesn't feel like paying $BIGNUM for something she doesn't need.) Which means she's been running under Classic for a long time now. Here's the odd thing: unlike some folks we've not had any problems starting Classic, but Tiger's Finder seems to have decided that the Photoshop 6.0.1 application is actually a Script Editor document. Re-installing Photoshop worked for a while, but now the same thing's happening again. A get info on the file shows it as being an application, but for some reason the Finder wants to open it in Script Editor. Anyone got any clues?