Monday, May 23, 2005
Friday, May 20, 2005
Monday, May 16, 2005
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.
Saturday, May 14, 2005
TextEdit tips
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
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.
Monday, May 09, 2005
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
launchd
. Either Very Good Stuff or Very Bad Stuff depending on your plist skilz and the size of your cojones.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
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.
Saturday, May 07, 2005
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.