Very useful Apple tips

MacOSXtips.co.uk has published some very handy command line tips for customising OS X.

My favourites:

5. defaults write -g NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode -bool TRUE
Sets expanded save dialogs as default (showing column/list view of folders rather than a drop down menu). Replace TRUE with FALSE to reverse.

9. defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify TRUE
Skip disk image verification. Potentially risky, use with disk images from trusted sources. Replace TRUE with FALSE to reverse.

11. defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType none
Disables the unexpectedly quit dialog that normally appears when an application crashes. Replace “none” with “prompt” to enable again.

Is Apple Mail running slow? Speed it up

Tim Gaden of Hawk Wings fame (and formerly of APC X-Factor fame, sniffle) has documented an excellent tip to speed up Apple Mail.

It involves optimising the SQLite database Apple Mail uses to store indexes and subject lines of emails.

You can check your current ‘envelope archive’ size by entering this in the terminal:

ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index

Then to optimise it (cleans out stuff that has been marked for deletion but not actually deleted, defragments the structure, etc):

sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index vacuum;

Then check your envelope archive size again to see the results…

ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index

It compacted my envelope archive down from 55MB to 50MB — not a huge increase, but the speed difference was dramatic.

In particular, my ‘sent mail’ folder which had been taking 10 – 15 seconds to open (8,000 items) now only takes two or three seconds.

Read the full post and many informative comments here.

Why I’m not happy with my Hitachi Travelstar 160GB notebook drive

I am a sucker for more of everything when it comes to computers, so I had to upgrade my MacBook Pro’s hard drive to 160GB — the biggest hard drive available at retail. (Of course, soon after I ordered it, 200GB drives started becoming available and Hitachi announced 250GB notebook drives… bastards).

Anyway, it’s a Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 (product ID HTS541616J9SA00) … and just a word of warning to other potential buyers: this drive is NOISY. Unlike all the other drives I’ve had in my previous PowerBooks and MacBook Pro, which have either been Fujitsu or Seagate, this one sounds like a desktop hard drive of old. Do anything remotely data intensive and my lovely quiet notebook starts making frantic ‘da-dadada-da-dadada-dadada’ noises.

Also the Mac tech who installed it for me (Tim Gudex) told me that the air hole on the drive that is boldly marked “do not cover” (presumably to allow the air in the drive to contract and expand with heat) is placed exactly where the MacBook Pro’s hard drive cable has to go. So he had to fudge it a little bit by using some tiny foam blocks to lift the cable up over the hole.

Despite all that, I’m not entirely dissatisfied with the drive. It seems fast enough and I now have more than enough space to install Vista onto the machine and dual-boot it with OS X (and keep ample TV shows etc on the drive).

However, next time I upgrade I think I will stick with Seagate which generally seem to be quiet and reliable notebook drives. In fact, I would have bought Seagate this time except that their 160GB SATA drive was quite a lot more expensive than the Hitachi one 😦

Lexmark e120n: 20ppm mono laser printer with networking for $163.94 NEW

Is it normal to get this excited about a laser printer?

I’ve had my eye on the Lexmark e120n for some time now, and I ordered it on a whim a couple of days ago. (I got mine through EnByte because it looked like a reputable online store and had cheap delivery.)

I received it at work today and when I got it home, I unpacked and installed it in three minutes flat while my lasagna was reheating in the microwave. (Home cooked by Kate, special treat for me, no McCains in sight here…)

Anyway, the e120n is a 20ppm mono laser printer with an ethernet print server built in!

So I’ve connected it up to my Billion ADSL modem/router and now I can print wirelessly from anywhere in the house.

John C. Dvorak explains how he trolls Mac users

Ah, you gotta love this guy. He’s been trolling the tech community since tech journalism was invented, and people still fall hook, line and sinker for him every time.

Here’s him explaining how he earns tidal-waves of page impressions every time he writes something about Macs.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=8438149669860398431&hl=en

The problem with Podcasts

I’ve really been getting into podcasts in the last few weeks.

This epiphany has come about for two reasons:

– I got my iPod’s battery replaced ($US46.99 including return shipping from USA which equated to $A70… a $30 saving on the Apple service) so now I have 12 hours of playback time again rather than half an hour, and;

– I moved out of my house in Rozelle so I now have a slightly longer bus-trip home. Living in Rozelle I was getting off the bus before I got on it in the city, so I never had time to listen to podcasts.

However, I’m finding that the only podcasts that are really worth listening to are those produced by professional broadcasters. There’s some terrific ones at the ABC:

– AM
– PM
– Enough Rope [you can also watch online now]
– Background Briefing
– All in the mind
– The Health Report
– The Law Report
– The Media Report
– Life Matters

And outside of the ABC, Tony Martin’s Get This podcast is very funny.

However, some of the amateur ones are just abjectly terrible.

According to iTunes, Linux News Log Podcast is the most popular podcast about Linux. I listened to the latest episode (#94) and gave up after three minutes, at which point the host hadn’t said anything about Linux yet. In fact, it was so bad I feel compelled to offer this transcript of the waffle:

The Linux news log podcast episode number 94, for Tuesday, the 4th of July, 2006. Welcome to the show everybody.

Linux newslog. Your source for Linux and open source news on the net. L-l-live to the hard drive from Phoenix, Arizona.

Linux newslog is a proud member of the tech podcast network. If it’s tech, it’s here. [Some metal music]

Hey hey everybody, how’s it going. You are listening to Linux newslog, I am your host coming to you almost live from Phoenix, Arizona, here in studio BR 2. This is the fourth of July, can you believe it, huh? The fourth of Ju—-ly.

And I’m here at home doing a podcast. Well, partially because I don’t like going out when there’s lots of opportunity for other people to be complete idiots, and here in the states, if you’re not from the US, here in the United States, the fourth of July everybody is out being drunk being an idiot.

Almost everybody. Anyway. A significant proportion of people, so, the safest thing to do is to stay home which I am doing right now and conversing with my lovely audience here in studio BR 2.

I have, uh, it’s been a while since I put a show out, partially because I have been reloading my computer, um, disaster has struck again, so, um, yeeeesh, that’s been goin’ on, everything is fairly back to normal, so we’re back to recording and doing the podcast.

Also, while I’ve been redoing things I’ve decided to change things up a little bit in how I do the show. It’s now 32 bit sample rates floating point, and uh, 192KHz per second sample rates. No, it’s 32 bits sample bits, the sample depth is a 32 bit float, and the sample rate is 192KHz per second.

It sounds a little different in my headphones, it’s quite a bit clearer than before… I thought 96KHz was clear; this is incredibly clear… uh… and quite a significant bump in the noise floor and just the depth and clarity, it’s incredible, it’s like I’m talking to myself, into my own ears.

To me, that last sentence said it all.

I’m sure this will offend the host Adrian Bacon, but it’s not intended to. I’m sure his podcast is great. It’s the most popular Linux podcast on iTunes after all. It’s just that I couldn’t be bothered ploughing through the waffle up-front to hear whether what came later was any good.

I’m a huge proponent of the web as a self-publishing medium; that’s how I got my start in journalism, but I reckon the difference between written blogs and recorded podcasts is that it’s easy to skip over the boring stuff in blogs, but you can’t do that as easily on the bus while listening to a podcast.

MacBook Pro envy

My friend and colleague Tim Gaden has just bought himself a MacBook Pro for work. I am, of course, not the slightest bit envious.

He writes in his post about it, “Repairing permissions on the old one took 118 seconds for a 54GB hard drive. This one does 92GBs in 62 seconds. I’m a happy boy.”

See, that is what we really need; a computer that can repair the faults in its file system twice as fast. I’m not sour. Oh no.

It reminds me of the Intel Australia launch of the Core Duo CPU I went to recently. Their real-life, on-stage example of why you should upgrade to a Core Duo was because you could virus-scan a giant PowerPoint presentation while encoding video at the same time with no slowdown.

I hung my head in shame that the PC industry had reached the stage that faster virus scanning had become a selling point for a PC.

That said, it did give me a sort of sanctimonious-bastard sense of satisfaction a Mac zealot gets because he doesn’t have to run any anti-virus at all.

See, it doesn’t matter that my relatively new PowerBook runs on a bog-slow, outdated G4 processor. I don’t have to do virus scanning. Though it does sometimes frustrate me how long it can take to repair permissions.

Oh wait.

The day another Vista feature died (and I stumbled on a scoop)

It’s one of the biggest thrills a journalist can experience: stumbling upon a scoop of worldwide relevance.

You hear a corporate executive say something in the midst of a stream of marketing fluff, and your adrenalin starts pumping… did I just hear right? Did other journalists in the room pick up on this? Are there any other journalists in the room? How can I get this story online right away?

That happened to me at the Intel Developer Conference in San Francisco yesterday. It was a small fact dropped by a Microsoft exec that was a red-hot poker: a blow for Intel, the PC hardware industry, the Mac community and PC end-users who were eagerly awaiting the release of Microsoft’s next-generation operating system, Windows Vista.

This story was going to be big. Its ramifications were:

• Microsoft was removing another key feature from the next generation generation Windows Vista before shipping
• Buyers of the new Intel-based Macs who had been hoping they could dual-boot Windows and OS X on the one PC would find out for the first time that they won’t be able to… ever.
• The whole PC industry would lose a major incentive to move on from the 20-year-old PC architecture onto a new modern platform
• Intel was getting a public slap in the face from Microsoft at its own worldwide Intel Developer Conference, with Microsoft saying it was putting the brakes on adopting one of Intel’s key technologies at a critical moment.

Why Mac Mini sucks, or rather, it doesn’t

MacWorld in the US has posted a great analysis of why you shouldn’t assume the new Mac Mini is crap simply because Apple has bumped up the price and included an ‘inferior’ Intel GMA950 integrated graphics chip.

Personally, I want one of these to use at work. No, the graphics won’t be powerful enough to run Vista in its full ‘glory’, but won’t most of us want to turn off most of the visual effects once we realise that they don’t add anything much to Windows’ usability? And besides I’d rather run OS X and use ACP’s Citrix server to access Outlook.

My only problem is one Java application that is core to our editorial/production workflow that we use at work, which DOES come in a Mac version but isn’t made available from the IT people 😦

Steve Jobs bloopers reel

It’s enough to make an Apple PR person weep. (If you hadn’t noticed I’ve really discovered video blogging this weekend…)