Posts Tagged ‘Mac’
07 Feb
Ein Freund und ich haben kürzlich unsere MacBooks getauscht. Er bekam mein 2006er 15″ MacBook Pro und ich im Austausch dafür die kleinere, aktuelle 13″-Version des MBP. Bis dahin ist das Ganze ja noch nicht wirklich spannend… 
Lange Rede, kurzer Sinn: ich habe in der Vergangenheit schon ein paar Mal Solid State Disks (SSD) im Einsatz gesehen und war vollkommen platt, wieviel mehr Geschwindigkeit die bei der alltäglichen Arbeit rausholen können. Beim Tausch der MBPs haben wir auch die Festplatten umgebaut. Ich habe meine 320 GB-Western-Digital-Festplatte (5400 rpm)
mit ins neue Gerät migriert, er hat seine 64 GB-SSD in das “alte” Gerät eingebaut.
Was soll ich sagen? Das alte MBP rennt damit wie ein Gaul auf Steroiden. Wir haben keine “echten” Benchmarks gefahren, aber: sein OS X war deutlich schneller hochgefahren als das mit dem aktuellen MacBook Pro der Fall war. Firefox benötigte auf dem 2.0-GHz-MBP mit SSD gerade mal 3 “Animiertes-Dock-Icon-Zeiteinheiten”, während das hübsche Icon beim 2.53-GHz-Modell immerhin 9 Mal durch die Gegend hüpfte, bis ich mal ein Firefox-Fenster zu sehen bekam.
Natürlich sind das keine wissenschaftlich fundierten Messungen, aber es beeindruckt ungemein. Jetzt weiß ich zumindest schon mal, worauf ich mal ein wenig spare — und hoffe auf fallende Preise im SSD-Markt. Die Intel X-25M mit 160 GB
sieht ganz brauchbar aus und ist mir schon von mehreren Seiten empfohlen worden.
Image: “My new buddie” by Fredrik Smedenborn. CC-licensed.
18 Jun
After you’ve all upgraded to Firefox 3, you might also want to try out the firefox-mac-pdf extension, too.
It displays PDFs “inline” (inside a browser window) instead of downloading and/or opening it in Preview.app or Adobe Reader. Great extension!
(via macosxhints, TUAW, and others…)
14 Feb
I use Monolingual from time to time to reconquer some of the hard disk space on my MacBook Pro (sorry, some parts of that post are in German). The tool has been quite helpful: hey, it gave me 2 more gigabytes for … spreadsheets! 
Note that using Monolingual is kind of messing around with Mac OS X system files — do it at your own risk. It may brake your system, shave your cat or crumble on your keyboard. You’ve been warned.
Nevertheless, some Mac applications really don’t like their languages to be stripped from the .app package! Keep in mind that you should never ever remove the English language (en) from applications as it may be used as a language default.
I couldn’t find a list with applications having trouble with Monolingual, therefore I try to compile one here. Feel free to post additions in the comments section below.
List of Mac OS X applications known to have some trouble after Monolingual was used:
- Almost all Adobe products (Acrobat, Creative Suite) for OS X. Acrobat needs to repair PDF browser preview and PDF printer. Repair process hangs. Updates don’t work anymore.
- Skype (version < 2.6). Crashes during start-up. Version 2.7.0.195 beta seems to work without any problems, though.
- Cyberduck. Crashes when trying to establish a SSH/SFTP connection. Needs to be re-installed.
- Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. Automatic (incremental) updates fail.
27 Jan
I always wondered what would happen if my backup disk I used for Leopard’s Time Machine feature ran out of space.
Yesterday I finally found out (and yes, I realized that it has been mentioned in the manual, also)…
As I have set up my backup partition on an external Firewire drive to exactly the same size as my hard disk inside the MacBook Pro (160 GB), that means that I’ve been producing about 60 GB of changing data since I installed Leopard and ran Time Machine for the first time in the end of November. Wow.
31 Dec
It’s the small things that make OS X so outstanding… such as this dialog box which appears when you perform software updates on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) running from battery power. Nice
11 Dec
Today I stumbled upon a blog post in Hawk Wing’s blog which was written in 2005 but is still up-to-date: even with the latest version of Mail.app included in Mac OS X Leopard, you are able to use multiple e-mail addresses for one POP or IMAP account.
Within the mail account settings you will have to provide a comma-separated list of your e-mail addresses (e.g. me@example.com, mickey@example.com, donald@example.com) and then you can choose the address you want to use as the sender’s address from a pop-down menu in the “New Message” window. Nice
More tips for Mail.app can also be found on Apple’s support pages.
11 Dec
When upgrading my Mac from Tiger to Leopard, I had to remove the Logitech Control Center software. It relied on the Application Enhancer (APE) and caused the famous blue-screen-after-installation. Leopards’ systems settings provide some basic functionality for correctly binding keys from a Windows keyboard, but I really missed some of LCC’s features (e.g. binding the middle mouse button in a UNIX-style way to the “paste” keyboard shortcut).
Logitech has since updated LCC to version 2.4.0 but unfortunately they didn’t get it completely right this time (again). The software seems to work fine on Leopard (you can bind your keys to whatever action you want and see the battery status of your wireless keyboard and mouse), but it breaks Growl’s display notification.
So far, removing the folder /Library/InputManagers/LCC Scroll Enhancer Loader (and a reboot) results in Growl working properly again and the key bindings still work, too. If anyone experiences problems with this solution, please post them in the comments.
(Thanks to the folks at the Growl forum for their help with this issue)
08 Nov
Well, just a few days ago I learned about a massive data loss bug that seems to have existed in OS X for quite a while: when you’re moving files from/to a volume (such as a mounted SMB share, a USB stick or a hard disk drive) and this volume suddenly gets unresponsive for whatever reason, the files you were moving are gone. Lost. Forever.
I just experienced a short (lasting only a few milliseconds) power outage at my home. Short enough for me to barely notice it, long enough for my external hard disk to power down and—guess what—being ungracefully unmounted.
I’m still quite lucky that the files I lost will be recoverable (even if it takes some effort and time). But nevertheless: a file system operation called “move” should copy and delete (cp && rm) with the word “and” representing a logical conjunction… So if copying fails (for whatever reason) it should definitely leave the original file in its place!
As Tom (who seems to have discovered that problem in the first place or at least made it public) wrote:
Apple, please FTFF […]
In contrast to my wish of Java 6 on the Mac: Java would be nice to have (perhaps in a few months, sometimes in Q1/2008). Losing data due to a buggy file system implementation is a serious problem which needs to be taken care of now!
Update (11/16/2007): The Mac OS X 10.5.1 update is said to fix this bug:
Addresses a potential data loss issue when moving files across partitions in the Finder.
I have verified the correct behaviour: moving a file now operates transactional: OS X copies the original file to the destination volume. When that volume is suddenly disconnected, a partial (corrupted) file remains on the destination volume but the fully intact original is still there. After being successfully copied (and only then!), the original file will be deleted.
07 Nov
13949712720901ForOSX
Oh mighty Steve! Give us Java 6 for OSX. Now. ASAP.
