Yes! I hate(d) the keyboard volume control because it’s such a pain to get it just right. Check this out: Macworld | Mac OS X Hints | Use fine-grain volume control in 10.5
The only problem is that I get cramps doing this on my MBP. I have to use FN-OPT-SFT-F[4|5] to get there. Still cool though.
Hot on the heels of Mac announcing that there’s going to be a an SSD option to their Mac Air, comes the news that EMC is going to offer SSD’s on the Symmetrix: StorageMojo » EMC’s new flash drives. Can’t wait to see what a fully loaded all SSD Symm runs for. My guess is the GNP of Guatemala. However, it should smoke just about anything out there. Finally a good use for all those fancy 4 and 8Gb Fibre HBA’s everyone’s been buying.
Yes! Finally a place to find the newest and bestest quicklook plugins: http://www.qlplugins.com/
My personal favorites so far:
Folder Viewer (now you can see what’s in a folder, not just an icon for the folder)
Zip Viewer (peek into your zip, rar, tar, etc. files without opening them)
The only thing I wish I had was one that let you look at more and older M$ formats. Particularly PowerPoint. Why is it that PPT files are roughly 50/50 on being able to be previewed with quicklook? That’s the format that I use it the most for.
Ever since I loaded up leopard on my mac, I’ve run into a strange issue. Whenever I log in to my account, which was transfered from my original powerbook over to the mac pro via tiger and then upgraded to leopard, I see a long period of disk activity that slows my box down to a crawl for the first 5-10 minutes after logging in. I’ve tried using top to see what’s going on, but all I can find is that a “find” command is being issued by someone. Well, while sitting on a plane ride to Minneapolis today, I stumbled across a shell script I had downloaded a while back. It is a solaris script to run Dtrace and report back on all of the disk activity. I thought for sure that this would help me figure out what’s going on. Well, when I fired it up, it first complained that I wasn’t root. A quick “su -” later and I ran it again. That got me a “: probe description io:genunix::start does not match any probes”. Doh! Being the nerd boy I proceeded to see if there’s a list of the probes that are supported to see if I could modify this script. At a minimum this was going to take me through the rest of the flight.
I was wrong.
Apple developer tools provide you with a cool GUI dtrace under the aptly named /Developer/Applications/Instruments.app!
So, I fired this guy up and figured that it would take another hour or so to figure this thing out. Nope, the very first thing it does is provide you with a wizard where you can select some predefined trace packages. One of them is called “File Activity”. Select that and then make sure to change your selection to “All Processes”
Hit the record button and Voila! All the disk IO activity measurements you’d ever want. Now it’s just a matter of tracing back the culprit and I should have this nailed down quickly. More on this as it develops.
Take a read through all of the “fixes” that they are focusing on in this release patch. Maybe this will make leopard as stable as tiger?
Mac OS X 10.5.2 update to bring endless list of fixes | MacScoop:
OK - So it’s the new year. Time to get back to doing this stuff. Here’s a cool tidbit. Just started using this thing and it looks like it’s going to be a good time sucker and also quite possibly OOTT. I’ll post back on that later. Check this article out.
NetNewsWire For OSX is now free!:
NewsGator announced on Wednesday the release of NetNewsWire 3.1. More importantly for many users, the company will be making the RSS reader available to all customers for free.