Category Archives: Mac

Another reason to hate iTunes

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Like I needed more… It’s 3am and pretty quiet. I realise that the external HD is noisy. Check that Spotlight hasn’t decided to index it (not allowed to) and realise it’s that damn iTunes again. Pause playing the music, drive stops. Repeat to be sure. Go do some searching and fine instances of this very complaint going back to 2004. SIX YEARS. That far back people were complaining and yes there are noisy drives but if I am playing one track why can’t iTunes work out that lifting that track in one go into RAM to play would make total sense instead of dragging it off 100kb at a time? It’s not rocket science is it for a computer to cache some data? And it’s not even that much. But then iTunes is no ordinary shop is it?

If you ever wrote any code that is in iTunes you should be skinned, rolled in salt and have the crystals washed off with hot water. Daily.

Volumes do not exist

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cd Volumes

ls

Carrie Ext-1 Mac2 Play

Play is the actual HD .
Carrie is an external HD but it is not attached. It is unplugged, not there, off.
Ext-1 is an external HD but it is not attached. It is unplugged, not there, off. It is actually called something else.
Mac2 is an external HD but it is not attached. It is unplugged, not there, off. I think this is what Carrie now is.

When I run Grand Perspective to see what space is occupied and by what it tells me that many gb of data is in /Volumes/Ext-1/ but it does not report both the drives, just that one and the name is still wrong. I can rollover the graphics in Grand Perspective (GP) and it will tell me the images and file names. So it’s not just saying “10gb” it lists every single image.

I can cd to Mac2 and it tells me the directory ‘d2′ is there. cd ext-1 and it says ‘Pictures’ is there. How? They don’t exist. Nothing is mapped, shared, connected. I cann0t cd Carrie because it is not attached. But I can to 2 that do not exist? Weird.

Now, were this Leopard I could in some odd way begin to think it could be remembering old data. But this is Snow Leopard, clean install. No archiving. So it is obviously not a clean install because SL has knowledge of something it could not remember? Or it stores and then uses information on external HD – why load old names?

Reboot.

It does exactly the same thing.

From GP, open an image file. It does – a long list of them in Finder. Get Info /Volumes/Ext-1/Pictures/2006/10-10-2006 (it’s a pigeon). But how?

Here’s the problem – if I set up Time Machine it’s going to copy that which does not exist. And even if it does not, why is Mac OS 10.6.1 not getting a clue and removing that which does not exist? Time to go look (again) in the Apple forums for the solution to (yet another) problem caused by Apple’s very own operating system.

The next day … the answer … http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=92023

Firefox cpu

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1. Open Firefox
2. Open Activity Monitor
3. Go to http://wordpress.com, let it fully load.
4. Watch Firefox CPU. If you do nothing the usage is around 1-3%
5. Go to http://google.com. I see 1-3% usage.
6. Go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/ I see usage of 1-35%

Safari is 5-40%. I assume it’s that single line of latest news.

Snitching on Mail.

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I installed Little Snitch on the mini for amusement. It requires a restart. On that restart LS shows Mail.app wanting to make several outgoing connections.
I don’t use Mail, I’ve never used Mail, I’ve never run it, I would never run it. I have never given it permission to run, it’s not in my login items. So wtf is it doing running? Is this one of those ‘Apple knows best’ moments? I probably can’t install it – like so many other Apple apps it seems – but I’m certainly out now for a way to cripple it into submission – it will not connect.

One more step away from G

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NewsGator just let FeedDemon and NetNewsWire be free. No ‘lite’ versions, fully free.
There were a couple of programs I really missed from Windows and FeedDemon was one. I forget just why NNW did not appeal, but the cost was one aspect. I’d already bought FD so paying made my judgement harsher. But now it’s free.
The shared items bit in Google Reader I do not like. There is the whole privacy thing with Google. There is also the fact that this astronomically rich company provide absolutely useless support – like trying to make stone sweat blood. I use gmail and google reader. Having NNW free means I can move feed reading away from Google. It also means I have just one app for feeds and podcasts.
The data that Google take in return from this being free is what Newsgator now get. I trust them more.

Speed support at red-sweater

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I’m reinstalling and re-registering apps I’ve bought. So far so good. Marsedit I download but I can’t register it because I bought the version before the latest (which I can use / am allowed to use). After some hunting for my reg code I decide I’ll email red-sweater to see if there is something I can do.
I send the email at 11:36pm and SIX minutes later I get a reply and the reg code I need. 6 minutes. And it’s not automated – how do I know? I send a thank you email right back and I get a great response there too. If support is a factor when buying a product then Daniel Jalkut has both. Excellent.

Another hot macbook

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Charging laptop while working, get distracted, leave laptop open and apps running.
Come back sometime later, see all is still running, close because I’m going out / working on the other machine.
Return a couple of hours later. Machine unresponsive, light off, it is really hot. Not localised underneath because it’s all of the underneath and even the keys are too warm. Hold power button down to restart. Fan kicks in when it starts and smc says the temp is 65.
This happened twice now. So:
- do not charge with apps running
- only charge when shut down or when actually being used
I’m sure someone will say this is nonsense, but that same person can describe exactly why this is doing it.

(And this isn’t anti-mac, it’s just saying what is happening)

Repair and defrag.

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So last night I repaired the OS using the original CD, I removed all those junk files which programs leave behind when you uninstall them, I reset various caches and “optimised” (defragged) the system. All those things I did on the mac because it’s getting slower. Funny, Mac users will tell Windows users that there is no registry to worry about, program uninstall completely, that defragging does not exist in the World Of Apple, that it stays fast. So why do programs like Cocktail and Onyx have daily weekly and monthly scripts? “Just works”. Yeah, right.
(So if this does not work I’ll reinstall Tiger)