While there is a hidden option that enables users to hide certain updates (control-click the update inside the App Store to reveal a hidden “Hide Update” option) this does not work for all updates. For instance, I can hide a Safari update, but not Apple Numbers, Pages or Keynote.
For this reason I have now disabled automatic updates altogether. Smart way to mishandle your clients Apple! Another slice of arrogant Apple pie from a company which knows what’s best for its customers.
Instead I’ll set up a personal weekly reminder to run Software Update manually.
]]>fontd
process was chewing up my CPU cores. In my case this seemed to coincide with using the final Presto Opera build (v12.16) but font related issues can be caused by just about any application.
OS X uses the Apple Type Server process, which stores commonly used fonts in a cache for quick access. These files can become corrupted and may affect system performance and stability. So sometimes it may be advisable to do a little maintenance. Here are two simple steps that may help sort font related issues.
Clearing the database is done by opening a terminal session and issuing the following command:
sudo atsutil databases -remove; atsutil server -shutdown
Apple Type Server will be restarted immediately by launchd
after running the command, so there’s no need to ping the server with
atsutil server -ping
Restart your computer immediately after performing this action.
To look for and delete any conflicting fonts, open Font Book, select all your fonts, right click and select “validate fonts” from the context menu. The result will show whether any fonts are giving you grief. You can delete the conflicting fonts but ensure that you don’t delete any required system fonts (which could make your system unstable.)
For more info, make sure you check out Kurt Lang’s very comprehensive article about OS X font management.
]]>Calibrating one screen is fairly straight forward with the right tools. Just follow the software wizard and you’re done in about 10 minutes. Calibrating two screens can be a little bit more tricky—especially if one of those screens is a laptop display.
I use the latest version of Eye-One Match (v3.6.3 as of this writing). Once figured out how to make the magic happen, it’s really a breeze. Follow these steps and you should be fine…
These steps work for me. I’m not saying it’s the only way to accomplish this, but it sure works for me.
If all is well, you should now have two displays with their own profiles, and your profile settings should look similar to this:
Aside from really enjoying catching up with relatives my highlights included:
Of course, such a short write up doesn’t really do justice to the wonderful experiences I had along the way. Some of the extraordinary and incredible encounters along the way are well deserving of their own account. All the people, scenery, architecture and the myriad of photographic opportunities…
I shall return.
]]>While having been very happy with Songbird overall, I have been concerned about Songbird’s slow performance with larger libraries.
For this project to survive this issue absolutely had to be addressed in upcoming versions. I realised that it would only be a matter of time before we’d see improvements—after all, Songbird is being built by a group of designers and developers that have previously worked on projects such as Winamp, Netscape, and Firefox, so I have quite a bit of confidence in its dev team.
It looks like the time is finally here: after reading the developer’s blog on the subject I installed their nightly build to check for myself. I’m happy to be able to report that performance has been greatly improved in the latest nightly build. So, as things stand, all will be well in the next stable version of the software (v1.9).
I’d like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to all the Songbird devs who make the magic possible—keep up the good work everyone.
This year’s line up included local acts Dubmarine and Chocolate Strings (both bands always manage to put up a great show). Dan Sultan was particularly animated on stage and a definite favourite with the female punters who enjoyed watching him move as much as they enjoyed listening to him.
Comedians Shake-A-Speare, Kevin Kropinyeri and Sean Choolburra made the Dingo Shed rock with laughter, while Mark Sheppard continuously cracked up both young and old in the Black Dramatics venue with his “Chasing The Lollyman”.
It has almost become a tradition now for musicians to jam together on the last night of the festival. They are then joined by both traditional and contemporary dancers and makes for quite a show which is not to be missed.
All in all, another great festival, and I’m already looking forward to being back there next year. A big warm thank you to all who performed, danced and organised the event.
]]>An Apple store employee advised me that he considered there to be little noticeable difference between the two versions. I came to a very different conclusion having compared them side by side in store for nearly an hour.
While the menus probably would have been alright, a lot of text is already hard to read due to small font sizes used on many websites. As I didn’t feel like constantly squinting or getting rather close to the screen to read articles on these websites (interestingly enough, the Apple online store was one of the websites I found really hard to read) I opted for a regular screen instead.
So, if you need the extra real estate, by all means, knock yourself out with a 15″ hi-res screen. Otherwise, think very carefully about getting this. If at all possible try before you buy.
]]>Wanting to make a near complete switch from desktop to laptop for all of my work, I decided to wait for the faster and relatively cheaper machines to come out.
After buying and swapping a new hard drive, my machine now is a 15″ 2.66 Ghz i7/8gb RAM/7200 rpm (16mb cache) beauty that deals with virtualisation just fine while running every other application that I throw at it.
]]>www.google.com.au
for Australian users). This can be inconvenient for web developers as it can be useful to be able to check a site’s ranking in search results in a different version of the Google site.
Well, without hardly any effort at all, you can tell your browser to stop being automatically redirected to your local Google site:
1. Open your browser
2. Clear your cookies in your browser
3. Allow your browser to accept cookies
4. Navigate to: www.google.com/ncr
5. You should now be able to use any Google site you please
127.0.0.1
). Everything is fine until you install virtualisation software such as VMware’s Fusion to fight IE’s dodgy rendering issues. Of course you prefer Fusion to recognise all your locally mapped DEV sites, but you can’t simply tell the virtualised Windows environment to use 127.0.0.1
since this will simply point back towards itself.
Suppose you have set up a virtual host for a site called sample.dev
. This virtual host allows you to use URLs such as http://sample.dev/about-us/our-team.html
Now you want to be able to use that same virtual host in your virtualised environment (=guest environment). You’re just a few simple steps away from making this work for you.
To make all this a little easier, I prefer to use a different loopback address than the standard 127.0.0.1
. My preferred address is: 10.0.0.101
. I’ll explain why I use this address later on.
Ensure your sample.dev
site is configured in your local hosts
using the 10.0.0.101
address file as follows:
10.0.0.101 sample.dev
10.0.0.101 another-site.dev
10.0.0.101 yet-another-site.dev
We’ll use the local IP address to bridge the guest and host environments. Please note that you can use any local IP address available to you (ie, not yet in use or assigned).
Next, we’ll add the same lines to the host
file of the guest environment: locate the file (windows/system32/drivers/etc
on XP) and duplicate the Mac host file entries:
10.0.0.101 sample.dev
10.0.0.101 another-site.dev
10.0.0.101 yet-another-site.dev
Now that we have configured the host(s)
files on both the guest and host environments all we have left to do is create the actual bridge for these environments. We do this by adding an ifconfig
directive to our system by using launchd
or rc.local
launchd
Introduced in OS X 10.4, launchd
is a flexible way to start/stop/edit processes. To put it to our use, we’d create a plist
entry in /Library/LaunchDaemons/
We do this by opening a terminal
window and typing:
sudo touch /Library/LaunchDaemons/ifconfig.plist
Next, open the file we just created in a text editor and add the following:
<plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>Label</key> <string>ifconfig</string> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>/sbin/ifconfig</string> <string>lo0</string> <string>alias</string> <string>10.0.0.101</string> <string>netmask</string> <string>255.255.255.0</string> </array> <key>RunAtLoad</key> <true/> </dict> </plist>
Finally, save and close the file.
rc.local
The rc.local
file runs in the background at system start up. While deprecated and essentially replaced in Leopard by the more flexible launchd
, it still can be used to launch processes.
rc.local
can be found at /etc/rc.local
. If you’re running a more recent system installation, chances are that you’ll have to create this file as OS X has not created this file by default since version 10.4.
You can create the file by typing the following in your terminal window:
sudo touch /etc/rc.local
Now, open the file we just created in a text editor and add the following:
ifconfig lo0 inet 10.0.0.101 netmask 255.255.255.0 alias
You may need to reboot both the hosted and the hosting environment in order to have these changes come into effect.
Thanks to Rob Sanheim for his tips on the subject.
code
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