Here’s a screenshot of my dock…..
Currently, my dock consists of the following apps:
Firefox, iTunes, Mail.app, iCal, Chicken of the VNC, Roxio TiVo Transfer, SlingPlayer, AppFresh, Time Machine, Terminal, VisualHub, ImageWell, AppZapper, iShowU, Pixelmator, CSSEdit, Snapz Pro X, Cyberduck & NetNewsWire.
What’s in your dock?
I need to come up with a good backup strategy for backing up my Mac’s important data. I currently use Time Machine to backup my Mac however, I’d like to implement a remote backup strategy similar to what I’ve implemented on my Windows box. Right now, I’m looking into either using JungleDisk (Amazon S3) or rsync over ssh.
Anybody have any suggestions?
This week’s episode of the MacBreak Weekly turned me onto a great app called Monolingual. For those of you who don’t know, Monolingual is a small app which allows you to remove language files from your OS X install. In case my description isn’t good enough, here’s how the Monolingual website describes their software:
Monolingual is a program for removing unnecessary language resources from Mac OS X, in order to reclaim several hundred megabytes of disk space. It requires at least Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Panther) and also works on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).
I don’t know about you, but I use my computer in only one (human) language — English. And I’m willing to bet that you do too, albeit perhaps not English. So why do you have a bunch of localization files for the Mac OS X operating system filling up your hard drive? Enter Monolingual — a handy utility for reclaiming your space for more useful things… like international mp3 files, email or whatever you like.
The great thing about Monolingual has to do with the fact that it allows you to recapture a couple Gigabytes worth of disk space simply by removing language resources that you aren’t going to use! In my case, I was able to save ~1.9G worth of disk space by removing all language resources other then English and English (United States).
Word of caution: This app does remove files off of your machine so you should use it at your own risk. If I were you, I wouldn’t use the Architectures feature in Monolingual since it will remove files which are necessary to run Rosetta. Here’s a snip taken out Monolingual’s FAQ:
Q. Should I remove the non-Intel architectures on my Intel based Mac?
A. You can use Monolingual to remove non-Intel architectures for your installed applications (even if some of the applications are PowerPC-only; Monolingual is smart enough not to remove PPC forks if those are the only ones in the universal binary). However, you should not strip the System frameworks if you want to use Rosetta. Rosetta needs the PowerPC code for all frameworks used by the emulated application and if it can’t find it, you may see messages such as the following in the console:
/System/Library/Frameworks/Cocoa.framework/Versions/A/Cocoa:
mach-o, but wrong architecture
Default Screen:
Disk Space Before:
Removing Languages:
Monolingual Finished:
Disk Space After:
Update 02/22/07: Loweded Wookie was kind enough to reply to this post and provide me with a explanation as to why this issue exists. Apparently, the Finder writes out a file named .DS_Store in each directory that it touches. According to this site, the .DS_Store file serves the following purpose:
The .DS_Store files are created by the Finder during its normal course of operation but they are invisible by default. The Finder will automatically put a .DS_Store file into every folder you have opened. These files are used to save the positions of icons, the size of the respective Finder window, the window’s background, and many more view options. While professional users consider the .DS_Store files to be a design flaw of the Mac OS X Finder, a mechanism like this is necessary when opening Finder windows for exchangeable disk media to give former users of the classic Mac OS the same user experience they had in previous operating system versions. If you don’t like to see the .DS_Store files, replace the Finder by a better file management application
This explains why I am unable to open a file if other files are being copied into the same directory. I really appreciate the fact that Loweded took some time out of his day to research this issue with me. It truly was driving me nuts. I don’t necessarily agree with how OS X does this however, at least now I understand why I received the error mentioned below.
Just today I noticed that OS X doesn’t seem let me open a file that I just copied if there are more files that still need to be copied. For example, I tried to copy ~ 280 Megs worth of videos off of my computer upstairs.
When I tried to open one of the files which was already copied I received the following error:
Am I doing something wrong or has Apple just not figured this one out?
Update 2/19/07: Somebody over at digg didn’t believe me that this was a problem so I decided to try it out again when I got home from work. As you can see from these screenshots it is a problem. When I tried and open an image which already had a thumbnail generated for it, OS X told me it couldn’t access the file. This is driving me nuts. Am I doing something wrong?
For this test I copied six JPEGs:
I then tried to open one of the JPEGs which already had a thumbnail generated for it:
Update (2/17/07): I pretty much have given up on trying to do this. Even when I copy the library locally I can’t open it up. I think it has something to do with the fact that I am trying to open up a library that was created by my Windows PC. If anybody has any further information for me please let me know. I really did think this would have worked out fo the box….
I think I’ve encountered the first issue that I’ve had with my Mac that I haven’t been able to solve with a simple Google search. Recently, I decided that I wanted to try and access my iTunes library which is stored on my PC in the office upstairs. iTunes 7 introduced the ability to manage multiple libraries simply by holding down the option key when iTunes is launched (see screen-shot below).
In theory, this feature should allow me to load my PC’s iTunes library however, this solution isn’t working for me. When I click on “Choose Library…” and I browse to my PC’s iTunes library, I am unable to load the library. For some reason the library is grayed-out and I am not able to select it (see screen shot below).
At first I thought it was an issue with permissions however, when I browse to my iTunes folder via the Finder, I am able to create, edit and delete files so I really don’t think it has anything to do with permissions (see screen shot below). For the life of me I can’t figure this problem out. In reality it’s not that big of a deal since I can just listen to my music using the built in iTunes sharing capability however, I’d like to be able to access my library directly so that I can make changes to it. Any help would be greatly appreciated….
I think it’s kind of neat how Photo Booth can take a therma picture using my laptop’s iSight. Here’s a picture that I took while sitting next to the fire. Notice how one side of my faces is warmer then the other.
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