Alfred: A Quicksilver replacement?
Alfred is a new app launcher (and as with the best of those apps it is much more) for OS X. It’s currently in beta, that you can sign up for at their website.
Ever since Raj pointed me to Quicksilver it’s become a pretty essential tool on any Mac I use. However, development has dropped off over the past few years and whereas it still works perfectly now if there’s any major OS update it could be that it breaks. Scary! It’s to Albert’s credit that after a week of using it it’s slipped straight into my workflow without hardly any interruption or even being noticed!
Nice!
What’s also cool, although location only relevant for property programmes, is that the guys are local (to me in Cambridge that is!).
Startup items on OS X
For an unrelated reason I just checked the console on my Mac and found that an executable was being called every few mins, that did not exist. WTF!
I used to have a 3G modem made by Huawei (T-Mobile). The software dialler was pretty rubbish, and it appears that the naffness continued after I removed it. It had placed a file in my Launchpad folder which supposedly checked whether there was an updated version of the software available (note: in 18 months of running this software there never was!).
Anyway the upshot of it that it’s not just the StartupItems Preference Pane that shows such items. Also check the following folders:
/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchDaemons
/Library/StartupItems
~/Library/LaunchAgents
~/Library/LaunchDaemons
~/Library/StartupItems
Rebuilding Spotlight indices fixes mail.app search issues
Over the last few months searching in Mail.app has been problematic to say the least. I’ve been hoping that Snow Leopard would fix this, but it did not. In fact since upgrading to SL it has got worse, although this was likely just coincidence rather than being caused by the upgrade. So I tried rebuilding the Spotlight indices from scratch. Previously I would have used Onyx to do this. However, the Snow Leopard compatible Onyx has only just come out in beta, and was not available when I did this. Other methods I was aware of include dragging that partition (root) to the Privacy part, then back again. However, this being UNIX you can of course do it quickly from the command line. MDUTIL is a command line tool to interact with MDS, which is the Spotlight indexing tool.
Note all the following commands were run using sudo (or you could su to root). If you do not know what sudo is, perhaps the command line is not a place you should dwell!.
mdutil -i off /
Now some posts seems to indicate that you also need to delete the indices
e.g.
rm -R /.Spotlight-v100
I did not do this.
To add them back I simply turned on indexing again. Note this does take quite a while and leaves a few processes at 100% CPU.
mdutil -i on /
I have since been told that you can just force a rebuild using
mdutil -E /
However, despite the ease of this once the Snow Leopard version Onyx has come out I would recommend using that instead. It’s a cracking app, and I run this once a month at least.
Google beta of Sync for mobile contacts & calendar is live
Google beta of Sync for mobile contacts & calendar is live: “
That thudding sound you’re hearing is the head-to-keyboard collision of everyone who, for the purposes of wireless PIM sync to an iPhone, renewed a MobileMe subscription last week. Google announced today that the beta Google Sync for Mobile capability, long a feature on the Blackberry, has now been extended to iPhones (via Microsoft’s ActiveSync), and also to other devices that support the SyncML standard. You can sync your Google-side calendar and contacts to your device of choice, free, bidirectionally, starting today.
There are a few caveats with this beta, as one might expect: the main one is that you cannot use the sync capability if you already synchronize with an Exchange account, as there can be only one ActiveSync config on the iPhone or iPod touch at any time. Setting up sync with Google will also nuke your local contacts and calendar on the device, so back up before you proceed. Still, this represents a big step forward in the delicate dance of Google services in cooperation with Apple’s mobile gear.
If you configure sync for your device, let us know how it goes! Early comments note that the lack of multiple calendar support is a showstopper — if that applies to you, check out the NuevaSync option. Update: You can apparently sync up to five calendars to the phone, see here for details.
[via Engadget]
TUAWGoogle beta of Sync for mobile contacts & calendar is live originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)
Resizing a Time machine backup
As spotted on this blog here’s a way to increase the maximum size used by sparse bundle.
I use Time Machine to backup to My Ready Nas. I found this thread and howto on the Infrant forums. It’s not supported by Appole but it works nicely. Although you’ve got to admit that using an usupported method for a backup is a little dodgy!
I had a problem where resizing was not supported. This post, and this post again on the Infrant forums and this post helped. Well they helped me realise that something Apple did with the OS X 10.5.2 update stopped AFP shares being supported 100% for HDIUTILS manipulation of Sparse/ bundles.
So this command line does not work 
sudo hdiutil create -size 320g -type SPARSEBUNDLE -nospotlight -volname "Backup of Morcheeba" -fs "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" -verbose ~/Desktop/test.sparsebundle
So I just started again. I have multiple backups anyway!
As far as I understand it Time machine backups use Rsync and link. Much in the same way that my
Terminal Tip: Change Time Machine backup interval
Very useful. Although Time machine rocks, from a laptop it’s a bit annoying to be done every hour.
Terminal Tip: Change Time Machine backup interval: “sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 1800″
(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)
online storage
I’m a bit of a paranoid sort, and I really do backup even the most trivial of my data. I’ve been thinking of offline storage and a recent loss of my entire HOME directory (due to stupid human error, but all backed up) has made me think more strongly about this.
I used Rsync.net For quite a while, but I’ve been getting increasingly interested in Dropbox. Rsync is a commendably Open standard company. They allow access to their storage via many widely supported protocols, rsync (using ssh), scp, sftp, webdav etc. However, as a home backup network they are fairly expensive. I used a 10Gb share for a while, that’s about 11 bucks a month ($1.2 per Gb per month) but that’s not large enough to backup all my data. I used Rsync in a script that backed up a directory containing various softlinks to various important data folders scatered about my home directory. However, I’ve always been of the opinion that backup needs to be indiscriminate and completely automated. That is I’d prefer for all my Home directory to be backed up offsite rather than specific folders.
Dropbox offers 50Gb for 99 bucks. Now this is only accesible using a web interface or their admittedly cool client. Useable on Mac and Linux (windows as well but I’ve not used that). The folder is kept synched between all clients.
As a home user how can I afford to have the same storage as Dropbox but the same flexiblity as Rsync.org…..?
Apple’s new MacBooks prevent home-cinema viewing
Inevitable, but still so sad.
Apple’s new MacBooks prevent home-cinema viewing: “Anti-piracy measures block viewing on large monitors and projectors
Apple’s new line of MacBooks include built-in digital copy protection that will prevent protected media, such as DRM-protected iTunes films, from playing back on devices that aren’t compliant. The software, the Intel-developed High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), prevents content being played on devices such as large TV monitors and projectors.
(Via Macworld UK.)
OS X and the frustrations of not being Open Source
It’s now being about 22 months since my job sortof forced me into sharing my main OS from being 90% Linux (with a Gnome desktop usually) to 50:50 Linux:OS X. In that time I’ve grown to really like it. Prior to that I’ve used a Mac for about 10% of the time for a number of years. Probably coinciding with the introduction of OS X I guess, although I’ve also used OS 9 and OS 7 at earlier times in my computing life. I love the ease of use. When I want something to work it just does. I really enjoy messing, but sometimes the effort of setting something up surpasses the need for that task. For example although I spend a large amount of time hacking and reconfiguring my Mythtv box, I’ve never had the motivation to get my scanner working with Linux, as I know it’s just going to be a drag! This whole ease of setup is only possible due to a unified platform controlled by a dictator.
However, the enforced integration also has a downside. That is when I want to do something that is not prescribed by the Apple user guidelines. Having a Linux ‘if it does not do what you want and how you want to do it’ attitude, it gradually becomes a frustration when I need to do something in a different way to the majority of the OS X user base. Admittedly this frustration is way lower than whenever I have to use Windows. Steve Jobs and his crew have got most things correct, so that it does do things properly, and of course you always have the option of dipping into the CLI and doing things how you want to do them. However, that is not always an option when you have a third party application that is frustrating you, rather than the OS.
Consequently there’s always a list of trivial things that do well annoy me that would have had solutions quickly developed if they existed on an ‘open source’ platform.
Actually while we’re on this topic here’s two annoyances that just would not survive in the open source world
- Mail.app’s rubbish behaviour (see this post) when used with a low bandwidth connection. IMAP is just not great. It’s got better with Leopard, but it still does not behave as well as Evolution.
- itunes and Ogg Vorbis. Come on even most Windows mp3 jobbies wil also deal with Ogg files. Why does iTunes just do not do so? AAC is good, but larger and not that good. If my MBP had a 1Tb disc then FLAC would be good, but it does not have the space and let’s be honest, you do not always need FLAC quality.
I also suppose it’s ironic that the Linux desktop I use the most (Gnome) seems to be heading down the road of reducing user configurability. I’ve never had a problem with that though.
Codeweavers says cheap gas = free software tomorrow
A free copy of Codeweavers software tomorrow! I’ve used this on Linux and I quite liked it. However, I cannot think of ANY Windows software I want to run on my Mac!
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