Important considerations for the long life of your MacBook. Handling and environmental care tips. Cleaning Your MacBook Use a very lightly damp, soft (if you can squeeze the cloth very tightly and even a drop comes out, its still too damp), lint-free cloth to clean the computer’s exterior. Avoid getting moisture in any openings and be very careful not to get the damp cloth around the trackpad edges or around the inside edge between the monitor and its bezel. Do not spray any type of liquid directly on the computer. Do not use sprays, solvents, or abrasives; do not attempt to use any solvents on the LCD display either directly (especially!) No rubbing alcoholic, no glass cleaners of any variety, no acetone, no lens cleaning sprays, no AR coating sprays, no sprays sold as "for your LCD TV", no sprays sold as "for your notebook display". Use a soft paintbrush, lipstick lens-cleaning brush, or makeup brush for cleaning Small soft makeup brush, lipstick lens cleaning brush, or paintbrush for removing dust from the keyboard, hinge, and LCD display Your MacBook is a notebook, not a laptop 1.
Mac Virtual Memory – What it is, the Swap Location, and How to Disable Swap in Mac OS X. I was asked recently about the Mac OS X swapfile, specifically how to disable Mac OS X swapping entirely. I decided I will take this opportunity to talk a bit about Mac virtual memory (swap), it’s location in the Mac file system, and also to explain how to disable it. Mac OS X Swap aka Virtual Memory You may recall that in older versions of Mac OS (OS 8 and 9) you could manually disable swapping, then called Virtual Memory, by just adjusting a setting in the Control Panels.
Mac OS X is a bit different because it’s built on top of a unix core which relies heavily on swap files and paging for general memory and cache management. Because of this, swap is actually more important now than it was in prior versions of Mac OS. Basically when your Mac needs memory it will push something that isn’t currently being used into a swapfile for temporary storage.
Mac OS X Swap File Location If you’re curious where the swap files are stored on your Mac, they’re located at: /private/var/vm/ Big Nerd Ranch Books • Index page. X112.7.2 – XQuartz. Create apps for OS X Mountain Lion. OS X Mavericks and Xcode 5 To build apps for OS X Mavericks, make sure you have OS X 10.9 and Xcode 5 with the latest OS X SDKs installed on your Mac. If you don’t have the latest releases, you can download OS X Mavericks and Xcode for free on the Mac App Store. Energy Saving New features in OS X Mavericks give users visibility into where energy is being consumed. The new battery indicator on the menu bar identifies apps that consume the most energy, and Activity Monitor now details energy consumption per process. Sprite Kit Create high-performing 2D games with the powerful new Sprite Kit framework, which allows you to control sprite attributes such as position, size, rotation, gravity, and mass. Map Kit With Map Kit, you can now take advantage of the beautifully designed cartography and vector-based interactivity of Apple maps, including support for Multi-Touch gestures, pinch to zoom, and panning.
Safari Push Notifications LinkedIn What’s New in OS X AV Kit Multiple Displays. How To Sync Your iPhone With iTunes Wirelessly Over Wi-Fi. SOLVED: Macbook Air kernel_task slowness | tech.superhappykittymeow.com. I love my Macbook Air more than I've loved any laptop before (my first experience with a 12″ iBook in 2005 was a thing of beauty, but pales in comparison to my relationship with my Air). However, its CPU throttling to prevent heat drives me batty due to its aggressiveness — play a Flash video, for example, for a few minutes and it will start stuttering as the CPU temperature rises.
Let it continue and the entire computer will slow to a crawl. If you open Activity Monitor or look at top, you'll see a process owned by root called 'kernel_task' using 150% CPU usage or so. Kill the Flash video and the kernel_task will slowly scale back and things will return to normal. What's going on here is an interesting approach to temperature management. As temperature rises due to load on the CPU, the kernel runs some low-cost operations over and over — think 'gettimeofday()'-style functions. So… why load that module at all? Back in normal OSX, launch Terminal and run the following: “Fixing” kernel_task CPU Problems in MacOS 10.7/10.8 | rdoxenham.com.
Update (Early 2013): When I wrote this guide it was focusing on Lion 10.7, many people have, of course, upgraded to 10.8 and have reported success using the same principles. However, the plist entries have not been added for newer models, e.g. the new MacBook Air or MacBook Pro (+retina). Therefore, if you follow the guide exactly you may run into problems such as your model identifier not being visible. After diagnosing this with others via email it would appear that the system uses another plist in the directory, therefore removing all of the plists has worked. I cannot comment further or prove this to be the case as I don’t have the available hardware.
Let me know whether this works for you….. I use a wide variety of operating systems at home, all services are provided by Linux, e.g. firewall, routing, file-storage and DLNA media. However, I like using a Mac too, I have a late-2009 MacBook Air which I use whilst traveling. You can simply reboot now for the changes to take effect. How To Downgrade from Apple OS X Lion to Snow Leopard. We like Apple OS X Lion a lot (you can read all about it in our OS X Lion review), but that doesn't change the fact that a new OS always carries its growing pains.
For some Office and Adobe users, those growing pains may be growing migraines. And if you have a NAS, forget about it. So let's say you want to put Apple's new feline up for adoption and return to Snow Leopard: how much trouble is. Depending upon your Mac—and your back ups—not much at all. If You Back up If you have a backup of your Mac pre-Lion, rolling back the clock is surprisingly easy. Back to the Disk For the less backup prone, the process will require your original Snow Leopard disk. From here, insert the Snow Leopard disk. The first thing you'll need to do is reformat your hard disk. Update: Some readers have reported that restoring directly from Disk Utility doesn't work for them. Once you have Snow Leopard restored on your machine you ought to be in familiar territory. Automator AppleScript Actions Tutorial: Introduction to Automator AppleScript Actions Tutorial.
This tutorial shows you how to create an action for the Automator application using AppleScript as the implementation language. The tutorial assumes that you are familiar with AppleScript, but otherwise has no other prerequisites. It is helpful, however, if you have some experience with AppleScript Studio. This tutorial has the following chapters, which are meant to be read in the given order: “Before You Start” gives an overview of Automator actions and workflows.
It also describes the action that you will create in the tutorial. “Creating the Project” explains how to create an AppleScript action project and identifies the key elements of such projects. “Creating the User Interface” shows you how to create the user interface of the action using the Interface Builder application. MacScripter. Is it possible to reduce the sleep image? (NOT remove it!) How to Remove the Disk-hogging Sleepimage File from Your Mac. Posted 12/22/2011 at 2:02pm | by Cory Bohon If you've ever used a large file discovery tool like Daisy Disk, you may have stumbled upon a peculiarly large filed dubbed sleepimage. This file is a by-product of Safe Sleep and it's basically a saved state of your Mac's memory when it goes to sleep. MacBooks especially use this file to save your contents before the battery completely loses its charge.
When you start up your system, the Mac will restore this data from the sleepimage file. Regardless of how important this file may sound, it's actually completely unneccessary. So why not free up some hard disk space by eliminating it? Read on to find out how. The file may be unecessary for some (and this feature certaintly wasn't included on Macs made before 2005), but if you are constantly in a situation where you lose juice and your MacBook has to hibernate, you may not want to disable the Safe Sleep feature. Removing the File Luckily, the sleepimage file can be removed without any injury. Performance Upgrades; FireWire USB SATA Storage; Memory, more at OWC. Add Automatic Cloud Syncing To Any Mac App [How-To.
Syncing any file or directory to Dropbox is easy using Terminal. One of the greatest things about a service like Dropbox is that as long as you are either using apps with support baked in or can save your files to a Dropbox folder, you can keep all your data synced between multiple Macs. What if you want to keep app data synced between Macs that don’t lend themselves to being saved to a Dropbox folder or don’t come with Dropbox support, though? For example, most Mac games don’t allow you to specify where you keep your saves, but what if you want to be able to save your game on your iMac and then load it up again on the road on your MacBook Pro? Or what if you want to keep your app settings synced between your iMac and MacBook Air? It’s actually way easier than you might think. The technique we’re using in this tutorial involves symbolic links. What symbolic links allow you to do is tell your Mac that a file or folder in one directory should be treated as if it were in another directory.
Hard disk drives vs. solid-state drives: Are SSDs finally worth the money? Three years ago, I wrote a story comparing hard disk drives to solid state drives (SSDs) based on capacity, performance and cost. A lot has changed in three years. For one, laptops are quickly being eclipsed by tablets, which have NAND flash memory embedded on their motherboards.
In addition, operating systems like Windows 7 have been optimized to take advantage of SSD I/O performance. SSDs today are far more reliable, have greater endurance and perform better (in some cases, two to three times better) than in 2009. There are also new SSD categories. For example, hybrid drives combine NAND flash cache memory with a spinning disk in a hard-drive form factor. Perhaps the single biggest change, though, is price. Today, however, SSDs cost close to one-third of what they did in 2009 -- in many cases, less than $1 per gigabyte. One thing hasn't changed, though: While they may never beat out hard drives in price, SSDs will always have one major advantage: No moving parts. How I tested SSD vs. Control AirPort from the keyboard. If you use the Airport menu item primarily to turn Airport on and off, you can save some space on the menu bar by getting rid of the Airport icon and enabling or disabling wireless networking from the keyboard (or mouse) instead.
To start with, you need to find out the device name of your AirPort network interface. To do so, open System Profiler (Apple -> About This Mac, More Info). In the lefthand pane, select the Network section. In the upper right pane, you’ll see a list of your network devices. The key here is a command-line utility, networksetup. There are a few ways to make this shell command accessible from within the OS X GUI. Alternatively, you can implement the shell command as an Automator service. With your new application or service at hand, you can get rid of the menu bar Airport icon: Go to the Network pane in System Preferences, select the Airport interface in your current location and uncheck the Show Airport Status in Menu Bar box. 30 Truly Useful Mac Apps for Professional Writers. As a full-time professional writer, I’m always on the lookout for utilities that will improve my workflow and help provide a much needed boost in efficiency.
Today we’ll take a look at thirty of the best utilities around to help serious writers in their work. Whether you want a better way to work with Markdown or need something to help you plot out the scenes in your next novel, this roundup has just what you’re looking for. Advanced Writing Tools The writing market is quickly becoming over-saturated with extremely basic utilities that are easy on the eyes but so light on features that professional writers often miss the good old days when developers did all they could to provide you with the powerful tools that you need to get the job done.
If this description matches you, check out the apps in this category, each of which is specifically tailored to give you power and flexibility, not eye candy. Ulysses Ulysses is truly an app for professional writing assignments. Price: $29.99 Ulysses Bean. LockerGnome - Solve Your Tech Problems with How to; Keeping You Informed & Entertained Since 1996! 13 Ways To Make Your Mac Run Faster Right Now. CuteClips 3.1.11 for Mac. Ftparmy.com. How to make and setup an IRC Bouncer (using ZNC Bouncer)
5 Alternatives to the OS X Finder. The Finder is an excellent file browser that keeps getting better and better with every new version of OS X. However, many Mac users find OS X’s default file browser to be lacking in a few essential features like tabs, a dual window view, fast loading image previews, etc. As a result, several third party file browsers have sprung up bringing a lot of innovation to the table. This article will briefly introduce five alternatives to the Finder. I’ll go over each app’s unique features and shortcomings so you can decide which solution works best for you. Xfolders If you’ve ever used a Mac FTP client like Transmit or Captain FTP, you’ll feel right at home with Xfolders. The dual window interface allows you to easily move and copy files from one place to another. XFolders Feature Rundown from Developer Site: Full integration of the Finder, thus support of all file operations from and to the Finder.
Verdict The dual window system is definitely a handy feature, though tabs would be nice. MuCommander. SwitchDiskSizeBase v2.0 beta | brkirch's Blog. Changes in switchDiskSizeBase v2.0 beta: Mac OS X v10.7 or later is required (OS X Mountain Lion is supported)Added option for changing the unit symbols to the corresponding IEC units (e.g. KiB instead of KB)Added dual display option (see screenshot below)Uses a dynamic library to override the function that generates file/disk size strings instead of patching it. This should hopefully reduce the chance that updates to switchDiskSizeBase will be needed to maintain compatibility with future OS X versions.Due to the way switchDiskSizeBase works now an install of Xcode or the Xcode command line tools is required.
If the Xcode app is installed it may need to be run at least once in order to agree to the EULA.switchDiskSizeBase v2.0 beta only changes the file/disk size display for the Finder and Quick LookswitchDiskSizeBase v2.0 beta is distributed under the simplified BSD license instead of GPL v3. Download Link Copyright (c) 2012, brkirch All rights reserved. 1. Like this: Like Loading... Afsctool | brkirch's Blog.
A Hidden Snow Leopard Feature: HFS+ Compression. As you may already know, in order to reduce the size of Snow Leopard many of the system files are stored compressed. There are some technical details about this new compression in Ars Technica's Snow Leopard review but no details about how to use it for your own files. So I looked through the Snow Leopard command line tools and found this option for ditto: Code: --hfsCompression When copying files or extracting content from an archive, if the destination is an HFS+ volume that supports compres- sion, all the content will be compressed if appropriate.
This is only supported on Mac OS X 10.6 or later, and is only intended to be used in installation and backup scenar- ios that involve system files. After testing it out on some files I found that it does indeed apply HFS+ compression, although it seems that only files that meet certain conditions can have HFS+ compression applied to them. . $ afsctool -v /usr/local/bin/afsctool /usr/local/bin/afsctool: File is HFS+ compressed.
Randy's Träume (Build 20111126031027) How to (tutorials, semi-mods) Mods.