your favorite little computer program hoonja-doonja (mac version)

??!

i've got a G4 powerbook with 768MB and stuff zooms. the only thing that occasionally fails to zoom is firefox, which can occasionally get sticky, but i can forgive it.

what does your process viewer thing (can't remember the name of the app, and am at work using OS FUCKING 9 IN AN OLD-SKOOL STYLEE, so can't check) say is causing the problem?

but are you using Tiger? even basic desktop stuff gets slow...but that's often when I've had Photoshop and other memory intensive programs active.

I set it up so that I can select a file, launch quicksilver, press s (for send) and then type 2 letters of the person's name from my address book and it sends them the file, without even starting mail.app

also, get the web search plugin, i think it's called. It has like 350 built in websites, so you do like quicksilver -> imdb -> "whatever" and it does it.

1) Make sure that more than 10% of all hard drive space is free
2) Look at Activity Monitor and kill the stuff I installed like three months ago that I forgot about
3) Run Disk Utility and repair disk permissions
4) Restart

i guess the other solution is to enable spotlight and restrict it from indexing anything but my email. email searching totally shouldn't have to be this complicated. back in terminal days when i had a whole buncha folders and stuff i could just grep thru it all like presto.

http://harnly.net/software/letterbox/

much better way to view messages in mail. You see more emails and more of the selected email.

why does Safari take 342 meg of memory and 963 megs of virtual?

what is Kernel Task?

I look at the activity monitor but I don'd know what most of it is/means!

i guess i need to try to get myself to obey tracer's 10% rule - my bittorrent addiction means i tend to have about 300 megs free on a 100 gig drive, and i'm sure that's not doing me any good.

Dan, I dunno why Safari takes up so much memory. You'll find that if you quit Safari and restart it, it's much nicer. Over time it develops this gargantuan appetite for RAM. Kernel Task is the central, core OS task, I believe. I read somewhere that if you've got a gig of memory and stuff is eating up a bunch of memory, that's OK, because you want your computer to actually USE all the memory available to it, rather than just letting it go to waste - i.e. if you only have Mail and Safari running, you could expect each of them to be using far more RAM than they would if other programs were open, too. So I don't know - it's hard to assess when it's a moving target.

hmmm. X only runs its maintenance scripts if it happens to be switched on at 3am (or whenever), and they're not a patch on some of the deep cleaning onyx can do. sure, you can do all of it from the command line too, but why bother? onyx rocks.

!!? What Tracer says is true about RAM usage creeping up with time but no matter how long I've had it running, I've never had it get up to anything like those figures. I use Opera more than Safari, but mostly it only uses about a tenth of what you're reporting (and when it's freshly launched it only grabs 13MB and 132MB virtual.

appzapper

http://www.appzapper.com/

pre osX, I always knew where everything was and which extensions and control panels and prefs belonged to what, but OSX befuddles me. This is basically an uninstaller for anything, just drag the app to it's window and it finds all it's related files.

It's funny, I also bought DiskWarrior....so the only two things I've ever paid for are programs to fix the problems created by installing tons of illegal software!

Mount arbitrary remote filesystems over SSH. Doesn't work with Finder yet, but fine from the command line.

http://wizardishungry.com/blog/archive/why_i_uninstalled_quicksilver_dashboard_and_spotlight

Anyone with a less manly machine than mine who is using Quicksilver for anything successfully must have like 10 files in the catalog and no plugins. I've actually found that Spotlight does a better job than Quicksilver as an app launcher if you trim down what it will search in preferences (mainly, no music files). I *may* try quicksilver again, but it seems kind of pointless to use it if you're limited to using it as a glorified application launcher.

Especially not all the select-file->select-task shit. I also stripped the catalog down, so it's sitting at 36mb of real memory right now. Still way faster than Spotlight/Launchbar for starting apps.

Keeping the lid closed is a disastrous and utter waste of potential screenspace. This is how I work the majority of the time: use big external monitor for whatever file I'm working on and then put iTunes, system monitor, email windows over on the lid's LCD.

oh yeah tabmixplus' session manager for firefix is k-awesome for quitting and restarting to kill memory bloat and keeping yr. ridiculous list of stuff still open -- i have zillions of tabs most of the time as todos or reminders or whatever. probably would be better off stashing the urls with an app or bookmarking or some junk but...

also jon i haven't ever really seen dashboard as a memory hog if yr careful with whats in it?

hardly any footprint at all, and rilly useful.

also, yeah, using audioscrobbler with growl = k-essential.

growl is actually way cooler than quicksilver.

Then for app launching I invented my own genius thing.

I already had two folders in my dock, Apps and Utilities, filled with aliases to all my most used programs, and usually control/right click on them to bring up a menu and select them. But when I'm in that quicksilver "I don't wanna use a mouse" mood, I came up with my own version. Made a folder who's name is just two spaces. Put it on the desktop. Filled it with aliases to all my major apps and folders. Edited the names of aliases to make sense (so...InDesign instead of Adobe InDesign)

Now when I want to launch something, I just click on the desktop, hit the space bar once, hit control down arrow to open that folder, then type the first letters of the program I want, and control down arrow again.

This is often faster and more comfortable for me then using the trackball. Don't ask me why, but it's not too different from how Quicksilver works as a launger.

(in other news...can anyone help me with a copy of Quark 6.5 or 7?)

http://www.mikeash.com/software/qtamateur/

^ full screen quicktime player!