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

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!

How is this any better than going cmd-F in regular QuickTime Player?

Quark 6 stopped working. And I had a job to do. I downloaded and borrowed Quark from people, installed again and again and it wouldn't work. Booted under safe mode and it did work. Tried to think what was installed that was making it not work. Couldn't figure it out. Did some more research. Found people moaning, mostly about how terrible Quark 7 is. So I booted in Safe Mood. Opened Quark File. Saved it down to Quark 5. Then I opened Quark 5 in classic to save the file down to Quark 4. Then I opened file in InDesign CS2.

Then I used the Ink Preview feature on InDesign as discussed elsewhere and discovered that elements of the supplied photoshop had too high an ink density. Which was a great catch.

And that, if I can help it, was the last time I'll ever use Quark Xpress.

-- Elvis Telecom (quartzcit...), January 23rd, 2007 7:14 AM. (Chris Barrus) (later)

only qt pro has full-screen

And you can't get a serial number from one of the 10,000 w@r3z sites?

people like me have been using it for 1,000 years and are REALLY fast. I can layout a magazine with just using key commands.

it doesn't have a million palettes.

InDesigns method at beating quark was to make every feature available on a palette, so you could just click on everything instead of knowing the key commands to bring up whatever menu item you needed. Also, with the palettes, you can click on options while still basically being in your document, as opposed to Quark's method of making you open a dialogue window, clicking "preview", making changes, clicking apply.

Only problem is InDesign becomes a mess of palettes, and if you just click them all off, it can be easy to not know where to find the functions, especially if you're still accidently using quark key commands (and yes I know indesign can use quark key commands, but I don't want to do that, I want to get used to adobe so I can more seamlessly switch to photoshop/illustrator.)

The cure is to re-arrange your workspace which I just did. Basically, hiding palettes I'm not going to use, changing which palettes are group with which and putting them in good places. I now feel so much better. And you can save and copy the workspace, so like, I can copy my workspace to my iDisk and if I go to a freelance job, upload the workspace and everything is where I want it to be. That's nice. I know quark has this now, but fuck 'em.

Anyway, quark has been buggy as hell for as long as I can remember, and they spent the last several versions adding features so you could make websites with quark (who does that?) while Adobe was clearly adding features that print and design pros want.

it just sucks because like, half of how I'm able to make any money is because I know printing and general production issues, the other half is because I'm fast at Quark. Still, at this point, more and more places are switching to InDesign and there aren't as many freelancers who've made the switch, so that's something.

What would be nice would be to make money selling music and never have to use Quark or InDesign ever again. Wait, what were we talking about?

You can (I have), but it's idiotic for Apple not to bundle it with Macs. One of the first things people see when they buy a new Mac is those awful greyed out menu items with "FREE" next to them, which look so cheap and Windows. Such a bad impression. FFS, $30 is a rounding error on the price of a Mac. They include much more valuable software (e.g. iMovie). Just bundle it already.

http://www.audioease.com/Pages/Soundabout/SoundaboutMain.html

What I want to know is what the hell is up with FileRun, it's like the coolest thing that never actually came out. http://filerun.info

VIDEOABOUT too please