Tag: Mac

My MacBook Pro doesn’t feel good

About half of my applications suddenly started “beachballing”, when trying to shut them down they did not. I killed them and could not restart them. Looking at the logs I saw this:

May 20 11:51:47 TwinPower diskarbitrationd[146]: iCal [8351]:26247 not responding.
May 20 11:51:47 TwinPower diskarbitrationd[146]: RescueTime [29391]:34011 not responding.
May 20 11:51:47 TwinPower diskarbitrationd[146]: Safari [29406]:23663 not responding.
May 20 11:51:47 TwinPower diskarbitrationd[146]: Quicksilver [302]:24079 not responding.
May 20 11:51:47 TwinPower diskarbitrationd[146]: Groupcal Daemon [308]:23043 not responding.

It doesn’t look like a good sign…

RSS reader and sharing

I am a bit in a middle ground these days jumping from one reader to another and also between sharing my favorite articles between two different services.

I used NetNewsWire (a Mac RSS reader) for almost 2 years now and I’m very happy with it. Joining newsgator also gave me a web (2.0) interface for free that is nicely integrated with the client. Since I really don’t go very far without my notebook, I never used it.

Recently James Pearce brought to my attention the beauties of the mobile version of Google Reader. The mobile version is very simple and effective at the same time. Like most Google products, it does it’s job efficiently. I also enjoyed sharing my favourite articles via Google (and also temporarily embedded them in this blog).

Nevertheless, I could never find myself entirely comfortable in the web interface, especially when I am on an airplane with no connection (if the feed provide the full articles, I can read them even when offline).
Anyway, the reason why I tried Google reader was to be able to access the feed on my mobile. I tried to access the website of newsgator hoping to use it with Opera Mini, but unfortunately their interface is too advanced for a small screen. Browsing around the web site (probably the first time in at least 1 year) I discovered that thanks to the iPhone-wave, they have launched a mobile version. So thank you iPhone!
Now I’m happily back to my Mac-client, have a mobile version and even found a way to share my favourite articles.

But of course there’s always something that’s missing. How do I add to my shared items pages and links that are not in my regular feeds? I still haven’t discovered this. So here’s a news item I wanted to share:
Red Hat and Amazon Team Up for Enterprise-grade Cloud Computing

Nature and technology

I really like the contrast given by my new keyboard on my natural Teak table.

This is my Tisettanta Carpenter table (picture from official site, I don’t have the bench):
Tisettanta Carpenter Teak Table

And this is how the Mac and the keyboard look like (sorry for the little blur, they just shine!):
Apple Mac Aluminum Keyboard

You may also see the previous setup on Flickr, it’s still about the same, but the table is not a bit more clean. 😉

The Finder that will come

When I moved from Windows (2000 at the time) to OS X I had quite a few problems, initially with Finder (the counter part of Windows Explorer). I simply felt it did not have all the features I needed and that I was used to on Windows.

I tried PathFinder a really nice alternative Finder developed by CocoaTech. I think it’s a cool tool and shows many of the little things that could be added to the native Finder. After the 2 weeks of free test I decided that it actually had too many features for me. I went back to the default Finder and over the years I found my way with it and using xterm when needed (opening a file with vi or less is SO easy, fast and comfortable).

A new Finder is going to be introduced in Leopard. An overview of the evolution of Finder over the years and what is coming is available on AppleInsider. I think it’s an interesting reading.

Font comparison and thinking about it

A nice post from Joel Spolsky about the different approaches in font rendering between Microsoft and Apple. I like very much the second part in which he talks about the general behaviour of liking something you’re used to and that people generally don’t think about the differences between things, but that one is the one they are used to and the other is just “different”.

Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering