Me and my Mac

Posts Tagged ‘osx’

Making good and speedy use of the OSX Dictionary

Now i need to look up things in the dictionary, and after killing it in spotlight this seemed a lengthy routine.

However it is easily fixable.

Open dictionary and go into it’s preferences.

Now go to a website, doesn’t matter which one and right click on a word:

Click that option and voila:

In-screen Dictionary results.
This works for many many OSX apps and is very handy

Crippling Spotlight, yay!

For weeks i’ve been annoyed with me looking up something in Spotlight, expecting the thing to find what i want and pressing enter in a split second only to find me ending up in a dictionary.

It seems Spotlight deems it necessary to look in the dictionary, wikipedia and more of such things also for programs. And give that higher priority than actually finding an App or file.

No more i say!

defaults write com.apple.spotlight DictionaryLookupEnabled NO

Solves all that. And damn Spotlight is faster too! yay!

Ofcourse for this to take effect Spotlight has to be restarted. Done by either restarting your mac or killing the Spotlight process.

Later i found this options is also available in the amazing prefpane secrets from Blacktree.

Which makes things even easier.

A 640GB Bonus

Wut? Yes! hahaaa! I found 2 IDE drives in my magical closet of 320GB each. Not sure where they belong. But now they take care of the backups for both my Macbook Pro and iMac.

But… Yes, IDE drives. I bought 2 Macally 3.5″ USB2.0/Firewire400 casings. Turns out they’re stackable. Yay!
So behold! My massive storage tower… Isn’t it pretty? It’s aluminium seated on small rubber feet. The top one for my laptop and the other for the imac. Woohoo! Timemachine… No way, none of that… I bought SuperDuper! a while back. In all it’s awesomeness of cloning harddisks so that they are actually useful if the main drive fails. Instead of the mayhem Timemachine creates on a harddisk. Also Timemachine has proven me way too unreliable of loosing it’s contents or not recognizing the disk at all and thus has to reformat it for the “new” backup… Yea, rubbish!

Windows is the destroyer of good moods!

For some time i have been pondering if i should tamper the ridiculous windows 3GB ram limit on XP Pro. While i have 4GB in my computer and would like to use all of that, especially if windows is solely used for games. I thought it would be only logical and reasonable to be able to use as much ram as i can get. Thus 3GB was not enough.

According to this document from our infidels at microsoft i should be able to remove or reset or whatever the 3GB memory cap and use the extra 1GB by adding 4 bits to the 32-bit hardware layer or something. i didn’t really read it to be honest. Just glanced over it.

Anyway, on this page and on many forums with people having similar issues and in need of more ram i read that when you edit the boot.ini file to add some “switch” to it it would enable the 4GB ram. Which is the limit on Windows XP for some reason i didn’t read. I guess it has something to do with the system being 32-bit since we’re adding bits to get more ram…

Anyway, it turned out another epic fail for windows as if of course didn’t work. The OS needed a reboot to apply the boot.ini changes and BAM!! Some nasty error during boot time kindly informing me my hal.dll was damaged and i should re-install that one file to fix it. Fine. Then let me boot to a command prompt or anything, ANYTHING to fix it. But windows had no love and no way of booting up properly. Which left me frustrated trying to boot a windows 98SE boot cd i had made. Of course, using bootcamp prevented me from doing anything useful with it. So that didn’t work. Then Ubuntu 7.04. But that would not boot either. Then it hit me like a mac pro falling from 3 stories. Enable NTFS support through OSX. It was so obvious…. *sigh*

And of course while nothing else would work OSX came to the rescue. I had to install MacFuse 1.5 and NTFS-3G and after a reboot i could read/write on the windows partition. I quickly edited the boot.ini again and voila. Windows worked. I guess the error telling me the hal.dll wasn’t so accurate at all. But what do you expect from windows…

To serve or not to serve… Not to server!

So last thursday a small disaster happened in what later turned out an epic week of failure.
I lost communication with my server. Fearing the worst i called my mom, if she could see if the server was powered and perhaps reboot the thing.

She restarted the thing and all seemed well. The monitor wasn’t connected so there wasn’t much else she could do. But me from work could ping the machine again so i assumed it was ok. My mom went on downstairs, still on the phone, to test the internet connection. Nothing worked.

We then proceeded to bypass the server, which handled DNS and DHCP to set things manually and use openDNS. This did not work either. Frustrated we ended the conversation. I had to rush home after work to fix things.

Because the server seemed messed up i started there, rebooted. Found out the network cable wasn’t connected. Or so did OS X Server tell me. Ofcourse it was connected just fine. While pondering what would be wrong then i noticed my switch acted weird. All 8 ports were blinking in a rapid pace. “oh hell! it’s buffer messed up” i thought and went on to pull the power from it to reboot the switch. Which seemed well, the leds went as normal, for 5 seconds then they started blinking again. So i disconnected all Ethernet cables, restarted it again and noticed it was good. Then i connected all cabling one by one noting it went crazy at cable 2, which is going to my Lacie Etherdisk. Leaving that one out things went normal, but nothing could connect. I also noted the switch made a high pitched hissing noise that shouldn’t be there. I then declared the switch dead and angrily thought about a sollution. Which turns out to be a 3Com switch and my Airport Extreme. Hooked everything up… and voila. My LAN was working again. Mom rejoiced, she could read her email. I was more or less happy because the LAN was online and i could read my mail and chat with Catarina again. Life was good!

The next day, the server hung, and after a reboot no-one could connect to it. Remote desktop wasn’t working, shares seemed unreachable. Yet the machine seemed online as it responded to PINGs normally. GRRR! Climbing the stairs to the attic to go local on the monster it quickly turned out the LDAP database was gone. Which means that all users and access rights are either deleted or revoked. Thus no one could login. Luckily Root (admin) isn’t stored there so i could save all files and move them to my Lacie Etherdisk. Again, very angry and frustrated i decided for now i would use the Etherdisk and declared the server an unreliable piece of crap. Worst server OS ever!! Being completely through with OSX Server i decided i would reinstate the Lacie Etherdisk as the main data storage thing and my router would handle DNS and DHCP from here on in.

No more iCal server and no more LDAP hassle. I was so ready to throw it out the window as this was the 3rd or 4th time it lost its LDAP stuff in less than 6 months. With no direct access or a backup present this means i have to re-install the whole thing, set everything up again with only a backupped config file to go on. Lots of time would be lost, AGAIN!

OSX Leopard Server is stupid and sucks and is completely crap and even more unreliable… Aaand i dunno, some other nasty words!

I’m still not sure if i’m going to reinstall the server or not, probably not… maybe a Tiger server or even Linux PPC… We’ll see!

The iMac as a gaming computer?

I recently bought an iMac and kind of feared it would not outperform my previous PC in gaming. I had read on various large mac sites that the iMac “still was not capable of running games” and more of such stories.

Soon i discovered that that was not true at all. To properly play games you still need Windows installed so i installed Windows XP Pro SP2 with all updates and all that rubbish. And some recent games. Like ‘Rainbow 6 Vegas 2′ and ‘Supreme Commander’ for example. Both games are quite heavy on the graphics and memory part of the game and i can play both on 1680×1050 resolution all settings high without a hitch.

Also battlefield 2142 which is a bit older but still a heavy game specs wise runs fine with 64 bots enabled on Singleplayer. No problems there.

All fullscreen and high resolution and settings. I don’t see why the iMac would be a bad computer for games. It outperforms my guestpc which is a AMD Dual Core 4200 with a 512MB Vga. While the iMac is a Intel C2D 2.4Ghz with 256MB Vga.