I use a program called TreeSize Pro at work to show me how a directory is being used.  It’s really useful when I ask a user to clean up their home drive and they come back and say, “I need everything that’s in there and it’s all work related!”.  After using the program and showing them that 90% of the space is taken up by MP3 and MPEG files, they generally change their tune (no pun intended).

I found a program for my Mac that’s even better.  Disk Inventory X inventories your hard drive and shows you a map that shows you relative file sizes and sort of groups them based on the type and location of the files.  Using it’s map, I was able to clean up about 15GB of unneeded data in about 5 minutes (damn GarageBand loops!).

Over the past few days there have been two updates to OS X 10.4.  10.4.3 came out on Monday and included a whole bunch of updates.  I normally do not update any software with patches until a few days/weeks have passed because usually something breaks as a result of the update, and I don’t like being a guinea pig.  That philosophy only works when I’m not waiting for the patch to fix something that isn’t working for me, as is the case with my AirPort problem.

I checked the Apple discussion to see what other people’s experiences were and if the update fixed their problem.  There were reports of it fixing the problem for some people and not fixing the problem for others, so I decided to give it a go.

Continue reading . . . 

About three weeks ago I upgraded the RAM in my iBook to the maximum 1.5GB.  I had 768MB but I noticed that when I ran Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Safari, Firefox, Mail, iCal, Adium and another app or two, there was a five second “pinwheel” when switching apps, and i figured that upgrading the RAM was a pretty cheap way to increase performance.  Every since then, every few days, I encountered a weird problem.

The problem happens without any clear event to trigger it, and happens every few days for me.  The symptoms are as follows:

• The mouse response to the trackpad starts to jump around.  It is as if the mouse on the screen freezes for a moment, then jumps across the screen in an attempt to catch up with the trackpad.  This makes using the mouse very difficult.
• The kernal_task process starts taking up about 65% of the processor.
• The AirPort indicator in the menu bar loses at least one level of reception.

The only way to completely solve the problem, for the moment, is with a reboot.  Stopping the AirPort does fix the kernal_task issue and mouse movement issue, but they both come right back as soon as you turn it back on.  Also, when you turn the AirPort off and turn it back on, it may not reconnect to the wireless network.

I did a whole bunch of research and found quite a few threads in various forums that others were having a similar problem.

Continue reading . . . 

I understand that to keep the size of the 12” iBook as small as possible, Apple had to make some hard decisions about which keys to leave off the keyboard to save space.  Unfortunately, some of the keys are the very keys I use all the time.  Page Up, Page Down, Delete (not Backspace), Home and End are all keys that did not make the cut.  I really think that if they cut down the size of the mouse button, they could have gotten an extra row of keys on the keyboard at the top the size of the function keys.  The addition of those five keys would make my life a lot easier.  Yes, I am aware that I can accomplish all those functions by using a combination of keys, but that requires two hands in most cases.

I really hope that when Apple introduces their Intel based laptops they will find a way to include those keys on the keyboard.

One more thing…how about a right mouse button?