Category: Mac + OSX

Singing the Opera

After having to endure Safari’s short comings, I applied some remedies to address its most noticeable problems — memory leaks and abrupt crashes. But I made my last draw yesterday after its memory issues affected the rest of the computer again.

I have been looking into using other browsers full time, namely Firefox and Camino, both from the Mozilla Foundation, a spin off of good old Netscape (well, actually, Netscape has sucked for the past few years). But they suffer the same problem as to Safari — extremely poor memory management. If you open more than 5 or 6 tabs at the same time for a day or two, you can notice the whole computer slow to a crawl, or worst yet, they crash without saving sessions on the existing tabs.

A few weeks ago, I took advantage of Opera Software and its free download offer and kept the serials just in case. I have used Opera before and it sucked. But it’s been a couple of years, so maybe things have changed.

Indeed, things HAVE changed.

For the past day or so, I have had eight tabs or more open at the same time, and I have not experienced any slow down to my aging PowerBook (knock on the wood). What’s even more impressive is its memory foot print hasn’t creeped up like all the other browsers. Furthermore, Opera came with features that I have had to download extra plugins/tools for with the other browsers (draggable tabs, saved sessions, easier to manage bookmarks… etc). Opera has some user interface inconsistencies. But I’ll happily live with that and just zip through web pages the way I want to — lots and lots of tabs.

I am not ditching the other browsers just yet…. will still need them for testing and such. But Opera is going to be my primary browser from now on.

Mail Bouncer

Apple Mail Bounce Every morning when I fire up my favorite email client, I usually get in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 spam messages. And they just continue coming throughout the day. The upside is my mail server was setup so that 90%+ of the junk mails are appropriately labeled as “:SPAM:” in the beginning of the subject line by the time they reach me. And at home, I setup my Apple Mail to filter everything with “:SPAM:” in the subject to go directly to the “Junk” folder. It’s a nice setup. But It’d be nicer if the junk mail can just simply stop coming.

Recently I’ve been painstakingly using Apple Mail’s built-in “Bounce messages” feature. It bounces emails back to the sender, tricking it into thinking my email address doesn’t exist. The effort seems to be paying off. Now I get no more than 10 junk mails in the morning. And I have been experiencing a reduction of spams throughout the day as well.

Now only if Yahoo, Google and Hotmail can catch up and develop something similar, that would be great (in the voice of Lumbergh from “Office Space” ).

Vienna the RSS News Reader

It’s been a while since I wrote something technology-related. But then again, it’s been a while since I last read technology news and really have the time to reflect on it.

I discovered something today that’s blog-worthy. An open source RSS news reading application, Vienna. Its interface and functionalities are almost exact replica of NetNewsWire, except it’s free.

I just love having one app where I can gather all the news I need and just quickly glance through them every morning (or at least I used to prior to Bryan’s arrival).

via [TUAW]

Switcher’s Friend

Outlook2Mac image If you or know anyone who’s considered switching to the Mac but was held back because they couldn’t figure out what to do with their gazillion emails and attachments, Outlook2Mac is the answer.

A while ago at my last job, I had to look for a solution to easily transfer everything from the CEO’s dying Sony Viao laptop to her spanking new 12″ PowerBook. It took me a while to exhaust all solutions on the Outlook (and the attachments) issue. Finally I broke down and bought Outlook2Mac. It’s one of those life-saving specialty softwares you think you’d never use.

All that work, though, went to waste. She soon switched back to an IBM Thinkpad and just didn’t see the usefulness in her PowerBook. She claimed that it was an unreliable piece of metal. But I think its unreliability may have something to do with her knocking it against walls/tables/grounds a few times.

Original Unix Lab Dismantled

The original lab that invented Unix at AT&T has officially been shut down. This very team started it all: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, HP HP-UX, Compaq Tru64, Linux (RedHat, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo… etc), SCO Unix, IBM AIX, Sun Microsystems Solaris, SGI IRIX and then of course, Mac OSX, all of which derived from the original Unix conceived at the Bell Labs.

And then there is Microsoft, DOS and then Windows (3.1 through XP), the legacy Mac OS, and let’s not forget OS/2. There are others that never made it to the mainstream, but who cares.

After looking at this large list of Unix operating systems v.s. the rest, it’s a no brainer that Apple decided to go with a Unix-based strategy to capitalize on its maturity and stability.

More Safari Extensions

Came across this while reading old blogs from Gizmodo. Saft is an app that bundles a good collection of features that are currently missing in Safari. Just to name one I can’t live without — crash protection. Safari has serious issues with performance when opened for an extended period of time, and sometimes it crashes without warning. What crash protection in Saft does is it saves the current tabs and their URLs at the time Safari crashes and gives user the ability to retrieve those URLs upon relaunch.

Another cool feature is the ability to manually shuffle the tabs and rearrange the order; something that’s in existence in Firefox already.

Pimp My Safari has more stuff on improving features that Safari currently lacks.

Also, OpenDarwin keeps a webkit blog (the core technology in Safari) with interesting updates from time to time. This particular entry deals with memory leaks, which Safari is notoriously known for.

via [Gizmodo]

Uptime on My PowerBook

I don’t think I was able to keep a Windows machine up, un-rebooted, at work (or home) for more than a couple of weeks. There’s always some updates or patches out that needed the Windows to be restarted. Or the entire system just craps out for no reason anyway…

So this is why I love my Mac… It’s been up for 33 days!

PowerBook uptime

Tiger Rendering Issues

I guess there’s still some work to be done with Tiger… Or maybe my hardware is getting old and unresponsive? Either way… this is messed up… Menu littered with two layers of text from two different apps…. I have only seen it a couple of times though… But that a couple of times too many. But I’ll take this over virus-ridden Windows any day!

Tiger menu

Applescripting and Blogging

I have been using Applescript to help me make my blogging easier. Everything from image resize and image format changes are done via my tiny scripts through Tiger’s Automator. And let me tell ya… it’s a godsend not having to keep memory-hogging Photoshop open all the time. Sure, I could have used third-party software that takes up smaller memory foot prints. But why bother when Applescript is so readily available?

Here is a good article to get started on Applescripting. But if you are on Tiger, don’t bother; Automator is all you need.