No One Is Perfect

A reluctant foray into the world of blogging.

Archive for category Mac

What is using my USB drive?

Mar 9

Posted by Tom in Mac, Reminders | 2 Comments

For a while I’ve been trying to find out what is using my external USB hard disk on my mac when I want to eject it. Its been driving me batty and I usually resort to a few choice expletives before pulling out the cable anyway.

Recently I read about the lsof terminal command – for example:
lsof /Volumes/BACKUPHD

This shows you what processes are currently busy stuffing around the specific volume. After running this command I found that Spotlight was the culprit. It just kept on indexing the drive, and on a nearly-full 1TB drive this takes a bit of time. D’oh

So to turn off indexing by Spotlight I had to go to System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy Tab and add an entry for the volume that I wanted spotlight to ignore.

Easy, once you know how to do it ;-)

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Bluetooth fun and games

Aug 11

Posted by Tom in Mac, Reminders, Soap Box | No Comments

My application for an iPhone was rejected last week. Apparently I am not a good credit risk for O2 even though I can buy the iPhone and a 12 month contract outright. I wonder if Apple know how many customers are turned away by O2′s business practices?

So I have bought myself a Sony Ericcson W980. Very nice little toy, looks very cool, 8GB memory and a 3.2 megapixel camera. Oh yes, Vodafone don’t seem to think that I am unworthy of a phone plan.

One of the big annoyances since I got the phone was my inability to send all my contacts from the phone to my mac via bluetooth. It used to work on Tiger with my older phone, but something was wrong on Leopard. I just kept on getting transfer rejected messages. With a bit of searching on the internet, it appears that you have to go to System Preferences > Sharing and then enable Bluetooth Sharing for Leopard to accept contacts via bluetooth. Simple, once you find out how to do it ;-)

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Flickering screensaver on Leopard

Aug 11

Posted by Tom in Mac | No Comments

Since switching over to mac I’ve been using both a Quicksilver trigger, and right-clicking on the little padlock icon in the toolbar, to kick off my screensaver and lock my computer. After updating to Leopard I started to have a flickering screensaver, as if more than one screensaver was active at the same time. This has been bugging the heck out of me, but I’ve finally come across a solution on Mac OSX Hints (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071102105927735).

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