No One Is Perfect

A reluctant foray into the world of blogging.

Posts Tagged 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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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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New line in Excel on Mac

Apr 21

Posted by Tom in Mac, Reminders | 9 Comments

Excel drives me nuts. I have to keep on searching the web just to remember that in a spreadsheet cell you need to press <CTRL><ALT><ENTER> to type in a new line, since simply pressing enter moves you out of the cell. Now that I’ve blogged about it, I may actually remember how to do it later.

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