I have a MacBook Pro, it’s shiny and the keyboard lights up!
Aside from that I use it for doing my PhD, so have a bunch of software on it, some of which is better behaved than others. This page has a few tips I’ve learned along the way… use at your own risk!
I’ve managed to save probably 10Gb on my mac by getting rid of a few things that get put on by default. Aperture example projects, Garageband stuff, iPod photo thumbs, there are probably plenty more if you go looking…
Upgrading to Leopard 10.5 was easy. Just a few simple steps to get my fav apps up and running again…
- X11: The macsingularity.org site has a note and link to the macosforge X page, where I downloaded the X11 installer. I got 2.1.3 and it works nicely. The only trick was to remove a line setting the DISPLAY environment variable, which is not redundant in X11.
- Growl: I didn’t have to do anything with growl, but the mail notification stops working. There is a workaround here that I haven’t gotten around to trying yet. More info in the forums.
- .mac thingy in menu bar: Leopard has a .mac sync icon in the menu bar by default. You can get rid of it by ctrl-dragging it out of the bar.
- Boinc: I use a few spare cpu cycles to look for alien signals from outer space. I had to reinstall boinc to continue doing so.
- Gimp: I realised I was way out of date with my gimp installation, so got the latest copy.
- Onyx: To keep my mac nice and tidy I use onyx to clean things up every once in a while. There’s a new version compatible with Leopard.
- Aperture: I value my Aperture library a lot (A LOT) so don’t include it in my time machine backups. I don’t actually use time machine anyway (I do my own thing) so it’s not a problem.
I had some battery issues briefly, but fixed them with a reset of the power management system. See this post. Now the battery is screwed again, beyond the help of resetting etc… Time for a new one, and I’ll be suggesting to my local apple store that I shouldn’t have to buy one since I only got my computer less than a year ago.
The other day I wandered down there and got it replaced. Free. No worries.
The problem is likely that I use my mac for school, so it sits on my desk charging all day. And night when I take it home. The recommendation: cycle it properly every once in a while. I learned that you can actually remove the battery while the computer is asleep (and while its charging). Thus you can get to school/work/wherever, take the battery out, plug the power in, and fire it up. Just don’t trip on the power cord while its running.
If you take the battery out while the mac is already sleeping it will enter ‘safe sleep‘ mode, which I believe is like windows hibernation, and doesn’t require any battery power. The pulsing sleep light will go out, and it’ll look a little funny when restarting. Googling ‘mac safe sleep‘ gets a bunch of useful information…
If your new macbook doesn’t have 2Gb of RAM it probably isn’t going as well as it might… this was my experience anyway.
One of the cool things about macs is that with an external firewire hard drive, one can make a bootable backup drive. I learned how to do this from several sources on the web, and put them together into a nice automated system that ensures I’m always safe from disasters. The backup takes about half an hour for about 100Gb of stuff. I happened to notice the Sophos slows it down massively so I turn it off.
The heart of the backup is rsync, a unix utility that makes a duplicate of the mac’s hard drive on the external drive. There are many ways to do this, such as GUI apps like rysncx etc. I prefer to do it the old fashioned way with a shell script, copied from this macresearch.com article. It also requires a file of backup-excludes. When upgrading to Leopard I had to include two new excludes, /home and /net/*.
The script rsync’s my hard drive and copies a few other bits and pieces, just to be on the safe side. See the article from where I stole it for details… There’s a little trick you can use to avoid having to type your password every time the script does something with sudo. The script ‘blesses’ the external drive so that it becomes bootable. My script also does some networked rsyncing so I have to give my password to SSHKeychain anyway.
It also creates a file so spotlight doesn’t insist in showing me things that are on the external drive. Hence the line “touch /Volumes/OSX/.metadata_never_index”, which creates a file to avoid indexing. The link I think I got it from is in my bookmarks but isn’t working right now, try searching “spotlight external drive never index” or something.
For scheduling, I use launchd. With Tiger (10.4) launchd didn’t count time when the mac was asleep, and hence a half hour sleep meant any scheduled job would run half an hour late. This problem has been fixed in Leopard (10.5), so that jobs meant to run during sleep run when the computer is woken. Here is my version of the xml file that goes in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ to make it happen. To let the computer know its there enter the command “launchctl load file“. Typing “launchctl list” tells you which agents you have loaded as a check. Alternatively you can log out and in again.
The final ingredient is growl, which I use to notify me of what the script is doing. Growlnotify has some issues with Leopard at present, but mostly does ok.
Finally, to boot from you hard drive hold down the option key when you push the power button to start your mac…
I recently upgraded to Leopard, and had to reinstall everything to get this all to work again, see this post.
