I just remembered my Aperture 2 install came with a bunch of example projects, nearly 3Gb of them in fact. Go delete them from /Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Aperture/ to get your quickly disappearing space back…
Tag Archive for 'mac'
If you don’t use garageband on your mac, you can remove all the files in /Library/Application Support/Garageband and get about 2Gb of free space.
Instead of deleting mine, I shifted it to an external hard drive. Next time I started Garageband, it asked me to point to the new location. From googling the issue, it’s not clear whether you can reinstall the files if you delete them permanently. There appear to be some versions of Leopard that came with a second disk that has the files. My Leopard came on a single DVD.
Always running out of space on your computer? Have iTunes and an iPod or two, and a lot of photos? I just cleared out 3Gb of thumbnails for my iPods that I never look at. Just remove the folder “iPod Photo Cache” from your iPhoto or Aperture library.
I recently realised (from the Aperture forums I think) that for the Aperture vault feature to work nicely one needs to have a Mac OS formatted drive to backup to. Previously my external drive was DOS formatted so I could read it from my PC, and the backup took forever. I also had this problem, which appears to have gone away, though I’m not sure if it was related. Now with my Mac OS Extended partition, the vault backup of my 25Gb library doesn’t even take a minute.
After getting MySQL going I realised php5 wasn’t doing any better. This problem is caused by new settings for php and apache. To edit these files you need to do something clever like change the permissions or use something like vi. I used “sudo vi httpd.conf.”
Edit etc/apache2/httpd.conf by uncommenting the line #LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so (that means you remove the “#” from the start of the line).
Edit httpd.conf, which is in /etc/apache2. I changed the line Deny from all to Allow from all within the <Directory> tags. Then you simply restart apache with “sudo apachectl graceful.” Another way is here.
So after upgrading to Leopard I found my Python plotting stuff didn’t work, so had to reinstall it. My last setup was decidedly dodgy, being something of a mix of 2.4 and 2.5, which wouldn’t work if I removed one. Very suspect.
I have a MacBook Pro, recently upgraded to Leopard. Mostly I followed these instructions, but there were some steps skipped that I had to include for my particular case. Possibly because I’m on an intel macbook and the steps were for a ppc.
[I recently noticed this page, which you might want to read first since you might not really have to do a whole new install]
First thing I needed to do was get the latest XCode (3). A 1Gb download since my X DVD was at home. I also got the latest gfortran from here (gfortran-4.2.1.dmg) and installed fftw as decribed on the scipy pages.
I started totally from scratch, removing /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/ , MacPython from Applications, and the executable links in /usr/local/bin . I also got rid of the other stuff I’d installed in /Library/Python/2.X/site-packages .
I first got the MacPython 2.5.1 install and put that on. You get it from here, and it’s a simple click and install thing. Done. It gave me some thing about a postflight error, which apparently adds the Python.framework to my path, but it didn’t seem to matter.
Next was iPython from here. I got version 0.8.2. This install went fine. Checked by running ipython in a terminal. Most of the python things are installed by typing
sudo python setup.py install
Next was getting numpy and scipy from here. I installed numpy first no worries, and tested it with “import numpy” and then “numpy.test(1,10)” within the ipython shell. Scipy installed easily too. Like the guy I copied, I get one failure when running the test “import scipy” and “scipy.test(1,10)”. No worries.
Finally it came to matplotlib, from here. At this point I followed the steps here, and some other bits I found. There was a problem where the python I was trying to install with wouldn’t deal with a ppc/intel universal compile, and I had to use /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin/python instead of the default in the /Library framework. After finishing successfully, I had to manually copy the dateutil directory to /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/site-packages/ for some reason.
Finally I had to get wxPython from here, and do the click install.
After all that it finally works. I can’t really say I’m an expert since it took me a day to figure all that out. I think it’s worth it for how great the matplotlib interface is when it works though. Where else can you make nice plots that are draggable, zoomable, customisable so easily?
So anyone who played Quake back in the day will appreciate this… a drop down visor style terminal at the press of a key comb0! By the same people who brought you another indispensible app: quicksilver
Being at Harvard means I can get computer software a little cheaper than normal, so I went out and picked out a copy of the latest OSX: Leopard 10.5. After holding off for a few days I popped the DVD in the good ol’ clunky sounding MacBook Pro drive, and let it do its thing…
After restarting it took something like an hour to check the DVD, and then at least that long again to do the install. I wasn’t paying attention too much. But it was long enough to cook and eat dinner, and for the Bruins to be 2-0 up against the Senators.
Successfully installed, it was time to find all the broken pieces and get them running again. Doing so was easy:
- 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.
Simple really. Upgraded without a missed step… but see these other posts for my issues with MySQL and php
So yesterday I wandered down to my local apple store (Cambridgeside Galleria in Boston) to see if I could get a replacement for my dead 11 month old battery. They have this “Genius Bar” where black belt OSX dudes give help on mac related problems. They were very busy, but I got an appointment for this morning.
So I wandered down there this morning to see what they could do. The guy fired up the system profiler and said something like “my goodness” when he saw the available charge and number of cycles. New FREE battery for Grant. I am within my 1 year warranty, and have applecare too so there were no worries. A mate of mine had his replaced the other day, with a 13 month old macbook and no applecare, so it’s worth a go…
See the mac page for a few more comments on how to avoid the problem with your new one.
