Per this ArsMac thread, Panther features “Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering”.
In plainer terms, the OS defragments HFS+ filesystems automatically, if the files being used are smaller than 20MB.
Be sure to read the thread, for it contains nifty snippets of the actual kernel code, since the core OS, Darwin, is Open Source.
And yeah, if you’ve been living in a cave or something and haven’t already had some Mac fanatic splatter drool on you about it already, Expos?? really does rock.
Windows users, listen up:
iTunes for Windows is free. It doesn’t cost anything. It will play your existing MP3 files just fine. It will rip your CDs just fine, and you still don’t have to pay a dime to Apple. It’ll keep your MP3s organized, and you still don’t have to pay any money to anyone.
It can also show trippy visual effects when you play your MP3s, and yeah, those effects are free, too.
I’ve been playing with Unsanity‘s Window Shade X public preview. One of the nice new features of version 3 is “Minimize In Place”.
Suggestion for WSX3:
MIPed windows should [do something] when their dock icon is clicked. Right now I can’t decide what that something is; I think that perhaps a double-click should maximize all of them.
MIP iTunes, and open Safari. Now, consider your mouse movements. In order to maximize the MIPed iTunes, if the Safari window hides the iTunes MIP, you must first either cmd-tab to iTunes or click the icon, then click the MIPed window. Thus your mouse at worst travels from the center of the screen to the bottom of the screen, then almost to another edge of the screen, just to maximize a MIPed window.
It looks like it’s possible [but not easy] to install Linux on my old 6100/33 Power Mac.
Though I’m not really sure why I’d want to.
After hours of banging on it, I finally figured out how to enable printing via SMB from a Windows XP machine to a Mac OSX machine.
You’d think that with a Mac it’d be a point-and-click deal.
Think again. “Think different.”
Refer to William White’s guide for a detailed list.
The steps, in my particular case, are as follows:
Download and install the Gimp-Print drivers. This step is pretty straightforward, although you may need to install the ESP Ghostscript drivers too.
I’m drooling over the new G5 Powermacs. $2999 for a dual 2Ghz 64-bit platform isn’t that outrageous, either, considering that Sun‘s dual 1.2Ghz 64-bit system starts at around $13,995.
According to this Netcraft article, the Army has moved their www.army.mil server to Mac OSX, the first OS transition for that server since 1999.
The article also points out that Apple has switched its Knowledge Base servers to Solaris. Other anecdotal evidence shows that Apple is performing load-balancing between Solaris and OSX servers, possible for internal investigation.
A common irritation for me, while moving files from one folder to another, is having to stop the move in order to open another Finder window. Springloaded folders help a bit, but not much, and only for immediate transfers. They don’t help at all for moving files to a folder that hasn’t been created yet –“woops, I forgot to make that folder!”
That said, XShelf is freaking awesome. Go get it now.
If you’re one of the unlucky few who’ve had problems with your iPod battery, you can buy a replacement iPod battery from iPodBattery.com.
Laura had some weird problems with her iPod. For some reason iTunes wouldn’t update the play count of songs that she’d listened to after she installed the newest iPod software. I wiped and reinstalled the software, and now it works fine.
I’ve been playing with NetNewsWire, an RSS news aggregator for OSX. This is the first news aggregator I’ve used, and I’m very impressed.
A news aggregator is an application that downloads information from multiple sites, usually in the form of an RSS feed. The information is normally news, or weblog posts.
A very cool feature of NetNewsWire is that it periodically checks the feeds to which you’ve subscribed, and if it finds something new, it will download the headline and notify you.