They say you don’t miss something till it’s gone, well today Bloglines is having issues, no one can login, though I see it is still retrieving feeds from my site.
I uses Netnewswire synced to bloglines so this now leaves me with nothing at all to read. I did a few searches and it seems some others are having the same feeling.
So I guess this is how it feels to have a lobotomy, now if Google were to die it would be like someone cut my head off.
I have been really annoyed at this iBook since it was very very slow to my Samba servers – around 200kb/sec – and no amount of fiddling the Samba could get it to go fast.
First I tested using my Windows machines to the Samba servers in question and they were very fast as you’d expect, the Apple just wasn’t fast at all. Today when I got to work for the first time in ages I noticed that accessing my RedHat Enterprise Samba server is fast, so tonight I upgraded my Samba’s at home to version 3 and that fixed it.
So if your OS X is performing slow to Samba servers, make sure you are on the 3 branch of Samba.
UPDATE: After this I was still having some issues, especially with very slow read performance.
I came across this post on macosxhints and figured I’d give it a try, sorted, reading and writing is much faster now.
Being that I only have a little 12″ iBook that can do 1024×768 and no more having virtual desktops is essential. This is something that even Microsoft give away for free with the Power Toys these days but not Apple, so you have to hunt around.
There are a number of options, 4 opernsource and maybe another 4 commercial that I found. Till today I used Desktop Manager, it is a opensource project and does what you want it to do it does however have some issues. Most annoyingly it interacts badly with Adium X, Adium developers claim that the Desktop Manager author has admitted to it being a bug in his software but has not yet fixed it. I was reluctant to move away from it since it has a nice global-hotkey run dialog that is very useful for launching apps without having to hunt around the ghastly Finder or Dock applications.
Today I switched to Virtue, it is nice and based on Desktop Manager but has some additional features and it integrates with the system alt-tab behavior to switch desktops to the one that the app you choose is on. It also supports more hotkeys for switching desktops and understands about keeping a specific program in all desktops.
What about hotkeys? Well I also invested the time in learning Quicksilver, there is no going back, it’s absolutely brilliant, but more on this later on.
I have been trying out the Blockbuster Unlimited DVD Rental system for a few months, it is basically a DVD rental by post system, no return-by dates, 3 DVD’s at a time as many as you can fit in for GBP13 a month.
The service it self is great, very few scratched disks, disks always arrive promptly, packaging is well done etc. The problem comes with their web interface though, it really leaves much to be desired.
Rather than go into a list of issues that I have with it, I’ll mention some of the good things about Screen Select who I will be using from now on.
I thought I’d stick with Blockbuster out of loyalty, they are good as I said, they gave me a month free trial and they deserve my business. However over time I realized that a major part of this business is the user experience, and that isn’t just about the movies, it’s about managing your account as well.
So I have tonight manually moved the 60 odd movies I had on my wish list at Blockbuster over to Screen Select and in the process I got the hang of their user interface and so forth. It really is great, I think the biggest testament to how good is the fact that I have grown my list to 180 during the night where with Blockbuster I was running out of stuff to add! The systems both work by browsing categories and making recommendations, so clearly actually finding stuff to watch is much easier with Screen Select for me.
So the list of good things about Screen Select:
So think of the above list, and then think of a online DVD store without any of them, thats Blockbuster. I cannot list the shortcomings of their interface, they simply have to start fresh and do a good job of it.
I will stick to Screen Select, and I hope the actual DVD delivery aspect of their service live up to what I got used to at Blockbuster.
The very first thing that annoyed me about the Apple was its default terminal. It’s crap, it really is, its the slowest terminal I have used in my life, it was as bad as using a modem again.
The problem is of course that it tries to render everything in amazing quality and do transparency and use true type fonts and all that, it pretty much made for a completely unusable experience for me.
I tried a couple of alternatives like iTerm and while feature wise they are better they were still slow.
Another MAJOR pain is the fact that unlike Unix terminals the OS X native one does not copy text when you select it, I am just too used to that feature to not have it – there may well be a button to select somewhere to enable it, but I have not found it. Regardless the default terminal is too slow.
So I came across a shareware tool called GLTerm. It uses OpenGL to do it’s rendering, at first this sounds like a stupid idea but it works, its really quick. Not as quick as Putty on my windows box but its fast enough and it supports copy on select which makes me happy, and $10 poorer.
UPDATE: The terminal in OS X is indeed much faster as pointed out below, it flies even on my old 800mhz ibook it still lacks copy-on-select though. Also you need to be aware that support from the GLTerm author is virtually non existent, you need to almost threaten the guy to get anything out of him, pity, it’s a good terminal.
