Using tar to back up a disk which contains large numbers of hard links (e.g. a Time Machine volume) is extremely slow.

Slow as in, I started the backup of this 300gb disk last night, and it’s just over halfway done this morning.

The Unicode family of encodings has just become the dominant encoding on the web.

Good news for all.

Though I share some traits in common with the grizzled UNIX hacker, I have never been fond of focus-follows-mouse. Even so, this investigation into why it doesn’t work on OS X is a an interesting (though nerdy) read.

I don’t understand why you’d need to switch window focus when Emacs is the only app open.

The new firmware for Apple’s aluminum keyboards does the right thing. When you change your Caps Lock key to be Control (or some other modifier), the (undocumented) accidental press prevention is disabled. This is perfect, exactly how it should have been from the start.

I can now stop complaining and use Apple’s keyboards again.

Some of the other guides I’ve seen are inaccurate and didn’t work very well for me. This did.

You can change your account password, but you cannot change your keychain password. Your login keychain has the same password as your account, which you lost. You have to delete it. You’ll lose everything in it. Sorry. Consider buying a .Mac account (which syncs Keychains) while you’re doing this.

1. Boot (or reboot) your Mac. Hold down Command-S while it boots.
2. Your Mac will boot into a textual single-user mode. At the # prompt, run:
   /sbin/mount -uw /
3. Now, run: passwd your-login-name
4. Enter your new password. Now, run reboot
5. You system will boot. Log in with the password you just set. You’ll get a message about your login keychain. Hit “Cancel.”
6. Open Finder. Navigate to Library/Keychains in your home directory. Trash login.keychain
7. Log out, then back in.

8. That’s it.