Archive for May, 2008

The correct way to disable Spotlight

Friday, May 30th, 2008

A while back, I was looking for a way to remove the Spotlight icon from my menubar. I rarely if ever use menu icons, and wanted to reduce the clutter.
The only guides I was able to find recommended chmodding Spotlight.app to 000, to prevent it from being run. I did this, and was happy for [...]

Keybinding irritations

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

⌘T in nearly any app which uses tabs opens a new tab. In apps without tabs, it opens the Show Fonts. This is a floating window, which cannot be closed with ⌘W, the usual binding to close a tab or window.
While it can be closed in most cases, you have to use a different keystroke, [...]

Something I did not know

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

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.

Unicode wins

Monday, May 5th, 2008

The Unicode family of encodings has just become the dominant encoding on the web.
Good news for all.