Gav's Blog » os x

OS X, pdf’s, and documents with portrait and landscape pages

Gavin Treadgold — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 01:55:20 +0000

If you want something really frustrating, you should trying converting a word document that contains portrait and landscape pages to a pdf on a Mac using Adobe Acrobat. It won’t work. Which is strange for an operating system that has always prided itself on working properly and doing sensible things. For some reason OS X treats each section as a separate document, and you end up with only the last section being converted to pdf. Alas, I haven’t found a way around this yet other than reverting to an older Windows computer at work that has Adobe Acrobat installed on it. Here it works perfectly.

Speeding up OS X

Gavin Treadgold — Mon, 12 May 2008 23:36:57 +0000

Having just been through some emails with work colleagues complaing about slow performance in Windows, it got me thinking about what I could do to speed up my nearly 4-year-old Powerbook G4 with 1.25GB of RAM. I’m going to capture here some of the things I tried, and will keep updating them as I find more. It has slown down significantly under 10.5, and Mail in particular has not been very useable at times.

1. Turn off 3d dock. This creates a flattened Dock. I also turned off Magnification – Apple > Dock > Turn Magnification Off. Certainly doesn’t take as much CPU and it looks a little cleaner to boot.

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES killall Dock

2. I closed all my widgets as I had read that they can take up 10MB per widget! Seems a little excessive, but given how infrequently I use them, I can lose them for a while.

3. Upgrade the RAM – this one is going to cost some money. Currently it is running at 1.25GB and this appears to be right at the minimum required for OS X 10.5. My Page Outs are currently running at 143MB, which suggests I don’t have enough RAM. So time to look at replacing a 256MB module with a 1GB one and taking it to 2GB.

Update: 2008-05-30

After two weeks I have found the machine to be quite a bit more responsive. Sure, there are times when I have memory hungry applications open that it does slow down, but for general use – email, browsing, and working on documents, it has improved. I think the main improvement has been the bump to 2GB of RAM, but I think the other changes have helped as well. I wonder if I’ll be able to eeek the life of my laptop out to five years now!

Customising OS X 10.5 Guest account

Gavin Treadgold — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 05:26:50 +0000

Recently, I needed to tweak the guest user on my Mum’s laptop so that visitors weren’t sharing the account that they use for email and the like. Unfortunately the Guest account that comes with OS X 10.5 is not ideally configured so I needed a way to customise it to make it more friendly for guests. There is a ‘Simple Finder’ option, but it was a bit too simplistic for my needs. Anyway, I found a nice little writeup that shows how to tweak the Guest account’s configuration to make it a bit more guest friendly.

Using Time Machine upgrade a hard drive

Gavin Treadgold — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 09:23:28 +0000

As I write this, my home Mac has just about finished receiving a hard drive upgrade. I had approach the 250GB hard drive’s limit and was needing something far bigger – mainly for photos and movies from my camera.I had read online a few blogs that performed the upgrade by simply making sure that the Time Machine backup was up-to-date, and then removing the old hard drive, installing the new one, booting the OS X installer DVD, formatting the drive and restoring from backup. Sounded like a great option so I thought I’d give it a go to install a nice shiny 1TB hard drive.This blog post noted that the restore process was extremely slow. I had a quick restore with around 230GB being restored in around 2.5 hours. The expected time was a lot slower initially, I think this was because the system files were copied first, and this included a lot more small files that have more overhead associated with reading and writing than say transferring a digital photo or movie – e.g. one 10MB file is faster than transferring 1000 1KB files.It is just booting now, so I’ll know very soon whether it worked or not… stunning it has appeared to work perfectly. Now I just have to wait for Spotlight to re-index everything. But other than that, it was a painless upgrade.It also served an excellent dual purpose of actually testing that the restore process works. Very useful!Now I need to look at setting Time Machine to backup to multiple drives. It sounds like it can be done.