A Few OS X Tips
I was utterly stumped by an odd happening today, and to my surprise, everyone I asked was having the same problem. Stuffit Expander was taking an extremely long time to launch, and appeared to hang. If you let it bounce in the dock for long enough (sometimes as long as 3-5 minutes) it would eventually launch.
Turns out that the culprit was the “Automatic Version Check” feature, and the application was attempting to phone home. Well, Allume had their servers that respond to these checks go down recently, and as far as I can tell, they have not come back up.
The solution is to disconnect from the internet, launch Stuffit Expander (which should launch quickly with no connection to the internet), and immediately go to the preferences panel (which is among the most poorly designed I have ever seen on the Mac) find the Version Checking Panel, and turn it off.
Allume, formerly Aladdin, is one of the very sad stories of the Macintosh software development world. Stuffit was one of the original “must have” applications on the Macintosh, written by boy genius Raymond Lau. I honestly don’t know if Lau has anything to do with Allume nowadays, and honestly, I don’t want to know. For the last several years, each revision of this program has become slower, more bloated with useless features, less stable, and more annoying. There is simply no reason to use the .SIT format anymore. .ZIP support is built into Panther, and it’s transparent. This ridiculously badly programmed version check is simply the last straw. It’s time for Stuffit to simply go away.
Other, more cheerful (but mostly useless) tips
Tired of the “Welcome to Darwin!” when you launch the Terminal?
Edit /etc/motd to change the message of the day. Changing this file will require you to authenticate. If you don’t know how to find /etc/motd, or how to edit a file as root, then you probably don’t need to be editing your message of the day, sorry.
Want to change your Mac screen to a black and white negative image?
Press Control-Option-Command-8. Press it again to change it back. No, I do not know why you would want to do such a thing.
Have an internal drive with a faulty system that crashes?
Connect an external drive, and hold the option key while restarting your Mac. You will get a startup menu that allows you to select which drive you would like to boot from.
Hopefully, with today’s announcement of the Mac Mini some more folks will be buying Macs, and can use these tips. If anyone posts a question, I’ll do my best to find an answer.