Why is "kernel_task" taking so much CPU?

Sometimes the fans on my Mac will ramp up, and after a minute I'll go into Activity Monitor and see "kernel_task" occupying a large portion of the CPU. What's going on?

Thanks to Howard Oakley, we have an answer.

Long-story-short, the kernel does this when your CPU or GPU gets too hot. It starts pretending to run heavy jobs to keep the fans running high, which cools the machine down.

Let's ignore the fact that-that solution seems weird and is misleading to a lot of users and trust that Apple's engineers chose the best solution they had. (You can't do anything about it anyway.)

The question to ask yourself is, why is my computer running hot if it's not the kernel_task process? Two options:

1. Some other heavy process is running hot (like photoanalysisd, the tool that scans your photos for faces)
2. The ventilation grates on your Mac are covered or plugged, preventing the fans from being able to effectively cool the processor or GPU

My advice: don't download software to limit the fan speed, and don't try to quit the kernel_task (which you won't be able to do anyway). Just clean the ventilation ports with a little bit of compressed air.

If that doesn't work, sleep your computer for awhile to let it cool back down, then wake it back up and watch Activity Monitor to see what processes are running hot while the machine is still cool, and google those process names to see what they are and what you can do about it.

Sometimes a reboot will help at this point for runaway jobs, especially on a new OS release.

HTH.

FaceTime calls via URL

This is another one with a very narrow audience (welcome Googlers!) -- To do FaceTime calls using your iPhone from the command line or from a script (on the Mac), use this URL: tel:%28<number> e.g. tel:%285555555555 At the command line, you can do it with: open 'tel:%285555555555' From AppleScript, you can actually tell FaceTime to initiate the call:

  open location "tel:%285555555555"
  delay 2
  tell application "System Events" to click button "Call" of window 1 of application process "FaceTime"

For everyone else, if you have calling from your Mac set up, just for fun, go to the Safari address bar and type "tel:%28" (no quotes) (UPDATE:  I was missing the ":") and then a phone number. It should bring up FaceTime and offer to call the number. Enjoy!

Problem installing Office 2011 updates

Grr, Microsoft -- Office 2011 won't update because it says I have to quit the "Sync Services Agent" and "Microsoft Database Daemon".

Solution: Open the terminal (use spotlight to find it quickly), and paste these two commands in, one at a time, hitting return after each:

• killall "Microsoft Database Daemon"
• 
  launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.LaunchAgent.SyncServicesAgent.plist

... then go back to the installer and try again.

For those who care, the problem here is that even if you go into Activity Monitor and quit the Sync Services Agent process, our good friend "launchd" notices that it died and restarts it.

I'm a little soft on whether unloading it actually quits the Sync Services Agent process -- it seemed to, but I don't know why. I'm also not sure whether I should be re-"load"-ing the job with launchctl -- after the Office update installed, the Sync Services Agent was relaunched somehow, so maybe Office just launched it.

Anyway hope that helps someone.

---

ps. Having worked in a big company, my guess is that the last person who truly understood the entire design of the Office suite from install to test is long gone, and we're left with myriads of people who only understand pieces of it. As they work on the parts, those parts grow increasingly incompatible with the other parts, and we're left with something that starts looking like a Frankenstein product. That's my theory, anyway.

Heartbleed

In case you've been living in a hole for the last couple days, there's been a massive bug found in the open-source (free) server software that handles secure connections. For the lay-person, the software behind the padlock you see in your browser:

... had a bug that would happily offer up chunks of computer memory if someone sent it the right type of message over the network, with no record of having done it.

Here's XKCD's attempt at an explanation.

Some Q&A:

What does that mean to me?

We're not sure that anyone knew about this before it was found. Maybe NSA, maybe Chinese or Eastern Europeans, or internet crooks, or maybe nobody...

But if someone did know, in the best (most likely) case, they got very little if any of your info. In the worst case, they got your username and password and any other personal information from the websites (and other servers) you've logged into in the past 2 years.

How does this compare to past security bugs?

Catastrophic: 11 out of 10.

How will I know if they got my info?

This is the best question, nobody knows. Your best bet is to check your bank accounts to make sure there aren't any strange charges, check other accounts you log into to make sure there isn't any strange activity, then do the steps below.

Note, not all sites are affected, only the ones using the open-source version of the software (hurray for free and open source).

Is it fixed? What do I need to do?

Check the list of sites here, and reset passwords on any sites that are affected. My short list of sites using the affected software: Facebook-YES, Pinterest-YES, Apple-NO (yay), Amazon-NO (yay), Google-YES, Microsoft-NO, Yahoo-YES, Gmail-YES, Paypal/Target/Walmart-NO, Intuit/TurboTax-YES (doh!), most banks-NO, USAA-YES (doh!).

Then check your financial accounts to make sure there's nothing fishy going on. But you should be doing this regularly anyway (given that some e-commerce websites are zero-margin stores selling you cheap stuff just so they can get your credit card number to sell to crooks).

Oh, and be sure to use different passwords on different websites, and don't make them easily guessed. Apple's iCloud Keychain is a decent/free option for managing passwords for Mac users (though oddly it doesn't work with all websites, incl. Google). 1Password is a better option, but expensive (and I hate having to pay upgrade fees every year, feels like a subscription!).

So is the internet broken now? Should I stop trusting computers completely? Seems like we're always finding bugs like this...

No, the internet's not broken. But are people happy about this? Definitely not. We all hate changing passwords and not knowing who has what information about us.

What this means is that software isn't perfect, and memory bugs are pretty hard to recognize and track down. It may also mean that NSA is really sneaky about this kind of stuff, but the story sounds a little more innocent than that. On the plus side, anyone who knew about this is probably either chasing bank accounts much bigger than yours, or not interested in money...

But the same way armies learn where soldiers need more armor, the software-development communities learn how to better protect against not only this exploit, but this type of exploit, so I wouldn't expect us to have problems with these kinds of bugs for long. Coders are now looking for them, and stand to make a name for themselves finding them.

Hang in there, we'll get through this.

Gnuplot, Mountain Lion, and Malloc errors

A quick tip for google searchers:

If your Mac crashes when exiting gnuplot, or you can't interact with your X11/XQuartz plots, make sure you have Xcode updated, then try installing from sources with this command:

  sudo ./configure --with-readline=builtin

... instead of the usual "sudo ./configure".

Mac idle flash killer

My kids are always playing flash games on our Mac. I have nothing against flash games, of course, but when the kids want to do something else, they always go, leaving the game running on the computer.

Flash is a processor-hog, which means my computer works like crazy to keep up with it all (especially if they leave 8 tabs of Barbie karaoke going), which means the computer gets really hot and I'm sure runs like that for hours, which can't be good for it...

So -- a solution!

I've written a small perl script that checks to see if the Mac's been idle more than 10 minutes, and if so, kills all flash processes owned by the current user. Firefox then shows a message where the flash process was that the flash process crashed and you can reload it any time.

Then I set up a launchd ("launch daemon") process to run my script every 10 minutes. So those processes will now run at most 20 minutes unattended before the script kills them.

Interested?

Only do this if you trust me and accept that there's no guarantee of anything. And if anyone you don't trust asks you to download files and install them on your machine like this, don't do it.

Okay, that all said, here are the two files you need.

Setup:

1. Unzip those two files to your desktop.
2. Open Terminal (Finder: Go -> Utilities, Terminal)
3. Copy/paste this command into the terminal, and press enter:
   
   mv ~/Desktop/killFlashIfIdle.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents; chmod a+x ~/Desktop/killFlashIfIdle; sudo mv ~/Desktop/killFlashIfIdle /usr/local/bin/ ; launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/killFlashIfIdle.plist; launchctl start local.killFlashIfIdle
   
   
4. Enter your password when it asks for it.

You'll know it's working if you open a flash site, then leave the computer untouched for 20 minutes -- it should kill it.

The scripts are so tiny you can round their sizes down to zero. The commands they issue are super simple (ps, perl, and ioreg), so the odds of anything awful happening are miniscule. Still, if for some reason you want to uninstall the scripts, here's how you do it:

Uninstall:

1. Open Terminal (Finder: Go -> Utilities, Terminal)
2. Copy/paste this command into the terminal, and press enter:
   
   launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/killFlashIfIdle.plist; rm ~/Library/LaunchAgents/killFlashIfIdle.plist; sudo rm /usr/local/bin/killFlashIfIdle
   
   
3. Enter your password when it asks for it.

Enjoy.

AppleScript, the Finder, Mac OS 10.8, and "get selection"

Regular readers, skip this one -- only Googlers with very specific problems are going to be interested in this one...

I use Keyboard Maestro often in conjunction with AppleScripts to make my life easier. One of my favorites is the keystroke <cmd-b> to open files with BBEdit.

Under 10.8, AppleScript and the Finder are ridiculously slow -- "get selection" takes about 5 seconds per item selected to return a list of items selected.

The solution? Change it to "get selection as alias list". That returns the list instantaneously, and seems to work about the same in most cases.

Here's the script if you're curious (view on blogger, not feedly, to see the script correctly):

---

tell application "Finder"
 set theApp to application file id "R*ch"
 set theFiles to (get selection as alias list)
 if (count of theFiles) > 0 then
  open theFiles using theApp
 else
  open theApp
 end if
 
end tell

---

Enjoy.

DropScript for Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)

Anyone remember and love the old DropScript app by Wilfredo Sánchez?

Well, I found the source code, but it wouldn't compile on my machine, so I played around with it for awhile and got it to work under Mountain Lion.

At this point I'll note that I am *not* a software developer or Obj. C programmer, and only got it to work because I've hung around the platform long enough to know the terms and am able to use Google. There might be stupid stuff in the binary and I wouldn't know it (e.g. artificially limiting it to certain OSes or architectures -- though I did check the source code for URLs, email and IP addresses making sure it isn't overtly doing anything dangerous...).

Anyway, if you're interested in a binary, leave a comment and I'll see if I can help you.

In the meantime, for those who got DropConvert and DropResize scripts from me ages ago that have now broke under Mountain Lion, try these. ;)

Random thoughts

My life is officially full — my inbox-of-life has not stopped growing since my son was born. The stack of unanswered emails, unfinished projects, and unread magazines are all simultaneously growing despite my best efforts.

What does one do in this situation? Prioritize! Be sure to do the most important stuff first. As one would expect, blogging is a ways down on that list...

But I've had a bunch of things on my mind lately and I'd like to get them out:

• The iPhone 5 - Taller, lighter, faster — a miracle of modern engineering. Everything I loved about my old phone, and a bit better.
• Apple - One of Steve Jobs' earliest mantras was that a brand is about trust. Apple under him never traded that trust for money, and the current management looks to carry on that legacy. There's an example for other companies (and individuals whose name is their brand) to follow.
• Age - Anybody else notice that they're getting older?
• Brain - Turns out I got one of the heaviest doses of anyone affected by the CT overdose problem. What are the odds that I get a migraine that looks like a stroke, and my first and only CT scan is an overdose? I've learned that getting an X-ray is like trying to see what's inside your car by putting it in front of a large white sheet, and shooting it full of holes with a machine gun, then looking at where the bullets made it through to hit the sheet. X-rays can burn or kill cells — I had really weird effects for weeks afterward, the effect of burning all that tissue. Cancer can happen when an X-ray happens to hit a piece of DNA just right to mess it up without killing it. Fortunately, I just had an MRI and it came back clean — no signs of brain cancer yet. Good news, though most cells in your brain grow very slowly, so I may have cancer, but might not know it for 10 or more years. By that time, we may have cancer figured out.
• Obama - Well, I think I was right. Really complicated healthcare reform was passed, but my healthcare costs continue to climb rapidly. Jobs, overall economy, deficits, foreign relations — I mostly hear blame of Bush and other excuses for the current state of affairs. He got Osama, but lost a few planes we didn't know existed. Other than that, most of the news I see about him relate to him hanging out with celebrities.
• Romney seems troubled. If I were him, I'd feel the same way. As Scott Adams says, "the electorate is full of idiots", and in order to win he has to tailor his remarks to whatever group he's talking to, which when taken as a whole looks almost like a different person talking. That's got to be stressful for a very principled person. But I get the feeling that most people don't want a principled person in office because they've come to distrust all principle. I hope he wins, he's obviously a man who knows how to accomplish his goals, and has the determination to do so, and has an amazing track record. But I also don't expect the election to even be close.

Apple working on Flashback removal tool

Posted yesterday on an Apple Support document (via AppleInsider):

Apple is developing software that will detect and remove the Flashback malware.

Flashback Trojan for Macs

At 600k infections, the Flashback Trojan for Macs appears to be real. Best I can tell, a vulnerability with Java lets the attacker try to install something, and if the user enters their username and password it gets in elevated privileges. According to Gruber apparently even "sophisticated" people have been fooled into it.

Us Mac users have been spoiled.

So what to do? Well, if you trust me, download this script:

http://head-lights.s3.amazonaws.com/files/FlashbackChecker_v0.1.app.zip

... double-click the .zip file to decompress the .app, then double-click the .app file. It's a simple Applescript that checks for the 5 evidences of Flashback that F-secure, Mashable, and cnet contributors have found. It'll pop-up a dialog telling you whether you need to worry or not.

If you're infected (or if you don't trust me =) ), that cnet link can help you through it yourself.

Apple already has a fix, so if you're clean, just update your system if you haven't lately.

You might be tempted to think this marks the end of virus-free Macs -- and it might be, but I doubt it. Note, you still had to enter your username and password for it to get installed, so if you open your door to a surly guy holding a pipe-wrench behind his back, it's hard to blame the people who made your door locks if he comes in. And it's already fixed. Also, Apple's new OS (Mountain Lion) enables whitelisting (sandboxing/code-signing), meaning that if you have the setting turned on, only apps that have gone through Apple's screening process will be allowed to run, and even then they're only allowed to do things they have permission to do.

* UPDATED with info from Macworld story, apparently it installs just by visiting a malicious website.

Graphing Calculator (Lite) is here!

In August 1996 I had just returned from Ecuador, and needed to get registered for the fall semester at the U of A in Tucson. I ended up crashing with some good friends Chris and Ivy Bonhorst who I'd known there in 1993 before I left. While I was there Chris had a PowerMac 6100 on his desk, one of the first PowerPC Macs, and he said I could poke around and try it out. I'd been away from computers for 2 years, so playing with the newest 7.5 (?) OS was fun and exciting...

I soon saw an application called "Graphing Calculator", and upon launching it very quickly came up with this:

It wasn't a static image either, it's like a sheet floating in space that you can grab with the mouse and spin in 3-d. Zooming and panning and animating were all perfectly fluid -- no ugly stepping, no entering in plot bounds, no "plot" button to re-click every time the view changes. Any mathematical relationship I could think of was instantly visualized. Any piece of the equation could have an "n" inserted which lets you animate that piece and see the sensitivity to that parameter. It was amazing! 2-d plots are great too, but my mind quickly was unsatisfied with only 2 dimensions. 4-d and beyond suddenly made perfect sense.

Within minutes I had knocked out half my unresolved math questions. What a thrill! Not only that, I'd never seen a computer do anything like that before, I didn't think computers would ever be fast enough to do anything close to what I was seeing right in front of my eyes.

And this was 1996. 66 MHz.

I immediately knew I needed a Mac, and worked like crazy to get one. Graphing Calculator sold me.

The story of how Graphing Calculator got on the Macs is crazy. Crazier still is that Apple didn't buy the guy out (I'm guessing his price was too high).

The advent of OS X in the early 2000s brought with it a crappy "Grapher" app replacing Graphing Calculator. GC was still available on the website, but it was $100 (?!), which I couldn't ever justify spending. For me that took all the fun of math back out of the Mac and has been a sore spot for me for the last 9 years.

Well, for anyone else out there like me, the wait is finally over. $10 on the App Store, the "lite" version has everything I missed. I didn't even blink between seeing the screenshots/price and clicking the "Buy now" button.

Math is already more exciting again. =)

How to "move" instead of "copy" a file into your iTunes Library

Handbrake users, rejoice! This seems to work:

1. Make a "temp" folder inside your Music/iTunes/iTunes Music folder
2. Whenever you get a new file you want iTunes to manage, e.g. from Handbrake, drag it to that temp folder
3. Then drag it from there into iTunes

It should disappear from the temp folder almost immediately. Note, you need to have "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" in the Advanced Preferences pane.

If you do this a lot, try making an alias to that temp folder on your desktop.

If you *really* do this a lot, leave a comment and I can probably be persuaded to make a folder action script that will automatically send those files to iTunes when dropped there.

(Update, I wasn't the first to discover this.)

So, do people actually like the iPad?

See the results. Scroll down to see the charts. (Via daringfireball.net)

And no, I don't have one yet. The new Hulu Plus has promise, I'm excited to see where that goes.

"Why would anyone buy a Mac now?"

There was a bit of a lively discussion the other night about Macs and PCs. A friend had picked up an Acer Laptop for about $350 with a pretty impressive spec sheet (15" monitor, dual-core processor, 4 GB RAM, 256 MB graphics card, Windows 7). He had looked into Macs but the closest thing to that was the MacBook Pro 15" for $1600. Ouch, what a price difference!

Then he poses the question: "Why would anybody buy a Mac now?"

Hmm. Well, I can't imagine he came to me looking for objectivity, I'm fairly well biased. Still, are we really that disparate now? A $1250 premium for a Mac laptop does seem pretty onerous, especially since Macs and PCs were supposedly on par pricewise for awhile there.

We should probably mention here that at least some of that cost savings on those PC laptops is advertising -- apparently companies pay PC manufacturers to include their software on the machine. So when you boot it up, you get a ton of ads, spyware, and other junk you have to turn around and clean back off. What a mess. I'd pay $100 just to not have to mess with that. So we're up to $450, but that's a far cry from $1600.

So what'd I say to him?

I told him different people value things differently, and I could think of at least 25 things I valued enough more on the Mac to make it worth it for me.

"No way!" he says. "You can't think of 25 things."

Easy:

1. No viruses. What is that peace of mind worth?


2. Awesome process scheduler. The mac prioritizes the user interface much better than Windows. Doesn't seem to matter how busy the computer is, I can still move the mouse around, switch windows, etc. Windows (and linux for that matter) have always let the interface suffer when the machine gets busy.


3. Window manager not in the kernel. Huh? This means that the part of the OS that draws the windows is wedged into the core of the OS, but runs as a separate process. Why is this good? Ever have your Windows-windows stall, i.e. stop drawing? You drag them and they act like a cutout of that part of the screen? Happens all the time on Windows, but rarely on the Mac (actually never, but I hesitate to use that word).


4. Time Machine. Plug in a spare drive, accept the OS's offer to make it a Time Machine drive, and it builds you a back up, taking regular snapshots as incremental backups (but not wasting drive space!). Their solution is quite elegant (uses unix hard links), each snapshot looks and acts like your entire disk file structure. Very nice!


5. Spotlight. Fast system-wide contextual search. Maybe Windows 7 does this better, but none of the Windows versions I've ever used have done this well.


6. Expose/Spaces. Supposedly Windows 7 just stole this from the Mac, but I'm guessing they did a half-keister job of it. I love being able to invoke expose or spaces in the middle of a drag.


7. Unix. The Mac is a unix machine under the hood, and it's very nice. I have written lots of perl and awk scripts to do stuff for me, and it's great being able to have perl create emails for Entourage (Mac equivalent of Outlook), or to pipe the output of a unix command to my text editor. Also has X11, so much of the open-source stuff from the linux community is available as well. I love rsync. Love that I can type "open ." in a terminal window and have the Finder open a window of that subdirectory; or drag a file from the Finder into a Terminal window and have it insert the path to that file. SSH/sshd built in. Find. Apache webserver. Super stable. Etc.


8. Robust networking. I come and go on my laptops, and they always just happily connect to the network wherever I am, wired or wireless. I could never get Windows to do this.


9. Column view in the Finder. I've grown to love this view. The sidebar shortcuts are also a huge time saver.


10. Long battery life. My work laptop gets 5-6 hours off a single battery charge. My home laptop is older, but usually gets 2-3. I was lucky to get 45 minutes out of my Windows laptop.


11. Built-in PDF generation, editing. Anything you can print in the OS you can make a PDF of. I use this *all the time*. Also, you can delete and reorder pages, then save a copy. All built-in.


12. No reboots necessary. I seriously can't remember the last time I restarted either my work or home laptops. I put off OS updates just because I don't want to have to reboot. I love an OS with long-term stability!


13. Good sleepers. I just close the lid, and when I open the lid, they're back up and usable faster than I can get the lid opened all the way. My Windows laptop would always drain the battery whenever I just closed the lid, and the machine would be off the next morning when I opened it back up. I wanted to drop-kick it into the parking lot. On the Mac, when the battery's about to die it writes the contents of RAM to the hard disk, and when you power up it reloads the RAM in about 10 seconds and you're back in business. Awesome.


14. Multi-touch trackpad. Windows laptop trackpad stunk -- no multi-touch, inconsistent response, etc. Mac laptop is a joy -- 2 finger scrolling, 3 finger page turns, 4 finger expose control, and more.


15. Quick window zoom. Hold down control and swipe 2 fingers up or down on the trackpad (or hold down control and spin the mouse wheel). Fun, and I use it all the time.


16. Best of 2 worlds. A platform with native MS Office, Photoshop, Quicktime, and unix terminal all in one. Any other platforms do that? I can also run Windows and Linux in a virtual machine, having all 3 platforms on one machine.


17. Great keyboards. I love the new flat keyboards, they have a nice touch.


18. Auto detect monitors. Everybody at work who plugs their Windows laptop into a projector or external monitor has come to expect trouble. Not me, monitors come up fine, even hot-plugged.


19. iChat with screen sharing. If mom calls needing help with her computer, I can be looking at and controlling her screen in about 20 seconds, all with built-in software. Awesome. Pretty rare, though, she doesn't need help very often.


20. One-click flash drive eject. Why does Windows make this so hard? Snow Leopard made ejecting flash drives a joy, no more "you can't eject this drive because an application is using it..." errors.


21. Built-in screenshots. I can take a snapshot of any part of my screen with a single keystroke, very cool.


22. Built-in zip and unzip. No WinZip necessary. I prefer tarballs myself, and also has bzip2.


23. Built-in dictionary/thesaurus. I use this all the time. You can even do a spotlight search for a word and one of the options is the definition in the Dictionary app.


24. Applescript. System-wide almost user-friendly scripting tool. Lets you do things like automatically build a spreadsheet from the contents of an email filtered through a unix command, then email it to someone, all automatically. Does require some skill but not a CS degree.


25. Quicklook. Highlight any file (or files) in the Finder and press space and get an instant preview of it. Another huge timesaver.


26. Mounts and compatibility. NFS, SMB, AFP, FTP, VNC connections supported natively (probably more). Macs can read FAT32/NTFS drives, but PCs can't read Mac HFS+ drives.


27. Disk images. Built-in support for encrypted and non-encrypted drive images. I store all my sensitive stuff on one of these and don't worry about my laptop getting stolen.


28. Acceleration sensors. Laptops have acceleration sensors such that if it detects that it's falling, it quickly parks the drive heads on my hard disk before it hits the ground to keep from damaging my drive.


29. Drivers. Almost no futzing with drivers. With my current batch of hardware I didn't have to install goofy drivers for any of it, not my printer, scanner, digital camera, or digital video camera. Ever try installing a printer under Windows? Never works the first try, often not the second either.


30. Unobtrusive. Somehow on PCs I feel like I'm always tripping over the interface, it's always asking me dumb questions or notifying me of things I don't care about. Or not working for reasons I can't determine (and my Windows using friends can't either). The Mac works, and stays out of my way and lets me work.

There's 30, want me to keep going? =)

Malware on the Mac

I've said it before, but after this story from Computerworld, I'll say it again: your Mac can't stop you from downloading and running malware*. This time it's video codecs from Russian websites. "For helping you play diss videos our vebsite, download diss program and it help you."

These days, as long as the website looks reputable you're pretty much okay. That may not be the case forever, though, so make sure you're being careful. "But hey, how am I supposed to know what a reputable web site looks like?!" Here are the websites for a few of my favorite Mac apps: Firefox, Keyboard Maestro, MarsEdit, CSSEdit, Transmit, 1Password, BBEdit, Delicious Library, Google Earth, MacTracker, and Adobe Photoshop.

Caveat websurfer.

---

* "Malware" is not a virus. Viruses self replicate, often without the user even knowing. Viruses are rampant on Windows. Malware, on the other hand, is a program that does bad stuff that the user installs willfully, usually because the they think it's a game or free software.

Canon networked printer and Snow Leopard

A very short post -- a couple days ago Canon released new drivers for their MX700 (and probably others) that makes it so they work over the network with Snow Leopard. Hooray.

What I still don't understand is how SL is supposed to automatically download the drivers you need for your printer -- how's that supposed to work, and why didn't it?

BTW, wanna know what *really* changed for Snow Leopard? John Siracusa answers that in a massive 30-page in-depth review.

Snow Leopard: First impressions

A few first impressions of Apple's new OS:

• Easy install. The simplest (and therefore best) install experience I've seen.
• Snappier. A little, at least -- I haven't really noticed huge increases on anything yet, though. Maybe 10-20%?
• Weirdness on first run. For the first few minutes, spotlight couldn't find any of my apps -- then a few minutes later it could. System Preferences (under the Apple menu) wouldn't launch, then a few minutes later it would.
• Keyboard Maestro/Spaces weirdness. Any of my Keyboard Maestro macros that switch spaces occasionally require me to run them twice for them to actually switch. Not sure what's going on there...
• More disk space! Hmm, where did that extra 10GB come from on my disk? Uh, maybe some of it came from here -- a "GB" represents about 74 MB fewer actual bytes in the count now, so what looks like an extra 10 GB is actually closer to 9 under the old accounting.
• Scanner. Preview can grab images directly from my scanner.

There doesn't appear to be anything else that's really changed.

One thing I'm really excited about (but haven't seen yet) is in ejecting disks -- the old OS would just basically say, "No, this disk is in use..." SL will actually tell the apps to let go of that disk, and if they won't, it tells you which ones are hanging on. Very nice.

Worth $29? I guess so -- though from what I've seen I wouldn't break any speed limits getting to the Apple store.

---

UPDATE: My mom tried installing SL and in the middle of the install it seemed to crash, so she force-quit and restarted, only to discover that those steps corrupted the HFS+ disk catalog. Proceed with caution, and make sure you have all your stuff backed up (including those painfully large Entourage databases).

BBEdit "invisibles" characters

Thinking about building a font for BBEdit, and wondering what characters it uses to represent invisible characters, like spaces and tabs?

Of course you're not.

Unless you got here via a google-search, in which case you might be. Here's what the BB-folks came back with:

• Carriage returns: 0x00AC (172), unicode name "NOT SIGN" (¬)
• Nonprinting characters: 0x00BF (191), unicode name "INVERTED QUESTION MARK" (¿)
• Non-breaking spaces: 0x2022 (8226), unicode name "BULLET" (•)
• Tabs: 0x2206 (8710), unicode name "INCREMENT" (∆)
• Spaces: 0x25CA (9674), unicode name "LOZENGE" (◊)

Hope that helps somebody out there.

Firefox 3.5 tip

Finding that Firefox is opening links in the current tab in Firefox instead of in a new tab as you'd prefer? Me too! =)

This seemed to fix it:

1. Type "about:config" in your browser location bar, then accept the warning
2. Right click in the window and select "New" -> "Integer"
3. Paste in "browser.link.open_external" as the name, and "3" as the value (no quotes)

If that doesn't work, type in "browser.link.open" in the filter bar, then right click on each of the preferences that match and select "reset".

That seemed to work for me.

Good luck!