Cowell Computer Consulting

Sites that incorporate flash are often draining your battery. You can disable flash from automatically loading using safari stand.

• Install Safari Stand: http://hetima.com/safari/stand-e.html
• Go under the Stand menu
• Choose SafariStand Setting...
• click on advanced
• check load Plug-in manually in the flash section
• restart safari

Unless you're one of those people who browse with your activity monitor open, you're probably not aware that many sites are sucking your battery dry. Many sites incorporate flash, in particular to display annoying advertisements. These little flash tidbits are often poorly written and will make your CPU work really hard, which will drain your battery. Now when your browser encounters flash, you can click the box where the flash would have been to load it.

You can also add exceptions to the site alteration area. For example, you might want to let flash automatically load in if you were at youtube.com.

Posted by Luke Cowell on July 02, 2008 at 07:18 AM

Some people have been having problems with the Mail.app rules in Leopard. Mail filtering rules somehow don't seem to be working the way they should.

A little sleuthing let me to a file in ~/Library/Mail called MessageRules.plist. This file contains all the rules you've created as well as the apple rules (eg. junkmail rules and 'news from apple' rules). What I noticed was that this file also contained very old rules that I had created, but were not visible in the rules list in Mail.app.

My hunch was that the file had become corrupt. So I removed it as well as MessageRules.plist.backup and restarted mail. I made some new rules and it worked! I actually think this issue may have started before I upgraded to leopard, so it's worth a shot in Tiger as well.

In Summary, remove these files:

~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist ~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist.backup

Wait, that's not tedious! You said this would be tedious! OK, as promised here's the tedious part:

Go and remake all your rules in apple mail again.

Ta-Da!

Posted by Luke Cowell on December 20, 2007 at 08:48 AM

This will be a useful read for you if you are looking to speed up the time between when you start the login process and when your key startup items are loaded.

There are a plethora of tutorials out there on how to improve your login startup times in OS X. Some suggest adding delays between startup items. Some suggest using an applescript to do your launching.

Time to usefulness

It is possible to measure the amount of time that has passed until all your login items have loaded, but let's get real, many of the startup items could be started at any point within the first few minutes logging in. Unfortunately, when your login items (from your account preferences) are executed they are all started at once. This means that most of the programs aren't ready until all the programs are ready. We should then be measuring how long it takes before you can use your key startup items, rather than timing how long it takes until all startup items are launched.

The problem with the applescript solution

I've seen some very elegant applescript solutions. For example:

 tell application "Firefox" to launch
 tell application "Apple Help" to launch

Unfortunately, when you use an applescript in this way, the applescript will scan through your applications folder to find the apps you've told it to launch. That means lots and lots of unneeded disk activity, which is your primary bottleneck on startup.

Shell script

I recommend writing a shell script. This code sucks, but it works. I've added a start delay aka. startup as this is called with the other startup items and I've added delays aka. between between the items to stagger the launch process.

#!/bin/sh

startup=15
between=1
sleep $startup
open /Applications/smcFanControl.app/
sleep $between
open /Applications/Spirited\ Away.app/
sleep $between
open /Applications/Mozy.app/Contents/Resources/Mozy\ Status.app/
sleep $between
open /Applications/Microsoft\ AutoUpdate.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft\ AU\ Daemon.app/
sleep $between
open /Applications/Palm/Transport\ Monitor/
sleep $between
open /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/iTunesHelper.app/

You may need to wrap this in an applescript ala:

do shell script "mystartupscript.sh"

add this to your login items.

Pros

-I can start using quicksilver much more quickly now.

-My computer is more responsive in the first couple minutes after login.

Cons

-How often do I actually restart my computer ? Rarely, so the benefit is minimal.

-More difficult to maintain than using standard login items.

I'd also recommend that you check out Lingon for speeding up your startup in general.

http://lingon.sourceforge.net/

Update: Avi Flax has some comments about startup optimization

http://aviflax.com/post/os-x-tip-staggered-login-items/

Posted by Luke Cowell on May 17, 2007 at 07:08 PM

I been using quicksilver for a while and it's a great tool. One thing that disappointed me was that when building triggers I could figure out how to couple several commands together. I found this article which does a great explanation of it.

You need advanced features enabled etc. I won't re-explain what the previous author did a great job of explaining, but I will explain how to overcome one limitation they mentioned.

How do I order and add delays between commands ?

-Enable the Terminal Commands module

-For the sake of a simple illustration I'm going to use large type commands. Create and save 2 large type commands using the encapsulate [^+Enter] and save commands.

-Enter the following:

.sleep 5 [tab]

run command in shell [enter]

[^+Enter] (to encapsulate command)

Save command to file [enter]

Let's try it out. Use the comma trick to group your 3 commands together and then choose to run. Neet - delay.

Extending the concepts

-you can use the comma trick to build triggers with multiple commands coupled together.

-you can change the delay between commands by modifying the number after sleep.

-you can couple as many commands together as you want using this technique, adding delays when required.

Posted by Luke Cowell on May 10, 2007 at 07:50 AM

How many of you have a sticky note or a text file on your computer with sensitive information in it ? We sometimes forget that it would be possible to have our computers stolen. Often times the information on our computers is of more value that the computer itself.

Keep your information safe using keychain access (located under /Applications/Utilities).

Keychain will unlock the login keychain on your computer using your account password. If your passwords match then you want have to enter your keychain password on login. This is important to note because it means that anything that resides in the login keychain is not really protected if someone can gain access to your account.

1. Open Keychain Access.
2. Create a new keychain if you don't already have one. (File->New Keychain).
3. Create a new secure note in that keychain (File->New Secure Note Item).
4. Give your note a name and enter your secure information.

Don't forget to lock your keychain (Apple-L) before closing the app.

Posted by Luke Cowell on April 30, 2007 at 06:51 PM