The Warne Account

The personal blog of Dan Warne, Australian geek and tech writer

Archive for category Software

How to tweak OS X Lion to disable window zooming and other eye-candy

Jul 30

Posted by Dan Warne in Apple, Mac, Software | No Comments

lion 300x169 How to tweak OS X Lion to disable window zooming and other eye candy
Don't like Mac OS X 10.7 Lion's annoying window zoom effect for new windows? Thanks to Tomas Franz, you can disable it. Open Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and copy and paste the following line:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

You then need to restart any apps that are running for them to get the new setting.

Hurrah! Snappy window performance again.

Also, if you want to restore CMD+D to being "don't save" as it was in previous versions of OS X, you can do that with this command:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSSavePanelStandardDesktopShortcutOnly -bool YES

Tags: , , ,

How to backup your iPhoto library to Dropbox – and resize images to save space

Sep 23

Posted by Dan Warne in Apple, How to, Mac, Photography, Software, Technology | Comments off

how to backup iphoto to dropbox How to backup your iPhoto library to Dropbox and resize images to save space

iphoto library finder info How to backup your iPhoto library to Dropbox and resize images to save spaceIf, like me, you took Steve Jobs at his word when he said iPhoto 6 onwards could support up to 250,000 images, and you've been piling them in ever since, you've probably got a very large iPhoto library.

Mine is currently sitting at 66,431 images and is 220GB on disk. It's so big that it convinced me to part with $1800 (Australian) to get the 512GB SSD Apple is making an option with the latest MacBook Pros. Obviously, at that price, it's a ludicrously overpriced option at $3.50/GB compared to smaller, cheaper SSDs, typically around $2.50/GB, or mechanical hard drives at about $0.14/GB, but I wanted to have a boot drive on which I could have my full iPhoto library so I could work with pictures much more quickly (and boy, does it make a big difference.)

However, one problem I've been seeking an answer to for years now is how to backup my photos off-site, in case a house fire takes out both my MacBook Pro and my Time Capsule backup. (Or, if my house was burgled and both the MacBook Pro and Time Capsule were stolen — which actually happened to a family member of mine.)

Simply dropping the iPhoto library into an online backup program like Carbonite or Mozy isn't viable, because uploading 200GB of data takes so long that it basically never completes — or the backup system gets so far behind that you'd be losing a lot of new photos if your house burned down.

The 'ideal' solution I had in mind was to do Time Machine backups constantly to my Time Capsule, as well as a fallback backup of downscaled resolution photos to an online backup location. I like Dropbox (my referral link included in that link) because it works so quietly and reliably in the background, but you could use any online backup service. Although some people might say that backing up the full resolution photos is important to them, to me, the most important thing is making sure those frozen memories don't get lost — and if I downscale them to fit within 1920x1920px, then I still have a high definition, albeit not camera-resolution, version of the photo.

I've now figured out how to do it! Full details after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why do I get a second Firefox dock icon?

May 1

Posted by Dan Warne in Apple, Firefox, Software | 3 Comments

One thing that really annoys me about Firefox on Mac OS X is the way it spawns a second dock icon for itself after it applies any sort of update to itself (including plugin updates).

Here's a screenshot of the offender in action (I removed some icons from the middle of the dock to make it easier to see:

dock problem Why do I get a second Firefox dock icon?

For those of you who might assume I am a moron, no, I don't have two copies of Firefox, and no, I am not running one copy of Firefox from a DMG or anything like that.

Nobody on the web seems to have found a solution for it yet — as far as I can tell from Googling. There are several bugs on Mozilla's Bugzilla system related to it, and the main one seems to be bug 432520, which is unfortunately not yet assigned to a developer for resolution.

One of the big problems has been that nobody's been able to define a clear set of steps to reproduce the problem. I believe the second dock icon appears after Firefox auto-updates an extension at startup time, and then silently restarts itself to allow the extension update to take effect. However, it's difficult to test because the hypothesis requires an updated extension to be available — which only happens every now-and-again.

Anyone else got ideas?

pixel Why do I get a second Firefox dock icon?