Having grown frustrated with VoiceMac… I started googling and found this github script that will patch GrowlVoice so that it actually works again. Awesome!

It’s too bad that the developer won’t fix the original app, but hey, it looks like he is kind of successful with other things.

1 – Restart or reboot. You obviously don’t want to have to reboot every hour, but if you haven’t rebooted in a couple days, this gets you off to a clean start.
2 – Make sure Parallels isn’t running. While it is great to use windows apps, using Parallels basically means your computer is running another computer in addition to itself.
3 – Try disconnecting external drives. Your mac does all sorts of stuff to try and keep it’s disks organized, disconnect (at least for a few) to see if that makes it run faster.
4 – Use Activity Monitor to see what is keeping the computer busy…
Run Activity Monitor by using Spotlight to find it…

Once it is running, you will see a list of all the running processes… I like to go to the CPU tab and sort by % CPU:

In that screenshot, you can see that iPhoto is currently holding my computer hostage. I was doing a big import, it’s not usually that bad.
Other stuff that tends to be obscure but problematic:

• mds = spotlight indexing
• mdworker = something else for spotlight
• backupd = time machine

You can look at the other tabs too – see if memory or disk shows something off the charts. Here’s my memory (I have 8gb installed).

Here’s my disk usage:

Similar to the cpu table, you can sort by different columns to find what is the biggest user of disk activity or memory…
5 – Turn off Time Machine (at least temporarily)From System Preferences (apple menu in upper left –> System Preferences…)

You can turn it off for a few hours to see if that helps (give yourself a reminder to turn it back on). You can also exclude certain folders from being backed up via Time Machine. Here’s a screenshot where I’ve told it not to back up my external drives. You can set individual folders here, like the Parallels folder.

If Time Machine is causing the slowness, you can use something like Time Machine Editor to have it only run when you’re not doing work.
6 – Turn off Spotlight, at least for external drives.

If you turn off spotlight completely, just be aware that when you turn it back on, it will try to scan your hard drive again… typically takes several hours where your computer will be slow again. I would turn it on again before going to bed so that it could run overnight.
Similar to Time Machine, I have it exclude certain folders, especially on external drives. Otherwise, it tries to look at the drives to make sure it can find stuff when you search for it… You can also uncheck some of the categories in the “Search Results” tab — I would leave Applications checked at a minimum, other stuff is a judgment call.

7 – Turn off unneeded Login Items

I’ve got a lot of stuff running when I log in, but they are all things I use regularly. If you see stuff you don’t use, or don’t use frequently, you can remove it.
Sometimes you have to click the padlock to make changes… not obvious if you’re not used to making changes like this.

There are some helpful articles online too…

From the article:

The URL scheme for opening website is far more useful for me. You can prepend “op” to a normal Safari URL to open it directly into 1Password. For instance, typing ophttp://google.com in Safari will launch Google in 1Password’s browser. Therefore, I made a bookmarklet that you can click in Safari to open the current website in 1Password even faster; simply create a bookmarklet with this code:

• javascript:window.location=’op’+(window.location.href);

…And 1Password will launch the website you’re currently viewing. I tested the bookmarklet in Safari and Chrome for iOS; it has become a huge timesaver to quickly log into websites that I access on a frequent basis.

@ECHO ON

echo %0 %*

pause;

Also useful:

@ECHO ON

echo %0 %* > launch.txt

notepad.exe launch.txt

pause;

@echo off

for %%I IN (..\lib\*.jar) DO SET CP=!CP!;%%I

java -cp %CP% com.example.Launcher

And also for shell scripts:

#! /bin/bash

CP="."
for i in ../lib/*.jar;
do
		  CP=$i:$CP;
done

java -cp $CP com.example.Launcher

pmset -g log

Using this, I was able to see the following entry that was slowing things down…

* Domain: applicationresponse.timedout
- Message: Kernel cupsd com.apple.powermanagement.applicationresponse.timedout 30000 ms
- Time: 4/4/11 11:52:59 AM EDT
- Signature: cupsd
- UUID: 1D806166-A5FA-498C-A769-8A29FB2A15F3
- Result: Noop
- Response time (ms): 30000

That last line “Response time (ms): 30000” means that it was waiting 30 seconds for this process to finish!

Thanks to googling, I was able to find that you can access the CUPS Print System from your browser by going to http://127.0.0.1:631/jobs/. I deleted the old print jobs that the power management system was attempting to resolve on standby, and now my laptop goes into standby much more quickly.

Ever since the PowerBook G4, Apple notebooks use a system called Safe Sleep to restore your computer to working order after being left unattended for a while. With Safe Sleep, the current session is written to both RAM and your hard disk — RAM because waking up is faster that way, and the hard disk so that the system can safely go into hibernation if the battery drains while it’s asleep.

Your computer will go into standby faster if you turn this off. You can also save some space on your hard drive by disabling Safe Sleep, and removing the sleep image. You’ll still be able to sleep your computer, but there’s no zero-battery safety net anymore. Your MacBook can go a very long time in RAM-only sleep mode on a full battery, so this should rarely affect your life. But keep in mind that if the battery does run out, you’ll lose any unsaved work.

This Macworld article goes into greater detail about Safe Sleep, but for our purposes, the short version is this:

1. Open up Terminal.
2. Type “sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0” without the quotes, and hit Enter.
3. Enter your password when prompted.
4. You are now using RAM-only / “old school” sleep mode.
5. Now type “cd /var/vm” and hit Enter.
6. Finally: “sudo rm sleepimage”
7. This will delete the existing sleep image file on your hard drive, reclaiming that space for future use.

select dob, 
    floor(datediff(day, dob, getDate()) / 365.25) as age 
    from personnel

Download this file and put it in AquaDataStudio.app/Content/Resources/Java.

Someone else came up with this solution, but I have no idea of the original source.