• Open the Utility called “Activity Monitor” which lets you see all the running processes and kill them at will
• If your machine is moving too slow to try and launch a new app, hold down Command + Alt + Esc to bring up  a dialogue that will let you kill any open apps
• Open Terminal and type “killAll <appname>” where <appname>” is the name of the application (i.e. “killAll Mail” will kill mail)

This allows you to see the software that others are using, both the most popular and the “upcoming” stuff. It’s a great way to spend a few minutes looking for a new download to make your day easier.

Where things really shine though are with AppFresh. This desktop app scans your system for all your installed software and shows you a list of everything. It then checks to see which ones are out of date and can update them to the latest version for you. With a click of a button, all your installed software gets updated. But in addition to this great functionality, AppFresh integrates with iusethis, so that after it scans your system for apps you have installed, you can then quickly go down the list and mark the ones you actually use and it will update your profile on iusethis.com.

The two big benefits you get are the ability to see what software your friends are using and, this is key, when you move to another computer (say, a new laptop or something) you can install AppFresh and connect it with your iusethis account. AppFresh will then tell you all the software that you use that isn’t installed yet and then install it for you (assuming it’s free or shareware).

How cool is that?

Here’s my list of software I use.

I needed something to remind me to save my work periodically so I whipped up a quick growl script to pop up every couple of minutes. It’s easier than you think.

1. You’ll need Growl of course, so download it. Install the app as you normally would and then copy the contents of the installation to your desktop into a folder of its own (to install the command line tools it has to be on a writable disk).
2. You’ll also need the Xcode tools for Mac OSX development (specifically the ‘make’ command). So download Xcode and install it.
3. Assuming you copied the Growl installer files to your desktop, open a terminal and type in the following:

   cd ~/Desktop/Growl/Extras/growlnotify
   make install

4. Now you can send a growl statement to your screen. You can do that in the terminal just to test your progress by typing:

   growlnotify --appIcon Xcode Build complete -m 'growlnotify has finished building'

5. Now we need to set up a notification that will remind us periodically. Here’s my command:

   while sleep 240; do growlnotify --appIcon 'Microsoft Word' Save fool -m 'Save your work fool!' ; done

   This command will prompt me every 240 seconds (i.e. 4 minutes)  with the application icon for MS Word with a notice to save my work.

6. If you want you can save this as a text file somewhere (say, your desktop) as something like ’savereminder.command’ if you want to be able to easily run it again. Make sure you’re saving it as plain text (if you’re using textedit for example, choose Format > Make Plain Text). Finally, you need to make it executable, so in terminal type:

   chmod +x ~/Desktop/savereminder.command

This is all great and fun and all, but where it really shines is with soft links. Soft links are aliases to directories and files on your computer so that to the operating system they look like they are in two places but it’s really the same file. Dropbox forces you to put any files you want synchronized with your online account into the Dropbox folder in your profile. But using soft links you can link to directories and files elsewhere so that they are synchronized even if they aren’t in that folder.

Let’s say you’re working on a term paper and you keep all your term papers in your Documents directory in a sub-directory called “papers” (~/Documents/papers/). You could link to the papers directory from your Dropbox folder and then all your papers are backed up constantly. If you accidentally delete it, or if you want to go back in time and get yesterday’s version, Dropbox lets you. But it also means that if you have a laptop or another computer with Dropbox installed on it, you could create the same soft link so that the same directory (~/Documents/papers/) exists  on that computer. Now if you move from one computer ot the next your work is already there waiting for you.

You can even get creative and synchronize application data, so that all your preferences follow you, for example. I use a program called Journler to organize all my notes and to-do items. By soft linking the data directory into my Dropbox I can move to another computer (my laptop) and open Journler there and see what I was looking at on my Desktop machine. You could do this with your Downloads folder or even your iTunes library (if it’s not too big - Dropbox gives you 2GB of storage free, but more costs $$).

So, how do you create a soft link? I do it in the terminal like so:

cd ~/Dropbox
ln -s ~/Documents/papers

The above example would create a link to papers. That’s all there is to it.

1. Pop in Kalyway’s 10.5.2 disk and install OSX as usual
2. After it finishes and you get the welcome video, it’ll ask you if you want to transfer settings from another Mac. Here you choose to restore from TimeMachine. This restores nearly everything, except the kernel, which means you are running the one on the installer (10.5.2).
3. You may, at this point, need to install a few drivers and whatnot. I have to install NTFS-3g and MacFuse again, for instance. I also install aquamac’s nvidia drivers and use osx86tools to set my graphics card EFI string in com.apple.Boot.plist so that I get QE (Quartz Extreme - basically support for hardware accellaration for your video card). Note that if I don’t do this all my drop-down menus are blank - just white menus with nothing on them.
4. Install Kalyway’s 10.5.3 combo update.
5. Install 10.5.4 directly from Apple (don’t use software update - download it manually)
6. Instal 10.5.5 directly from Apple (download it) using netkas‘ method of constantly removing AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext during the install (otherwise it crashes as I’m running it mid-way through and hoses my installation). All you do is run this in terminal before you start the update:
   

   sudo -s
   while sleep 1 ; do rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext ; done

7. Reboot, cross your fingers.
8. Optionally: download and install the voodoo kernel, which is useful if you have a quadcore system (I found my system gets much, much faster with it). It also fixes a sound bug that some people get where sounds stutter or sound fuzzy right when they begin (but sound fine if they continue playing - as with a movie or an mp3).

Then I did a clean install of OSX and started restoring from my Time Machine backup and was facing several long tasks of upgrades to get back to 10.5.5 (TimeMachine doesn’t restore kernals - just drivers, software, and user data / settings). I decided to give my SuperDuper clone one more time.

After booting into the DVD install disk I went into disk utility and mounted my SuperDuper sparse image backup. This contained the actual clone inside it as another mountable drive. I dragged this into the source and my OS drive into the destination and it took about an hour and a half (to restore about 80GB of data). Then I ran the repair permissions function while still in dist utility. Finally, I used bootefi to add my boot loader back to the drive and then crossed my fingers. What-do-ya-know. It totally worked.

One thing I like about SuperDuper is its ability to do a partial backup to an image, updating only the things that have changed. The first backup of my OS drive took nearly 15 hours (!!!), but subsequent updates take more like 10 minutes.

The only thing I’ll say about it is that the free version doesn’t allow you to do this partial restore nor does it allow you to schedule things.

Copy the folder “bootefi” and all included files/folders to the root directory of either a USB Thumb drive, a USB hard drive, or a second internal drive. Be sure that either the Thumb drive, the USB hard drive, or the second internal drive have a volume name.

Insert the OSX Boot DVD and allow the DVD to boot up. Install OSX from the DVD. Allow the DVD to reboot. This time don’t install the OS, but click on the Utilities menu and select “Terminal”.

Then enter the following commands

sudo -s (then enter your root password)

cd /Volumes/usbvolname/bootefi

where usbvolname is the volume name of the USB Thumb drive, USB hard drive, or second internal drive where the “bootefi” folder was copied to.

./bootefi.sh installvolumename

where installvolumename is the volume name of the drive that OSX was installed to. The installvolumename should be surrounded by double quotes. Example: ./bootefi.sh “MacHD” or ./bootefi.sh “Macintosh HD”

Now simply follow the prompts and choices based on the type of bootloader install. The choices are EFI or Darwin X86 bootloader and for an EFI bootloader, mbr or guid type partition on the OSX hard drive.

At the end, the script will ask to either reboot or stay in Terminal and reboot later.

Before OSX boots up, make sure to remove the OSX install DVD, so that it won’t interfere.

• alt+tab - switch apps
• alt+` (left quote - same key as ~) - switch windows within an app
• command up - same as ctrl+home in windows - jumps to start of document
• command down - same as ctrl+end - end of doc
• command left/right - same as home/end - beginning or end of line
• option left/right - jumps by word left or right