I'd head to the Palo Alto Apple Store to buy a shiny new MacBook Pro. Apple Mini Retail Store – Stanford Shopping Center What's that you say? Don't I already have a shiny new MacBook Pro? Sort of. It's still a little bit shiny and it's almost three years old, which in laptop terms is [...]

I'd head to the Palo Alto Apple Store to buy a shiny new MacBook Pro.

Apple Mini Retail Store – Stanford Shopping Center

What's that you say? Don't I already have a shiny new MacBook Pro? Sort of. It's still a little bit shiny and it's almost three years old, which in laptop terms is pretty far from new. That $1000 would pay for a little less than half of the new model I have specced out.

WARNING: This procedure worked for me but I do not guarantee it will work for everyone. Use at your own risk. I primarily use Apple’s Safari browser, along with Google Chrome and Opera. Chrome is almost to the point where I might be willing to switch, but right now I’m very comfortable with Safari. With [...]

WARNING: This procedure worked for me but I do not guarantee it will work for everyone. Use at your own risk.

I primarily use Apple’s Safari browser, along with Google Chrome and Opera. Chrome is almost to the point where I might be willing to switch, but right now I’m very comfortable with Safari. With one major exception: after an hour or two of heavy use (multiple tabs and windows, reloading pages, lots of script-heavy pages) the browser’s performance drops to a level that is just unacceptable, especially on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM. Page loads are sluggish and almost every click on a page results in a beachball for a few seconds. After a bit of Googling and experimenting I narrowed the problem to the browser cache. It seems that Safari’s mechanism for searching its cache is, let’s say, suboptimal.

Unlike most other browsers, Safari provides no user-accessible preference for adjusting or disabling its cache. So I looked deeper.

1. Close all Safari tabs and windows. Don’t exit Safari, just close all its windows.
2. Empty Safari’s cache: Safari menu -> Empty cache
3. Exit Safari.
4. Open Terminal*: Applications -> Terminal or Spotlight -> “Terminal”
5. In the Terminal window, type:
   chmod a-w Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Cache.db
   (the above should be all one line; hit Return or Enter at the end of the line)
6. Type: ls -al Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Cache.db
   (the above should be all one line; hit Return or Enter at the end of the line)
   You should see:
   -r--r--r-- 1 [your user name] staff 26624 Sep 28 17:33 Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Cache.db
   The details will differ, but the important part is -r--r--r-- which is Unix for “read-only for everyone”. That means Safari can’t write to its cache file, effectively turning it off.
7. Relaunch Safari and browse normally. If your results are like mine, you’ll note that the sluggish performance of Safari after an hour or two of heavy use is now just gone.

*Just re-emphasizing the warning at the top of this post. If you follow these instructions exactly, nothing untoward should happen. However, Terminal is the window into the deepest, darkest inner workings of Mac OS X. It’s possible to really screw things up with a simple typo. If you have any doubt, don’t do it.

Sure, it sounds silly, but a few of my favorite weekday lunch places on University Ave don’t offer WiFi (free or otherwise) and aren’t near enough to anywhere that does to pick up the signal. They’re almost close enough; my MacBook Pro and my Palm Pre can “see” the networks and try to connect, but [...]

Sure, it sounds silly, but a few of my favorite weekday lunch places on University Ave don’t offer WiFi (free or otherwise) and aren’t near enough to anywhere that does to pick up the signal. They’re almost close enough; my MacBook Pro and my Palm Pre can “see” the networks and try to connect, but not achieve or maintain a connection. It seems that this situation is the perfect one for one of these devices. I’ve found a few that look promising but I’m having some trouble choosing one. Feel like helping?

Hawking HWUN3 Hi-Gain USB Wireless-N Adapter with Upgradeable Antennas for Mac & PC (White) – $42.24

1000mW 1W 802.11g/n High Gain USB Wireless G / N Long-Rang WiFi Network Adapter – Dongle – $23.95

1000mW 1W 802.11g/n High Gain USB Wireless G / N Long-Rang WiFi Network Adapter – Dongle With Original Alfa 5dBi and 9dBi Rubber Antenna – $24.99

MacWizards Antenna & Booster for MacBook/PowerBook – $79.99

There’s quite a price difference between the least and most expensive, but the MacWizards item looks to be much smaller and sleeker. They all seem to have fairly similar specifications.

There’s also the rather different BearExtender n3 – $44.97

The BearExtender is an external device connected by a USB cable, not a plug-in antenna as are the others. It seems a bit too clunky, but the performance might be better since it can be moved around more freely.

What do you think?

Someone from the company that makes BearExtender found this blog post and contacted me, offering free shipping and a 30-day review period to try out their product. Not a freebie for review, just an invitation to buy one. I figured with free shipping and the 30-day return privilege I couldn’t really go wrong, so I jumped at it.

The BearExtender is not nearly as large as it appears in the promotional pictures. It’s actually a flat (maybe 1/2″ thick) square (around 2″/side) and very light, with a clip on the back to stick on to the Mac’s open lid. Comes with one short and one long USB cable, an antenna, and a USB drive which includes a getting started guide and the driver software. The software is really the only disappointment; it’s ugly and the usability is rotten. However, it does work.

My baseline use case is sitting at a cafe in downtown Palo Alto across the street from a Starbucks. With the Mac’s built-in WiFi, I can intermittently see the “attwifi” network and get a very weak connection that drops after a minute or two; essentially useless. With the BearExtender, I get a strong signal from the “attwifi” network, can immediately connect, and the connection stays up without dropping.

It connects without issue to my AirPort Extreme N at home, and also displays quite a few more networks around my home than the built-in WiFi. I’d say it’s well worth the money, which after all is only as much as dinner for two at a reasonably nice place.

Again, to be clear, I’m reviewing this on my own accord; I paid full price (less free shipping) for the unit and they didn’t ask me to write or do anything.

I grew up with PCs. My first PC was an actual, original IBM PC model 5150 (which still lives, dormant for decades now, in my garage). Along the way, I worked on Commodores (VIC-20 and C-64), an Osborne, a Sinclair ZX-80, and there must have been an Apple ][ in there somewhere. But the PC [...]

I grew up with PCs. My first PC was an actual, original IBM PC model 5150 (which still lives, dormant for decades now, in my garage). Along the way, I worked on Commodores (VIC-20 and C-64), an Osborne, a Sinclair ZX-80, and there must have been an Apple ][ in there somewhere. But the PC standard won out and by the late 80s that was all I used. I went through a series of ever-more-powerful PCs, mostly home-built but some mass-market branded, for a number of years. I got to the point where I knew Windows, up through XP, like the back of the proverbial hand.

Meanwhile, Apple was evolving the Mac OS and finally released OS X, a true Unix-class OS with no legacy baggage. I watched from afar but as the OS and machines got better and better, I thought that I might be interested in making a switch–especially when Apple moved to Intel processors and it became possible to easily run Windows on Macs. Finally, I decided that when my then-current PC (a Dell Inspiron laptop) died, I'd buy a Mac notebook to replace it. Perversely, the Dell hung on for a year or two past its expected lifetime, but finally gave up the ghost when I (accidentally, I swear!) spilled most of a bowl of soup into it while working at home one day.

So I bought a MacBook Pro. I acclimated myself to OS X very quickly and was able to keep my Windows applications and workflows mostly intact with VMWare, running Windows side-by-side on OS X. But then a strange thing happened: I found I really didn't need Windows on my Mac after all. I tried keeping VMWare turned off for a week, then for a month, and then I just didn't turn it back on again and finally uninstalled it. There isn't anything that I could do on my Dell on Windows XP Pro that I can't do on my Mac, but (in my experience, as always) OS X beats Windows in the usability and stability department by a mile. And it's trite and over-used, but the Mac does indeed "just work". Things I want to do are right where I subconsciously expect them to be and work the way I instinctively want them to. There's tons of power under the hood, since OS X is a true Unix, but I don't need to deal with it unless I have to, or want to.

So yes, after years and years of being a PC, I'm a Mac.

Adobe Acrobat Reader doesn’t provide an uninstall utility on Mac OS X (despite claiming to do so on their support site) and after installing it for a single test, I wanted it gone. Following are the steps I took to remove Adobe Acrobat Reader from my MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.7). Note [...]

Adobe Acrobat Reader doesn’t provide an uninstall utility on Mac OS X (despite claiming to do so on their support site) and after installing it for a single test, I wanted it gone. Following are the steps I took to remove Adobe Acrobat Reader from my MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.7).

Note that these instructions will likely remove all Adobe software, including AIR if you have that installed; AIR is installed automatically (and without telling you) with Acrobat Reader.

Delete these folders from Finder:

• /Applications/Adobe Acrobat
• /Applications/Utilities/Adobe Utilities

In Terminal, type sudo find / -name *Adobe*
From that list, delete these:

• /Library/Application Support/Adobe
• /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin
• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Application Support/Adobe
• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat
• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Caches/Adobe
• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Logs/Adobe
• /Users/Shared/Library/Application Support/Adobe

In Terminal, type sudo find / -name *Acrobat*
From that list, delete:

• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Caches/Acrobat

Reboot. I don’t like having to, but several of the Adobe components were locked or in use and I couldn’t completely delete them. After rebooting, a sample PDF linked from a Web site opened in Safari via Preview, and a downloaded PDF opened in Preview standalone just like they used to.

Right now it looks like I got everything, but I’ll update this post if I find any more remnants.