I love Quicksilver. I don’t even use more than a third of its capabilities and I still couldn’t do without it. As nothing more than an application launcher, it’s completely indispensable to me. Because of it, I’m able to autohide my dock and, quite honestly, never see it. I don’t keep a single application icon on it (save those that are running, of course).

For the last few weeks, though, I’ve been noticing that Quicksilver has been absolutely monopolizing my CPU cycles to the tune of 65%-95% according to Activity Monitor. I don’t know when this started and I don’t recall any kind of “precipitating event” in the recent past that even might be the cause. If I only saw this kind of monopolization when it was reindexing, it would make some sense. That’s not the case, though. Usually, Quicksilver’s Task Viewer indicates nothing happening at all. The only thing I know for certain is that the application seems to have gone rogue on me. It’s out of control.

I thought I’d found a solution on Mac OS X Hints, but…no. And, by the way, if anyone else cares to try that hint, note that the Quicksilver caches are located in ~/Library/Quicksilver, not in /Library/Quicksilver as the hint indicates (the comments point this out as well). Deleting the specified directory (and a few others) briefly offered hope only to snuff it out. Cruel.

I don’t appear to be the only one seeing this, but it’s not something I’ve heard much rumbling about nor have I found a working solution. Has anyone else seen this and maybe dug up any kind of explanation, fix or workaround?

I’ve had two big problems with Spaces up to and including 10.5.2:

1. When Command-Tab’ing to an application, Spaces would shift me to a different Space that already included a window of that application rather than allow me to open a new window in my current space. More »
2. When I had multiple windows of an application open in multiple desktops, Command-Tab’ing didn’t, by default, place the focus on the window of that app that was open in the same desktop I was already in. It didn’t do anything, really. It’s like that action confused the OS. More »

After a while, I was able to track down a fix – and by fix, I really mean glorified hack – for the first problem (which seems to have a real fix in 10.5.3 via a System Preference, by the way) and 10.5.3 seems to have addressed the second quite nicely.

Zang.

From time to time, I find the need to start Caffeine on my Mac, but my use is infrequent enough that it’s not something I like to keep open and available all the time. Invariably, once it’s running, I forget how to quit the application to get it off of my menu bar. It’s not an easy thing to Google so, for the sake of my own sanity, I give you:

1. Cmd+Click the menu bar icon (the coffee cup)
2. Select the Quit option

It’s a simple enough process, but I guess it’s just different enough from that of other menu bar icons that I can never seem to remember it.

Being a long-time (and still part-time) Windows user, I’ve spent many a not-so-happy second typing the following:

> ipconfig /release
> ipconfig /renew

Today, though, I made a few changes to secure my network and needed to renew the DHCP lease of my Mac. Usually, I’m sitting in front of the laptop so I can just use the System Preferences GUI, but not today. Today I had to remote in so I only had the command line available and I realized that I had no idea how to map the Windows commands above to the Mac terminal. Mostly for the sake of posterity:

$ sudo ipconfig set en0 BOOTP
$ sudo ipconfig set en0 DHCP

In typical Unix fashion, there’s no output to indicate that succeeded or did anything at all, for that matter, but it seems to do the trick.

Like many folks, I have separate computers for work and home. To make life even more complicated, my work system is a PC while my personal computer is a Mac. Over the last few years, I feel like I’ve been constantly prowling about for a good solution to sync files between those two systems and also the Windows XP virtual machine that is a guest on the Mac. I’ve tried a myriad of solutions that range from manual to automated, commercial to cobbled and just plain hacked. Most worked to one degree or another, but I found most to be more trouble than they were worth.

Yesterday, though, Sam Larbi, via Twitter, turned me on to Dropbox. I was absolutely stunned by the introductory video and asked Sam for one of his invites. He hooked me up and I started playing with the tool last night.

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