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Apple Universe

Top-level category for all Apple, Mac, and OS X related topics.

The Steve and Phil show, circa 1999

I don't normally post links to interesting things on other sites as stories here, just because I figure there are about 210 other places out there that already do just that. But someone sent me a link today to an absolutely amazing video from Macworld New York in July of 1999.

Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller were demoing AirPort, and the way they did it simply must be seen to be believed. I would have lost a lot of money had someone bet me that someone did what they did in this clip--"no way, he's not going to do that!" But, as you'll see, he did.

I had no idea they were that wild and crazy "back in the day..."



This is going to take not quite as long…

Back in February, I wrote about the incredibly lengthy time estimate that Stuffit gave me for an expansion. Well, it happened again today, but with QuickTime:

estimate

I was thinking about including a 1920x1200 movie capture of Redline Racing in my Pick of the Week writeup, so I had captured a couple minutes of the high-res stuff--the raw movie file was 8.6GB in size, in fact! After it opened, I had trimmed it down and then wanted to convert the format. When the export dialog appeared, the above was the initial estimate. It should be noted that at "only" 1,491,308 days, this is about 84 times faster than the Stuffit expansion!

What I also found humorous was the "7 minutes" bit -- it's not enough that I wait over 1.4 million days, but don't forget about those extra seven minutes! And yes, the dialog cleared itself up (unlike the Stuffit dialog, which never changed), and the actual export took only five minutes or so. In the end, I chose not to use the movie, but the funny dialog was worth seeing.





When good cache goes bad…

OS X uses a multitude of cache files--as an example, my user's Library/Caches folder contains 164 top-level items, most of which are folders containing more folders. In total, there's presently 1.18GB of cached data, just for my user. Wow.

Most of the time, this is a Good Thing, as it makes the system more responsive, as it's quicker to retrieve something from cache than to calculate or redownload it. However, it can also be troublesome at times. Like this morning, in my case.

I fired up Mail, and despite the fact that it was running perfectly last night, it was glacial. Folders took multiple minutes to open. Moving a message was a 15 minute process, if it worked at all. Even worse, though, was that when Mail was having its fits, the Finder was completely unresponsive. I could click on some folders, but others would bring the Finder to the land of permanent spinning rainbows. Trying to mount a disk image resulted in more spinning rainbows.

So I restarted, and tried again--it had been quite a while since the last restart. But I had the exact same symptoms. Unresponsive Mail and flakey Finder. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out if I'd changed anything or not, even though I was positive I hadn't touched the system while sleeping :).

Then, after another restart and repeat of issues, I thought I'd try deleting Mail's cache folders. Inside my user's Library/Caches folder, I opened the Mail folder and deleted everything, then emptied the trash. Launched Mail again, and...voila, it was perfect! Speedy as its ever been, and the Finder didn't have fits while Mail was running. Everything was basically back to normal--all because I deleted a series of temporary files that are supposed to do nothing more than make data access quicker. Go figure!

This is the first real cache trouble I've had on OS X, but it is a relatively common source of issues for others. Since cache folders exist in many spots (your user, the top-level Library folder, and the System folder), you might want to look into one of the cache cleaners, such as Cache Out X or Tiger Cache Cleaner (among many others), to make the job simpler.

I think I may add a general cache emptying routine to my crontab, just to make sure it happens somewhat regularly, given how much trouble this one incident caused.





And the answer is…

For those who didn't quite see it in the comments, the mystery object is a printout of an entire walkthrough of the original game of Zork, one of the earliest interactive fiction games. Adventure was the first widely-known entry in the genre, but Zork really made huge strides in both the breadth of the virtual world as well as the character's interaction with that world. The printout pictured in the prior story was created on February 18th, 1980, by myself and a good friend who was in his first or second year at MIT.

Zork date

At the time, I was 15 and my buddy Patrick was 19. These were the early days of computing, just over two years into the Apple ]['s existence. So while graphical games existed (Mystery House was released in 1980, for example), the capabilities of the machine made for very limited graphics--check the screenshot on the Wikipedia page for proof. As such, interactive fiction offered a more complete escape into the gaming world, as your mind did the work of creating whatever "graphics" the game required, based on the descriptions provided by the developers.

It was also the very early days of the internet, meaning it basically didn't exist. Its predecessor, ARPANET, was just getting going. Somehow, probably through a computer club at high school, I was introduced to ARPANET and the MDL machine at MIT. This machine allowed free guest account signups, and they had Zork installed for anyone to play. That's about all it took for me to get hooked, even over a 300 baud modem working on a dumb terminal with thermal paper!

Read on for a bit more about Zork, online gaming in the very early 1980s, and that monster printout...
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Which Mac should I buy?

Macworld logoGiven that everyone at Macworld is publicly reachable via a web email form, I get a lot of random questions in my inbox.

By a wide margin, the two most popular recent questions have been "which Mac should I buy," and "when should I buy it?" After answering the question about 2,500 times (or so it seems), I decided to write up my usual responses for easy future reference. There was some good conversation on the topic in the forums as well; this has become one of the threads to which I point those contemplating the switch.



Widgets calling

Macworld logoThe recently-released OS X 10.4.7 update included a not-announced Dashboard widget update feature which silently checks to make sure that your widgets are valid. I agreed with the need for such a feature, but wrote about how I think Apple could have implemented things a bit better.