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[Magnus]

I just did an HD swap.

Previously, you would just insert a CD and boot from the DVD drive by holding command C or something. It would load a small version of Mac OS X that had the utilities to do a clean install or format a drive.

Of course, Mountain Lion doesn't come on disc at all. The alternative for reinstalling is to hold command R to boot from a recovery partition.

Of course (2), if you're installing a new drive it won't even have that on it. If you have a newer mac it can connect to Internet to download and install ML on a new drive.

If you have an older one without Internet recovery, you have to create a bootable USB drive that will copy the recovery partition to a USB. Apple have a released a tool to do this. It's actually called the lion recovery disk assistant or something.

There are also ways to rip the installer from the downloaded ML package if you don't mind doing some very minor hacking about. I prefer to stick with official methods as much as possible so I created one using the official tool.

Awesome!

Went ahead and did everything today. So far so good!

SSD speed is truly wonderful. I'm very happy.

Questions though:

1. I threw in 8GB of RAM, As two 4GB sticks; OS X is still only detecting 4GB of RAM though. What's the likely culprit? Mobo firmware?

2. Best suggestions for scripts like User Highlighting for NeoGAF in Safari? Had it working just fine before on Mountain Lion; forgot what I used.

3. My finger swiping settings in Trackpad Options aren't working all the time. Most crucially, I need three finger swipes left/right to let me go back/forward in folders and on web pages. I used to use Better Touch Tool...but neither it, nor the standard Trackpad Options let me set it and have that setting *stick*. What gives?

 

[Magnus]

Awesome!

Went ahead and did everything today. So far so good!

SSD speed is truly wonderful. I'm very happy.

Questions though:

1. I threw in 8GB of RAM, As two 4GB sticks; OS X is still only detecting 4GB of RAM though. What's the likely culprit? Mobo firmware?

2. Best suggestions for scripts like User Highlighting for NeoGAF in Safari? Had it working just fine before on Mountain Lion; forgot what I used.

3. My finger swiping settings in Trackpad Options aren't working all the time. Most crucially, I need three finger swipes left/right to let me go back/forward in folders and on web pages. I used to use Better Touch Tool...but neither it, nor the standard Trackpad Options let me set it and have that setting *stick*. What gives?

So I solved #1 -- my dumb ass apparently didn't use enough force with one of my RAM sticks. It was literally sticking half-out when I re-opened my MBP. #fail of the highest order, haha.

Any help with the other two points? PLZTHX!

 

[The Real Abed]

2. Best suggestions for scripts like User Highlighting for NeoGAF in Safari? Had it working just fine before on Mountain Lion; forgot what I used.

NeoGAF already highlights your user. It's just way too light of a blue color for some strange reason. I don't know if there's one for Safari though to make it a different color.

3. My finger swiping settings in Trackpad Options aren't working all the time. Most crucially, I need three finger swipes left/right to let me go back/forward in folders and on web pages. I used to use Better Touch Tool...but neither it, nor the standard Trackpad Options let me set it and have that setting *stick*. What gives?

What model is your Pro? Is it older? Maybe there's a problem with older models and gestures?

 

[Magnus]

NeoGAF already highlights your user. It's just way too light of a blue color for some strange reason. I don't know if there's one for Safari though to make it a different color.

I got it working beautifully! Posted in the other Scripts thread. There's a great Safari pack of extensions that someone created for Neogaf.

What model is your Pro? Is it older? Maybe there's a problem with older models and gestures?

Perhaps!

I just can't seem to get this working, it's driving me nuts.

I've enabled BetterTouchTool (BTT) to allow for three finger swipe up/down to be Home/End, to go to the top/bottom of a web page. It seems I have to do that gesture immediately before I three finger swipe left/right for back/forward to work.

When I don't have BTT on at all, the three-swipe left/right is a hit or miss. It works one minute, and doesn't the next. All other gestures work just fine.

wtf

 

[CrudeDiatribe]

2. Best suggestions for scripts like User Highlighting for NeoGAF in Safari? Had it working just fine before on Mountain Lion; forgot what I used.

Yes, though that thread was locked for some reason and the link is dead. I've got a copy socked on my server, so I'll PM you a link.

 

[Splash Wave]

Why do animated GIFs push my MBA so hard? Pages with lots of them make my fans spin hard.

 

[Popstar]

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[The Real Abed]

GIFs use LZW compression so a page full of multi-megabyte GIFs is basically running several decompressors in a loop.

But why does it kill the processor on OS X browsers? At least WebKit ones. How has this not been fixed in 10 years?

 

[Popstar]

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[The Real Abed]

GIFs use LZW compression so a page full of multi-megabyte GIFs is basically running several decompressors in a loop.

But not all browsers have problems with GIFs. How has it not been fixed in WebKit yet? I don't think Firefox has this problem in its Gecko engine.

 

[Popstar]

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[The Real Abed]

GIFs use LZW compression so a page... oh. *ahem*

It's actually not a problem with WebKit. It's a problem with CoreImage which webkit uses. Gecko uses its own stuff.

It has been vastly improved from what it used to be like. The fans don't get going on my MacBook Air unless I'm browsing a page that's just GIF after GIF. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if it's one of things where the CoreImage people and Safari people have been playing hot potato and it's fallen through the cracks.

Yeah, it has to be a huge GIF thread for me to have problems. Like if I'm scrolling and it just stops for a few seconds. Same thing on Tumblr.

 

[Popstar]

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[The Real Abed]

There's a memory / processor trade-off with this sort of thing. It could be that they've just decided to err on the side of less memory usage, only caching whatever portions of GIFs are currently visible or just off-page, while something like Firefox might decompress and cache everything but bloat memory.

If you have both installed you could go to a GIF-heavy page and see how much more memory each consumes over baseline since this is just idle speculation on my part.

Next time I run into a GIF thread where I get the stopping I will have to do some tests with each browser I have. Including ones on Windows. (In Parallels though)

 

[mrkgoo]

So I think my old MacBook Pro logic board has gone (black screen no chime).

Now I was wanting some insight into setup assistant on a new mac from time machine. I'm guessing this can be an opportunity to remove any oddities in an existing account. For example, the group id and memberships on accounts was a bit weird from lion onwards for accounts migrated from earlier than snow leopard.

Also ditching ceappy old preferences and the like.

Does setup/migration assistant allow you to not transfer over some of that? That is, does it actually create a new user and just associates the files to it? Does it transfer over preferences/keychains and the like, or is that one of the check boxes?

I also understand setup assistant is slightly different to migration assistant, the latter definitely making a new user or something.

 

[Lord Error]

I've purchased the network drive (WD MyBook Live) five days ago, primarily because it's advertised to have ability to be used as a Time Machine Backup drive.

Sure enough, it works, but in these five days of being used with this macbook, I've already gotten two of these messages:

"Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you".

What this means is that all the backups you have created are lost forever, and it just starts over from scratch (which takes *forever* as you can imagine). I've planned to return this drive now and get Time Capsule, but it sounds like this problem occurs with TC as well, just not as often. What's the point of all of this if it is so prone to failure :\

There's a hefty multi-step terminal process outlined here:
http://www.garth.org/archives/2011,...ine-sparsebundle-nas-based-backup-errors.html
that can be used to resolve this situation without starting a new backup, but someone mentioned that even with this process you can't really be sure that the backups are not still corrupted (process just fixes disk errors and overrides the 'backup failure' flag)

Should I bother getting TC at this point, or should I just give up on this whole thing and use USB drive backups from time to time?

 

[Crazymoogle]

Depends on why the errors are happening? I mean, either the backup drive has errors, the source drive has errors, or OSX has set flags such that it think it has errors but really doesn't. In the latter case, the terminal procedure probably makes a lot of sense. I'd probably do that, then run diagnostics on both drives to ensure the hardware is okay.

If the WD Live is backing up over the network there could be some network issues too, but that would probably be step 4: plugin direct to your OSX device and see what happens.

 

[Lord Error]

Depends on why the errors are happening? I mean, either the backup drive has errors, the source drive has errors, or OSX has set flags such that it think it has errors but really doesn't. In the latter case, the terminal procedure probably makes a lot of sense. I'd probably do that, then run diagnostics on both drives to ensure the hardware is okay.

If the WD Live is backing up over the network there could be some network issues too, but that would probably be step 4: plugin direct to your OSX device and see what happens.

Noone really knows why these errors happen, or better said, why isn't there better error prevention process during backup to make it so that they don't happen. Apple has been silent on it for years, so they probably have no clue either. People started noticing it as of Snow Leopard or Lion, which is when this verification was put into place apparently. They just occur seemingly randomly, and that's about it. Source and backup drives don't have any logical or physical errors (you can check both with diskutil and they come up clean). There's time consuming process you can do to correct this problem when it happens (as described in that link above) but full validity of that solution is questionable. Some say that they see this happen when doing laptop backups, but not imac backups, so maybe something to do with sleep mode or closing the lid.

There so many people experiencing this problem that I'm starting to think it's unavoidable, and it's just a matter of how often it happens. I'm mostly curious if people with Time Capsule here could chime in with personal experience with how often they see this problem, if at all.

 

[G8D]

Hey, MBA here.

I'm having some issue with my Air and its fan. Basically it's loud as fuck all the time. I don't know if this is due to it getting hot easily or some other fault. I've just today cleared SMC and PRAM to see if it helps anything. One thing I have noticed is that it's worse when plugged into the charger. For example right now it's off the charger at 60 degrees celsius and ~2000RPM but when plugged in it can easily go 80-100 degrees and 6500RPM without any extra processes having been opened or the laptop itself even being used.

These stats are from smcFan.

I don't have the luxury of going to an Apple store until probably early July, I am still well within my 3 year warrantee, so I thought I'd seek help elsewhere for now.

Any ideas?

EDIT: so I've just went from unplugged, 53 degrees, 2000 RPM to 100 degrees and rapidly increasing RPM only a minute after plugging my Air into the charger...

That's not right.

EDIT2: it's now settled at 105 degrees and 6500 RPM though it may go hotter as that's as fast as the fan can spin...

EDIT3: I took to activity monitor when charging and a ghost Folding at Home application starts using '350%' of my CPU. I uninstalled FAH a while ago but am about to use the unofficial remover to try and get rid of whatever is still launching. Consider my problem solved for now...

 

[Crazymoogle]

SMC and PRAM to see if it helps anything. One thing I have noticed is that it's worse when plugged into the charger.

Any relatively modern Macbook should increase in clock speed and screen brightness when plugged into the wall unless you set it otherwise, so this makes sense. It definitely sounded like a rogue software issue so glad you've found the apparent culprit.

oone really knows why these errors happen, or better said, why isn't there better error prevention process during backup to make it so that they don't happen.

All I was suggesting was steps to rule out hardware errors. It could be problems on the software side, but better to test all of the possible user-side fixes than simply assume it's something that cannot be solved.

(Speaking of rubbish, love how iTunes upgrades blew up the personal hotspot drivers. That was not a fun one to fix.)

 

[Baconbitz]

So, my music is allover. I've done the organizing in iTunes, but songs are still not in folders like they should be, and folders are not inside of the iTunes folder. What am I doing wrong? I want to click on my music and just see a folder called iTunes but I dont.

 

[The Rizza]

I'm having trouble trying to get rid of this item in my menubar. It's the one that looks like a message box. When you click on it, it says notifications and shows a pause icon, and a settings icon. The pause icon changes color when I click on it but I don't know what it's pausing and the settings icon doesn't do anything. Does anyone know what it might be?

 

[jts]

So, my music is allover. I've done the organizing in iTunes, but songs are still not in folders like they should be, and folders are not inside of the iTunes folder. What am I doing wrong? I want to click on my music and just see a folder called iTunes but I dont.

iTunes > Preferences

File > Library > Organize Library...

 

[Mr. Wonderful]

So for those with the 13" Retina MacBook Pro, how is the screen real estate when at the exactly 2x UI scaling?

My MacBook before my current 1680x1050 15" was a 13", and 1280x800 was just not enough for Photoshopping or multi-tasking. I want to go with a 13" Retina MBP for my next Mac, or a Retina MacBook Air, whatever is available a year from now, but with the way that certain elements are 2x as big and some remain at native resolution, like photos and videos, how much actual real estate do I gain with a 2560x1600 Retina MBP over a 1280x800 screen?

In particular, will have enough horizontal space to watch videos at a decent size while having my web browser on the other half of the screen?

 

[Crazymoogle]

Just retrofitted a mac mini. (+SSD, +8GB RAM). Pulling it apart was ridiculous - you literally have to pull every component out of the case, piece by piece, and there's at least 3 pieces that can be destroyed by a little too much strength - but the result was totally worth it. Silent, fast, and as much as I love my MBA, it's nice to have a much bigger screen.

Anyone who wants to do one of these upgrades though...make sure to buy a kit.

 

[OminoMichelin]

So the other day I updated OS10 from snow leopard to mountain lion, which apparently decided that my windows partition was better off as a recovery partition. Effin' great.
It's a very common problem too, how did apple get away with this? It's been happening since Lion launched.

 

[Shiv47]

I've just moved from an ancient MacBook to an iMac, and before I fuck anything up, I want to make sure I handle the iTunes carryover right. Basically, my entire music library is on an external drive. If I deauthorize the MacBook and send myself the iTunes folder, will that take care of everything once I put it on the iMac? I have no need to move any music, just the folder info.

 

[vulva]

Hey, I've been using OSX for a bit but I'm still really new to it. I'm just wondering what software would work best to rip a video from a DVD I bought so I can watch it on my phone? I just tried using Handbrake and I got some audio with a lot of clipping sounds and very disjointed video. I also tried mpeg streamclip, but it ran in to errors while trying to read the DVD.

I just want to make an avi or something similar. Any ideas?

edit: nm MakeMKV worked a charm for me

 

[kehs]

So there a couple of sites that deal with cams and flash, and the image from the camera is visually distorted.

Does anyone know whats up with that?

 

[CrudeDiatribe]

I just tried using Handbrake

Handbrake has usually worked for me if I have buggered the settings up. The presets are usually what you want.

So there a couple of sites that deal with cams and flash, and the image from the camera is visually distorted.

Sites about cameras and flash? Like strobist.com?

 

[anonymous_abc]

My mom is getting an iMac next week, and I will be tasked to walk her through it and set it up.
Now I have been using osx for quite a while but was wondering if anyone has good tips of how to set it up and fool proof it for my mom?

 

[mrkgoo]

My mom is getting an iMac next week, and I will be tasked to walk her through it and set it up.
Now I have been using osx for quite a while but was wondering if anyone has good tips of how to set it up and fool proof it for my mom?

I dunno, but some starters might be to give her a non-admin account and not give her access to admin password.

Gatekeeper, obviously.

Also activate sons sort of screen sharing ability. Will be a godsend. Don't try if help over the phone with non-techy people.

 

[anonymous_abc]

Also activate sons sort of screen sharing ability. Will be a godsend. Don't try if help over the phone with non-techy people.

thats a must, teamviewer is what I have used in the past.

 

[CrudeDiatribe]

thats a must, teamviewer is what I have used in the past.

Screen sharing is built-in if you stick a Gmail/AIM account into iChat/Messages. Alternatively, make an admin account for yourself and stick in your Apple ID, then turn on Back To My Mac and the iMac will show up in your Finder sidebar (though screen sharing may launch a virtual session in this case).

Either way, enable screen sharing in the Sharing pref pane.

 

[anonymous_abc]

Screen sharing is built-in if you stick a Gmail/AIM account into iChat/Messages. Alternatively, make an admin account for yourself and stick in your Apple ID, then turn on Back To My Mac and the iMac will show up in your Finder sidebar (though screen sharing may launch a virtual session in this case).

Either way, enable screen sharing in the Sharing pref pane.

i never knew that. thanks.

 

[kehs]

Sites about cameras and flash? Like strobist.com?

I wanted help, but instead I got wordplay.



Me and you, we see eye to eye.

 

[mrkgoo]

Screen sharing is built-in if you stick a Gmail/AIM account into iChat/Messages. Alternatively, make an admin account for yourself and stick in your Apple ID, then turn on Back To My Mac and the iMac will show up in your Finder sidebar (though screen sharing may launch a virtual session in this case).

Either way, enable screen sharing in the Sharing pref pane.

I found teh built in screen sharing to be pretty awesome.

 

[CrudeDiatribe]

I wanted help, but instead I got wordplay.

... I really wasn't trying to be a wiseass, I didn't know what you meant by 'cams and flash', though now I'm thinking that something like TinyChat is probably it instead of my other hobby of photography.

 

[kehs]

... I really wasn't trying to be a wiseass, I didn't know what you meant by 'cams and flash', though now I'm thinking that something like TinyChat is probably it instead of my other hobby of photography.

Yeah, stuff like tinychat, although tinychat actually displays properly. Other sites don't.

I was joshing btw with my comment. Seemed like joke you were making when I loaded the site. hehe

 

[Kawaii]

This doesn't look normal doesn't it? What the hell are these files? It's taking up 64GB of my 120GB SSD.

I'm also having troubles with my macbook after installing the SSD and swapping the optibay for the older HDD, it's continually heating up and kicking the fans up without heavy usage. smcFan Control sais it is 83 degrees celsius right now and i dont have much programs open. (fans spinning at 6200rpm).

Any ideas how to fix both these issues GAF? I'm getting desperate, I can't have this laptop die on me, i use it everyday for work.

 

[CrudeDiatribe]

Any ideas how to fix both these issues GAF? I'm getting desperate, I can't have this laptop die on me, i use it everyday for work.

For both heat and space: something has a memory leak. If it weren't for the speed of your SSD, your Mac would also be terribly slow.

Restarting your Mac should free it up until it starts leaking again.

Suggest using Activity Monitor to track it down, but here's a shot in the dark: HP printer software; if you've got it, you don't need it and will cause this problem. Look for an uninstaller in /Applications

 

[The Real Abed]

Yeah, reboot and see if they're still there. If so, delete them using the Terminal and sudo and reboot immediately (So as to not let anything try and access them) and see if they come back again. That's not normal. OS X up through Mountain Lion only makes them in powers of 2 when needed. It starts with two 64's, then a 128, 256, 512, then 1GB files from there out. If you're getting that many something is really wrong. At least with some app.

Fortunately Mavericks has a much nicer Activity Monitor that will give you better feedback about system stuff. It will show you which apps have used the most memory and CPU in the last 8 hours. It might end up helping in the future. For now try what we suggested.

 

[Kawaii]

For both heat and space: something has a memory leak. If it weren't for the speed of your SSD, your Mac would also be terribly slow.

Restarting your Mac should free it up until it starts leaking again.

Suggest using Activity Monitor to track it down, but here's a shot in the dark: HP printer software; if you've got it, you don't need it and will cause this problem. Look for an uninstaller in /Applications

Reinstalling fixed the memory issue, I'll see if it fills up again.

My Macbok was terribly (!! photoshop could take a couple of minutes to load, even booting from sleep could take a minute or so) slow before installing the SSD, I had some money lying around so i bought the ssd in stead of a clean reinstall i was planning to do. Maybe that's also an indicator something is wrong.

No strange software, I did a complete clean install of Mountain Lion a week ago on the new SSD, i also formatted the HDD.

These are the installed programs. And a screenshot of the currently running programs, smcFan gives a temperature of 93 degrees celsius with the fans spinning like crazy...

I tried activity monitor a couple of times already, but no programs were using RAM or CPU like crazy. Any other indications of a memory leak?

Yeah, reboot and see if they're still there. If so, delete them using the Terminal and sudo and reboot immediately (So as to not let anything try and access them) and see if they come back again. That's not normal. OS X up through Mountain Lion only makes them in powers of 2 when needed. It starts with two 64's, then a 128, 256, 512, then 1GB files from there out. If you're getting that many something is really wrong. At least with some app.

Fortunately Mavericks has a much nicer Activity Monitor that will give you better feedback about system stuff. It will show you which apps have used the most memory and CPU in the last 8 hours. It might end up helping in the future. For now try what we suggested.

The files are gone but after a couple of hours (and only like 15 minutes of usage) it's filling up again i think, but we'll see what happens).

 

[CrudeDiatribe]

I tried activity monitor a couple of times already, but no programs were using RAM or CPU like crazy. Any other indications of a memory leak?

Yes. On the system memory tab at the bottom, post a screenshot after your Mac has been running a while, or just tell us what 'swap used' says. Should be near 0, yours won't be.

Now, make the window wide enough to see the 'real memory' column. Sort by it so the big numbers are at the top. See what's using GB.

I see you have MAMP installed You may also have a shitton of poorly configured MySQL and Apache children running amok. Your screen shot of the Dock doesn't begin to describe what's running; on the Mac I found the HP software shitting things up, it was a background process.

The files are gone but after a couple of hours (and only like 15 minutes of usage) it's filling up again i think, but we'll see what happens).

Basically you should have a couple of comparatively tiny files in there (mine are 64MB). Your Mac is swapping like crazy.

 

[The Real Abed]

What applications are you using? Including any background apps. Anything been installed lately? Something has gone rogue and it's time to hunt it down.

Also, I don't know how to read a number like 5.12,0. I know the comma is in place of a period, but what is the period for? It's not enough digits to be thousands. I'm confused at your strange foreign customs.

Edit: I see your list of apps. I don't see anything out of the ordinary. It might be time for trial and error launching and removing of certain automatically starting up apps.

 

[Kawaii]

Seems like the securityD process has something to do with it, it uses a lot of cpu and ram at the moment.

Also, since i saw that one using lots of cpu the swap memory seemed to grow to 1,36gb again, while it was pretty low at first.

Can't find much information on it though. It's just a hunce though, i'm not sure yet.

 

[CrudeDiatribe]

1,3 GB isn't a lot by itself. Certainly not enough to use up half your SSD.

I would expect to see 'Gebruikte Swap' approximate the size of the swapfiles you found.

Will look for that process on my Macs when I am able.

 

[Chris R]

I thought the point of making the Lion recovery stick was to prevent needing to download the entire OS when doing a reinstall?

I must have screwed something up :| 3 hours to go until my MBA is fresh and shiny again though.

 

[The Real Abed]

I think things have changed. I believe it always looks for updates too when installing now. 3 hours?

 

[Chris R]

I think things have changed. I believe it always looks for updates too when installing now. 3 hours?

It took 3 hours to download everything.

Finally installed, just going to take a little bit of time to get it back in proper working order.