Blog from the Loft | PK Shiu Personal Blog » mac

Itunes Music Match Resource Usage

PK — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 03:41:08 +0000

My main music library is on my 2011 Mac Mini, 2.3GHz 8G ram Core i5 CPU. Right now it is half way matching my 9000+ songs. Looking at the activity monitor, it is using up one entire CPU, with 35 threads and about 500 Meg of real memory. I assume the matching process is some sort of checksum computation and then a network query, which is why it is CPU intensive but not network intensive.

Modifier keys not working in Lion for External Keyboard

PK — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 13:07:05 +0000

Lion Tip of the Day:

As a emacs user, I always change the caps lock key on my Mac keyboards to “Control”. This is in fact a nice built in feature since Leopard. However today I docked my new MacBook Pro for the first time and the Caps Lock key on my external aluminum keyboard (USB) does not send the new modifier key.

Turned out this is a feature. In Lion, you can select different modifier key actions for different keyboards. There is a new dropdown at the top. Select external keyboard and update the modifier key.

Mac Bluetooth wireless keyboard tips and tricks

PK — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 14:45:40 +0000

I bought a new bluetooth wireless keyboard for my MacBook Pro to reduce clutter at my home office. Immediately I run into a few “problems” that can easily be solved.

Volume keys do not work

The top of the bluetooth keyboard has all the special keys to control volumne, play/pause etc. I was so disapponted that they do not work! They invoke the normal function key functions instead, running spaces etc. Then I remembered. I most likely have to install the latest keyboard driver. Click on the Apple menu, software update, downloaded the new driver, and all is well. This happened when I added the magic mouse as well. So, remember to run software update after adding new hardware.

Changing the Caps Lock Key to Control

This is for the hardcore programming using emacs. We live by the control key. Almost all modern keyboard move the control key to somewhere horrible. Well, OS X (bless Apple) actually have a system wide setting that let you change the pretty much useless Caps Lock key into Control .Just go to System Preferences, Keyboard, Keyboard Tab, modifier keys and change the mapping for the “Caps Lock” key to “Control”. Your hands will thank you.

Get the CSV QuickLook plugin for your Finder

PK — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:33:05 +0000

I have been using Macs for three years now. Yet I did not know you can install additional plugins for QuickLook so that you can quickly view different types of file in the finder just by pressing the spacebar ! I work with CSV files a lot and it has always been a pain having to open them in numbers or openoffice to view them. Now come (free) CSV quicklook plugins.

You can find a lot of different plugins at this site . This CSV plugin is the one that I installed.

How to Install

Go to the download site, often it is something on code.google.com
click on the .dmg to download the software
Click on the downloaded DMG file and it should open in Finder
copy the .qlgenerator file into your quicklook plugin directory:
Either at /Library/QuickLook/ or ~/Library/QuickLook/
If you copy into ~/Library… it will only be available to your account. If the ~/Library/QuickLook directory is not there, create it first.
either reboot, or start a terminal session and type:
qlmanage -r

That is it!

A great scanner for the Mac – ScanSnap S300M

pk — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 23:56:24 +0000

Just wrote up a review for this little scanner. Great automatic document feeder. Great scan quality, and speed. Just wish it is cheaper. Read and watch the full review here on the review page.