OS X Leopard

I have 4 computers (1 laptop and 3 desktops) packed away - I now do everything on one fully loaded MacBook: for medical reasons(*), I either need to have my legs elevated or be walking - sitting at a desk for more than a few minutes is not a good idea. Fortunately, I can still hike for up to 3 or 4 hours at a time :-) Anyway, having everything in one laptop works best for me.

Anyway, since the work and research part of my life is bound up with one nicely configured laptop, I was hesitant to change anything, but after burning 4 backup DVD-Rs and cloning my laptop's disk drive to an external disk, I did a fresh install last night and restored my user files from the cloned disk.

It took a few hours to get all the tools working that I use (and I am probably still not there yet), but the time was well spent. I think the Time Machine idea is awesome - you really need to try it to appreciate it. I plan on alternating between two external disks, keeping one at a friends house for off site backup.

I am still deciding if the Finder changes are all that great. The icons don't seem as distinctive as the old ones. I do like the document automatic preview options.

The Java JVM support (version 5) performs well, and the NetBeans IDE (used only for Ruby and Ruby Rails development) seems more responsive. Ruby is installed as a shared library framework so if you should run many simultaneous Ruby processes, some real memory would be saved (like Apple does for multiple JVMs running). I was going to do my own Ruby install and decided against it.

Leopard seems very much faster than Tiger but that may be partially because I wiped the disk and did a clean install (the ultimate disk defragmentaton :-)


---

(*) A bit of advice: last year I was working really long hours sitting at my desk without getting up often enough - that lead to deep vein thrombosis and 2 pulmonary embolisms. Set a timer to remind yourself to get up every 30 minutes or so!

Comments

  1. Angry Developer7:44 PM

    Hi Mark,

    A friend of mine pointed me to this small cool app: http://www.workrave.org/welcome/

    It is not still available for OS X, but it is great for recovery and prevention of RSI.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark Watson, author and consultant8:54 PM

    Hello Behrang,

    That timer program looks good. I use the 3-2-1 Widget for OS X. I like to let people know just how important it is to interrupt the 'flow' and get up and walk around. Especially for computer programmers: it is too easy to get into coding and not think of taking a minute or two break to move around.

    Best regards,
    Mark

    ReplyDelete
  3. Angry Developer9:05 PM

    The 3-2-1 widget is very neat.

    What I like about WorkRave is that every 5 minutes or so, it disables the mouse and the keyboard and forces the user to take it easy! :))

    Also every hour or so it shows some animated pictures like how to stretch the fingers, the body, etc.

    Some time ago I had some terrible backache while sleeping more than a few hours in my bed. At first I thought my bed is the problem. But I found out that the real problem is me sitting behind my desktop in an unergonomic style for hours and hours.

    It is great to let people know how important this small and tiny breaks are.

    All the best,
    Behrang

    ReplyDelete
  4. Michael H.12:43 PM

    I work from home these days, and so I'm very aware that I don't exercise enough. =) I have the Mac set to announce the hour, and I used to get up and do stretches, jumping jacks, &c. when it tolled. Unfortunately, lately I just ignore it... =/

    Michael

    ReplyDelete
  5. Jellybean4:33 PM

    For the Mac, check out AntiRSI:

    http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/antirsi/

    Great free program you can customize to suit your needs.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Mark Watson, author and consultant10:19 PM

    Hello Jellybean,

    AntiRSI looks good. However, for me, it is important to simply get up and walk around for a minute or two so the simpler 1-2-3 timer set to 20 minute intervals works great.

    I find that getting up and walking around gives me some time for thinking about what I am working on. I have always thought that one of the best toolsets for a computer scientist is a pad of writing paper and a good pen :-) It is good to get away from the keyboard.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a w...
Read more

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more