Month of May, 2007

It sucks when Google Maps catches you!

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"Either I missed out on a lot as a kid, or the playgrounds here in Belgium are a LOT more fun than the ones back home."

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The launch of Microsoft Surface marks the beginning of a new technology category and a user-interface revolution. Surface, Microsoft
’s first surface computer, provides effortless interaction with digital content through natural hand gestures, touch and physical objects. Surface computing breaks down traditional barriers between people and technolog

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"Blow in her face and she'll follow you anywhere." Pretty much says it all.

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In a recent post on Facebook's new platform, the social networks new offering can be viewed as having similar traits to an operating system: embracing third party developers who are given the hooks to build apps that take advantage of a unified UI, and large installed user base.

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It lives! Windows Longhorn has been resurrected and is available for download. FREE! The serial required is: TCP8W-T8PQJ-WWRRH-QH76C-99FBW. WinFS has been restored!!!!

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Man...

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For those who missed it http://duggmirror.com/security/Netscape_Hacked_By_Digg/ .

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#10. Not that you would ever need to know the dietary habits of the South American anteater, but it's comforting to know you could find it online if you did.

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On Sunday evening I finished writing an article I had been preparing for a couple of weeks. It was full of my own experience and careful research into the area of OS X optimization, I compiled in total 52 tips. Once publishing on Sunday I submitted the article to around 20 top Mac news sites thinking that a couple might pick them up.

Luckily some did and by late Monday it found its way onto Digg.com, where it got promoted to the front page early Tuesday morning. I've never had an article on Digg so was quite surprised to find someone has submitted it and that it received over 1500 Diggs.

The traffic increase had quite an effect on ImAFish so I'm going to try to evaluate whats happened.

Visitor Stats

The graph is from ImAFish's Google Analytics and shows unique visits.

As you can see from the Graph the huge traffic spike on Tuesday, this is when the article made it to the front page of Digg. The flat line represents around 200-250 visits/day.

The table below shows total number of hits from the week for the various locations. What's interesting is how this balances out over the individual days - 20,000 off the Digg hits come on the Tuesday though the StumbleUpon traffic is spread quite evenly over the week.

It will be interesting to see how this traffic will taper off over the coming days/weeks , one of my other popular articles still has a constant traffic stream even though it was written over a year ago.

I thought it was also interesting to leave the 'average time on site' stats in as the StumbleUpon average is double what it is for all the others. I thought this may be because there are more comments nearer the end of the week for Stumble visitors to read however 99% of the lifehacker.com visits have been in at the end of the week.

Why are StumbleUpon visitors spending twice as long on the site and viewing on average 2 pages?

I'm not really surprised about the low pages/visit as being a Digg user myself I rarely look further around a site unless it's been Dugg a number of times in a short period making me more interested.

The browser stats shouldn't be of any particular surprise considering it's a OS X based article so I was expecting a higher rate of Safari users than usual.

70% of the visitors used OS X, 27% Windows and 3% Linux.

Over the week I used 35gig of bandwidth, mainly because I hosted all my own images for the article.

Adverts

My advertising revenue was better than usual however it did not increase at the same percent that the visits did. It's pretty well known that Digg users don't click adverts and I could have done more to optimise the adverts to be in better positions however my main goal of the article was not to milk it for revenue. On average for the week page click through rate has been at 0.19%, which is down considerably from usual.

Server

I was quite surprised with my hosting in the fact that it didn't go down at all. I just have a normal shared hosting account. Its not unusual to see websites that have gone down because of the Digg effect and with the volume of hits I was getting I was expecting the worst.

I'm not sure the exact reason on the server staying up but I know its not overloaded with accounts, is a reasonable speed and is run by some very good techies. My articles blog runs Wordpress 2.1 with the WP-Cache module installed which I can imagine also helped.

Response

The response to the article was in general very positive and its created quite a debate for some people, one person has even copied my list and written responses to all of them, its a bit patronising and he doesn't add anything useful to my article. Though I have to give credit to him for being able to spin my article into something that has also brought him traffic and for not censoring all the negative comments it has given him.

Its been good to see a range of comments on ImAFish and I thank those people who made corrections or added to the original article.

Content Evaluation

There are some parts of the article where I should have been more clear and this unfortunately led to some confusion for some people, in future I will have to make sure any points made are obvious.

Overall though its been a very positive experience and a very interesting week, hopefully I can repeat it again with another article in the not so distant future. I'm off for a week to Egypt on holiday so will bring another holiday review the week after.

Including the "Twirl-a-Squirrel"

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Reader Kip modded a cheap $5 throwaway flashlight into a blinding torch that's brighter than a $95 fancy pants flashlight. Hit the play button to see how.

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In the biggest music promotion in history, Coke and iTunes have teamed up to give away 2 billion free iTunes downloads to lucky Coke drinkers over 4 months.

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Showers are great and all, but sometimes I wish they could be more terrifying. That's why I like this Gasmask Showerhead. It strikes fear deep into my soul, which is what I look for in a bathroom appliance.

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The title says it all.

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Jonathan Coulton sat in Gorilla Coffee in Brooklyn, his Apple PowerBook open before him, and began slogging through the day
’s e-mail. Coulton is 36 and shaggily handsome. In September 2005, he quit his job as a computer programmer and, with his wife’s guarded blessing, became a full-time singer and songwriter.

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Doggles? Wtf!

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It's been a while coming but I've finally finished my latest article. If your a Mac geek then your going to love this one!

52 Ways To Speed Up OS X

Enjoy!

After Apple recently announced a delay to OS X 10.5 Leopard I had to delay my iMac upgrade until the Autumn. This led me to thinking about how to speed up Tiger to get the most out of my ageing G5. This is what I came up with:

General System

1. Repair Disk Permissions Navigate to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility. Select your Macintosh HD and select Verify Disk Permissions. If needed you can then Repair Disk Permissions.

2. Clear out login items Its good to check that unwanted programs are not starting up when you login to your Mac. This can be done from System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items.

3. Clear out unwanted applications Go through your applications folder and see if you can save yourself some disk space by removing any applications you no longer use.

4. Clear out unused system preferences Check in your system preferences if there are any unused system preferences tabs that can be removed. If you do find something you don't use you can either disable it within its menu or remove it from '~/Library/PreferencePanes'. You may have to reboot or do a force empty trash (see #38).

5. Clear Desktop Its been reported numerous times that having a clear desktop can increase the speed of your Mac. So either put your junk in folders or delete it!

6. Empty Trash (if it wont empty see #38) I'm always amazed when I'm looking on someone's Mac and they haven't ever emptied the trash! Check what's in there then save yourself some space and empty it.

7. Turn off Universal Access (if not used) Navigate to System Preferences > Universal Access and turn off anything you're not using.

8. Turn off Bluetooth (if not used) Navigate to System Preferences > Bluetooth.

9. Turn off speech recognition (if not used) Navigate to System Preferences > Speech Recognition.

10. Turn off internet sharing (if not used) Navigate to System Preferences > Sharing > Internet

11. Check there is plenty of disk space on the boot drive. Your Mac uses some of your hard drive space as virtual memory when there is not enough actual memory available. Its good to always keep 10% of your hard drive free for such activity.

12. Remove Unwanted Language Packs OS X contains hundreds of languages that you most likely wont use. Monolingual is a free program that can root out these languages and remove them saving you some extra disk space.

*Edit: Warning people have experienced problems with Monolingual so becareful what you remove. Only a reinstall will put the languages back so decide weather you really need the extra space by removing them.

13. Remove any desktop changing programs Until recently I had a nice program that would put a different babe on my desktop each month. It looked great but once I started looking in activity monitor it was taking up lots of memory and processor time.

14. Check dock for unwanted apps. Your dock should only contain your most used applications so take a look through to see if there is anything you can remove or uninstall.

15. Choose suitable applications for files Be sensible when choosing what applications open by default - think do you really need Photoshop to open just to view an image when preview will work fine? Right click on a file then select Get Info.

16. Check Software Build If you have an Intel Mac then check the build of the software is universal - it might be that the application is still running through Rosetta and that a universal update is available.

Eye Candy

17. Remove dock animation Navigate to System Preferences > Dock then un-tick Animate Opening Applications.

18. Avoid animated desktops Navigate to System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver then un-tick Change picture.

Dashboard

19. Remove unused widgets. Each widget takes some memory and processor power even when you're not using the dashboard so only enable the ones you use. Alternatively you can disable the dashboard - see #23.

20. Check to see how much processing power and memory each widget uses. Some widgets are more intensive than others, if there is one that is particularly demanding see if there is one with similar functionality on the Apple website. To do this run Activity Monitor - Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.

As you can see the widgets I have running are all using an acceptable amount of Real Memory.

Tinkertool Tinkertool is a utility that gives you access to additional settings within OS X.

21. Remove animation effects. The animation effects are the eye candy that make OS X look nice but they are not really needed, you can turn them off from the Finder pane within Tinkertool.

22. Disable Dock shadow. From the Dock pane un-tick Enable Dock shadow.

23. Disable Dashboard. If you don't use the Dashboard you can deactivate it from the General pane.

24. Skip checksum verifications when opening DMG files. This will speed up the loading of disk images when opening. This can be found in the Applications pane.

25. Remove or deactivate unwanted login items from the Login Items pane. You might already have done this in #2.

26. Reduce delay time for display of loading pages in Safari. This should speed up your web browsing experience, found within the Safari Pane.

OnyX OynX is similar to Tinkertool however has many more options and preferences.You may have already done some of these in previous tips. Parameters

27. Un-tick Graphic Effects (Finder tab). You may already have done this with Tinkertool #21.

28. Un-tick Animate 'Opening applications' and 'When alert in background' (Dock tab).

29. Disable Dashboard (Dashboard and Expose tab). You may already have done this with Tinkertool #23.

30. Set Safari speed of web page display to fast (Safari Tab). You may already have done this in #26. Maintenance

31. Repair Disk Permissions. You may already have done this in #1.

32. Run Maintenance Scripts.

33. Reset Spotlight Index (it may take over a day to rebuild the index afterwards).

34. Run complete system optimization. Cleaning

35. Clear Internet Settings.

36. Clear User and Font Caches.

37. Clear unused logs.

38. Force Empty Trash Automation

39. Check settings - The default settings should be fine here. Click Execute.

Safari

You can do some of the following by resetting Safari - click Safari > Reset Safari. *Edit: Resetting Safari does not clear Favicons.

40. Clear Cache. To speed up page loading Safari saves a copy of every page in its cache however if the cache gets too large it can actually slow down page loading so its best to empty it occasionally. To do so click Safari > Empty Cache.

41. Clear History. Safari can remember every single site you have visited which can have a negative effect on its performance. You can empty it be selecting History > Clear History.

42. Clear AutoFill. AutoFill is the data is saved in forms such as your username and password on websites. As with the cache and history the AutoFill can mount up over time. To empty select Safari > Preferences then select the AutoFill tab. From here you can go through the three AutoFill sections and clear out data that you no longer want stored.

43. Clear Favicons. Favicons are the little icons you see to the left of the URL in the address bar. These can be cleared by emptying user folder/Library/Safari/Icons.

Firefox

44. If you use Firefox then you can get specially optimized versions of the browser based on your processor architecture - either G4, G5 or intel.

45. Extensions Firefox has some great extensions but they can slow down the browser so take a serious look to see weather you really need that extra toolbar!

iTunes

46. Smart Playlists These can slow down the operation of iTunes as they reload the contents of the list every time the program loads. If you have a a smart play list that does not change very often then you can either deactivate live updating (by clicking file > edit smart play list) or copy of the contents of the smart play list in to a regular play list.

Other

47. HP Printer drivers can often cause problems and use a lot of processor power so check in the activity monitor for HP Communicator, if it seems to be constantly running at 80% - 100% then try uninstalling it. I had problems on my Mac Mini for my HP PSC 1110 all in one with the HP software on OS X 10.3 maxing out the CPU after printing. I had to remove the software and just use the basic drivers rather than the full suite.

48. Check Classic is not running if not being used. Classic can be disabled from within System Preference.

49. Run Software Update. The latest updates sometimes provide speed increases as well as fix bugs and vulnerabilities.

50. Update other applications. It's always best to run the latest versions of your programs. Websites such as Mac Update and Version Tracker are good places to keep your applications up to date.

51. Add More RAM. There is only so much you can do with software, the cheapest way to give you're Mac a speed boost is to upgrade the memory.

52. Reboot your Mac. After doing all this optimization it might be an idea to reboot your Mac. If your like me and use sleep mode for the majority of the time then a reboot once in a while often helps too!

Update: Interested in seeing how many hits this article has got and how to do it for your blog then read here?

A lady thought that the puddle was only a few inches deep, but she was very surprised to find out how deep it was.

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Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the latest stats show that Gmail users skew younger and richer than those on Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.

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How come my chocolate covered raisins never come with any SQL?

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Linkinn - Top 5 most dangerous roads of the world

creakative jump drives and gadgets.

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I know there have been posts like this before, but I have yet to see any of these. Some are pretty clever. "Here is a collection of cool business cards to inspire you. Most of them are from the Business Cards flickr pool, some of them from Ads of the World..."

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The well known free antimalware application was recently served a CAD. The reply is priceless. Well done Patrick!! Get behind this one people FTW. Right is right and what this malware vender is doing is wrong.

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What is this device that, with less years in the market, sold twice the amount of the iPod?

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The coolest thing i've seen in a long time.

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Although Gmail, Gcal, Google Reader, et al. are great apps, they're not perfect. Here's what Google needs to do to improve.

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Simple tips on how to improve your candid photography

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As summer approaches lets take a look at some nice warm colored websites - today we digg out the best orange sites

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A new study from Motorola has found that an amazing 45% of Europeans now watch television online.

The survey covering the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain found that the French lead Europe in terms of online television consumption with 59% of people choosing to watch previews and episodes of their favourite shows via the web.

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You may already know that “deleting” a file does nothing of the sort. But did you know that your disk drive has a built-in system for the secure erasure of data?

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"But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you
’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be."

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Maddox comments on the crappy stock photos on the web: "Finally," I thought to myself, "a site that sells chubby black women." Unfortunately, after hours of searching there were no black women to be found; only DSL and local phone service. Here are some other photos I found on corporate websites, and what I learned about the world based the images:

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09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. It's the HD-DVD processing key you can use to decrypt and play most HD-DVD movies in Linux. Movie studios are going ballistic over this leak, so Digg the story up and make it reach the front page. The first time, the story got removed.

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