These are my notes while reading about MacOSX Housekeeping…
Source for these infos
A Macworld Article from February 2005: „Prevent Mac Disasters“
Verify Preferences
Run ‚sudo plutil –s ~/Library/Preferences/*.plist‘
Repair Permissions
Is done from within DiskUtility, which can be found in/Applications/Utilities
Delete Cache files
Can be done from within Terminal.app as well as with the use of diverse tools, as quoted in macworld. Ⅰ would reccommend macjanitor as it is free and quite easy to use. But if you want more comfort check out the other tools mentioned.
Delete Log Files
Is not really necessary but it can help to clean up things and to save disk space. macworld reccommends to delete the files from the Terminal or Konsole.app. Ⅰ rather prefer to keep things a bit archived; this can be easily achieved by running the scripts in/etc/(daily, weekly and monthly) either by hand, cron or Cronnix (a tool that makes it easy to schedule cron jobs without going to the terminal)
This also takes care of some other tasks, such as prebinding.
Prebinding
‚sudo update_prebinding –root/‘
Check Hard Drive Status
‚diskutil info disk0 | grep SMART‘
Creating a Mac Maintenance Toolbox
Is really recommended – as well as a good backup strategy.
…on my way to get wordpress to work as intended – oh the joy of plugins. Which ones will Ⅰ need? Which ones are fun?
Currently playing in iTunes: Temptation by Diana Krall
Oh, the choice is difficult. Ⅰ am currently looking for a new text editor – and there are so many out there. Why am Ⅰ looking? Ⅰ don’t really know 
curiosity as well as a growing dissatisfaction with Word and TextEdit. Ⅰ have been looking at SubEthaEdit, TextMate, TextWrangler and Emacs so far. The only one that is not Freeware is TextMate – which ⅰ stumbled across because it was hyped in the mac blogosphere – but Ⅰ haven’t really found out what is so great about it. Yes, it supports commandline tools such as grep, it can pipe the data through things like markdown. But most of these features are already in TextWrangler (formerly BBEdit lite and free as in free beer). Then there is SubEthaEdit, written by some fellow students here in Munich and it has that neat online-collaboration feature – which Ⅰ will not be using so often anyway.
So it seems the final battle will be between TextWrangler and Emacs. Ⅰ suppose it will be both for a while now – in addition to TeXShop – which Ⅰ may get rid of in the process – at least for editing my .tex files?!
Anyhow, if Ⅰ get some more time Ⅰ will write some details about the editors.
[Update 2005–04–28]
It has been a while since Ⅰ wrote this post. What has changed? Have Ⅰ decided on one texteditor?
Indeed Ⅰ have. Not because of a thorough investigation, though. Ⅰ have had my time in the past with BBEditLite, so TextWrangler – as a free alternative – was a good choice to start. Especially since it can open and save from FTP-servers, as Ⅰ do work on my blogs and othher websites too often. Ⅰ am a bit unhappy about it though – Ⅰ wish it would be a Cocoa app that works nicely with all those features by Apple as well as other Services. Somehow it always feels a bit wrong – much more than TextMate, SubEthaEdit or even TextEdit.
Now Emacs is another story – one that has not begun yet. Feature rich as it may be – Ⅰ do not have the time to run up the learning hill on that one, yet. But then TexShop is working fine and Ⅰ do not need any more power user features. Yet.
Ⅰ have been in love with OmniWeb for some time, testing it in everyday use. Ⅰ especially like the workspace feature and the ad‑ and pop-up blockers. However the nice tab feature of page thumbnails was eye candy at first, but used too much screen estate on my 12“ iBook, OmniWeb itself used too much processing power at weird times when it was in the background – so finally ⅰ switched to FireFox. Lovely. Great Add-Ons like the web developer tooolbar, and especially offline browsing – a feature that Ⅰ really missed in OW.
Ⅰ am not sure if Ⅰ have read this elsewhere or if Ⅰ am the first to think of it – Ⅰ doubt it. What Ⅰ would really want is the following system:
A blog like system where Ⅰ can do all a blog can do today, but more: whenever Ⅰ comment on another blog this article will be linked to a hard copy of that comment in my system, including the context it came from in case the other site no longer exists. When Ⅰ post a question on metafilter or in usenet Ⅰ want these articles plus their answers to be accessible through my blog – making my blog a summary of all my net activities, or at least those that Ⅰ wish to publish. There need to be access levels so Ⅰ can control who gets to see what, but….
A system that automatically posts questions Ⅰ post to the blog to usenet and metafilter, a system where Ⅰ can easily del.icio.us my stuff…
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