MacBook Pro

I have an ever growing fascination of getting my Mac to perform better, faster and being more efficient. One of best tasks to to perform tasks to clear caches, repair disk permissions as well as other tasks such as removing log files, and clearing temporary files. Most of these tasks involve hundreds of different methods and programs and is frankly a bit complicated. Thankfully a cool little menu bar program has been developed which groups all of these tasks into one area, as well as giving you a handy shortcut to do them all at the same time. This program, if you haven’t guessed by the title, is called MainMenu, a little app that is designed to run in the menu bar of your Mac.

Once as you duzi (download, unzip and install, it needed a name) the application and run it it will present it self in the menu bar, the drop down list contains the list of tasks that can help speed up your Mac.

MainMenu menu bar screenshot

The list is split up into 6 sections. Maintenance scripts are scripts that are designed for you to run daily, weekly and monthly. They do various tasks such as cleaning log files, and other menial tasks. Disk Utility is pretty obvious in its task. It repairs disk permissions. Makes sure the correct access settings are given for the right system file.

Rebuild is the section that you should, personally, use sparingly. For example there is options to rebuild you Spotlight index, which if you are not careful takes ages to complete. Cleaning is another useful section which does the majority of your tasks including, caches and histories. You can save a lot of disk space if you have massive cache files like I did.

The final sections, Finder and Other Tasks are used for the very small tasks. This includes removing .DS_Store files, DNS flushes as well as showing hidden files in Finder, disabling the Dashabord to name a few. One problem I did find is that enabling hidden files in Finder does seem to use a lot of CPU power on my computer.

This is a very cool little menu bar application and I recommend you use it if you want to have a Mac that runs smoothly and in tip top condition. It does have a lot of uses as well as features, you could spend hours getting the most out of your Mac.

The title of this posts makes this application sound like it is the run of the mill app for showing you resources information about your Mac. By resources I mean, CPU, memory, hard drive etc. All of the little pieces of hardware that make your Mac tick. This application, although shows this information, does it in a very unique and different way. I think it is quite funky and very different to the normal numbers on a window which you normally see. The style of this app reminds me of a gauge that you will see on a complicated piece of machinery. To you it looks a random mess of lines and shapes, but to a trained user it shows a whole range of information. This application is very similar to that.

iPulse is a simple widget style application, it doesn’t have the close buttons, or a title bar, it is just the circular dial and nothing else. This application, incidentally, is made by Icon Factory who have also made Twitterific and Frenzic, so this is another one to add to the list. Anyway, once as you install the application you will end up with something that looks like this (the actual application isn’t cropped on the edges).

As you can see from the image, you will wonder what each of the bars and circles mean. Thankfully there is a helpful help page included with the app. As well as this the preferences include some very handy diagrams to tell you what everything means.
Explanation

Explaining what each of the bars means is rather easy. If you take a look at the image below, each number represents a different section of the application.

1. System CPU Tasks
2. Users CPU Tasks
3. Low Priority Tasks
4. Wired Memory
5. Active Memory
6. Inactive Memory
7. Free Memory
8. Disk Read Activity
9. Free Disk Space
10. Used Disk Space
11. Disk Write Activity
12. Ip Packets Received
13. Receiving Bytes Per Second
14. Outgoing Bytes Per Second
15. IP Packets Sent
16. Page Swap In
17. Page Swap Out
18. Battery Level
19. Load
20. Wireless Signal Strength

It doesn’t take long to understand what each of the bar and circles represents. After a while of use you don’t try and work out what the values mean, you get a feeling of what the values are. You can glance and see that memory is higher than normal, or you have a lot of CPU usage.

As well as the coloured bars there is information about your computer if you hover over each section. You can get the exact values you would normally get in any other application. Although this is useful, the panes information tends to fly all over the place since different information is activated by placing your mouse over the different areas. Since the app is small it can be hard to get the information you want.

This information can also be found from the menu bar and the dock. The dock icon is the same as the widget, which is rather cool.
Extending

Like a lot of good applications you can extend and change the application so it meets you needs. iPulse is has a lot of little features which you can change and configure. If you go into the preference panes you can change the colours, and add other features to the application. One of the coolest features is the ability to get jackets, which are special designs to install into your application. There is a lot of designs on the IconFactory website.

Conclusion

To conclude this application is pretty cool. It is different than the normal resource monitoring applications and as a result it could be a keeper. It currently costs $12.95. Although, once again, I am unsure what paying for brings. Its a good application, although if you want an application that is free you might want to check out iStat.

We all need to make sure our system is running correctly. The best way to access information on how your system is performing is through Activity Monitor. It is designed to show you information about your system resources. This includes, CPU, RAM, Disk, and Network, as well as individual system processes. Its not an app you use actively how every it is useful to have it running in the background. You mostly use Activity Monitor to troubleshoot problem applications and wonder why your Mac is running so slowly.

Activity Monitor is found under Utilities > Activity Monitor. You window should look similar to the one below. The window is split into two basic sections. The processes list and the resource tabs.

activity monitor

The process list shows you what applications are running on your Mac. You can filter the list based on who owns the application using the drop down menu in the tool bar. I recommend you select it to “My Processes” or “Windowed Processes” as these are the ones that usually go wrong. You can quit a process by pressing the “Quit Process” button in the top left corner or the window. You will have two options when the dialogue window pops up. You can either “Quit” the process and allow it to save all the files that it may be using, or “Force Quit” the app. This will kill the process immediately, you will end up Force Quitting applications that are not responsive. As a general rule don’t Force Quit applications you don’t know, you will probably end up breaking something.

The process list can be sorted using headings at the top of the columns. I tend to organise the apps list by CPU usage as this is the one I am most interested in. You can also organise it by memory, to see which apps are being the hogs. The process list is quite useful to see what is running and what is taking up your resources. I don’t recommend how every quitting apps which you don’t recognise, as quite a lot will be system apps that you need, prime example being “kernal_task”.

The bottom half of Activity Monitor is statistical information on your system. This is split into a variety of different tabs, each looks into a different area of your Mac. The CPU section, as you may have guessed, shows you the % of your CPU in use. This is split into Users processes which you run, System processes which the system runs. The “Nice” section is a percentage show by programs which have been given a higher priority by the system, most of the time you will never see and nice apps running. The histogram chart will then combine all of these processes and show you the output. If there is more green and red values, then your CPU is being used more. You can double click on the chart to see a zoomed in model.

The next section, System Memory, is dedicate to how much ram is being used by your Mac. This, again, is split up into different sections. Free memory is not being used at all. Wired memory is memory that can’t be moved onto your disk (it can’t be converted into Swap memory), generally system memory to help your Mac run. Active memory is being used by applications, this is generally the majority in the pie chart. The more apps you open the more bigger the Active memory size. Inactive memory is memory which has been reserved by an app, its called it for use at a later date, it allows you Mac to run faster since an app can automatically use the memory with having to ask for it. Generally you don’t need to worry how much memory is being used, the value by “Used” will by all that you need, if you find the value is getting to high and nearing your RAM limit, I would recommend you buy more memory.

The Disk Activity and Disk Usage sections are designed to show you what is happening to your disk. The Disk Activity will show you how much information is being written to disk, I hardly ever use this section. Its only really useful if you are having slow downs with an app and want to know if your disk is being used. The Disk Usage section will simply show you how much space is being used.

The final section, Network, is really useful. This will show you how much data is flowing in and out of your Mac. If you are wondering why the Internet is going slow, or why a file isn’t being downloaded particularly quickly, the Network tab is usually a good place to check. It will show you how your network is performing. If you find that it is being used flat out, its usually a good indication to go investigate what is happening.

Network work security is getting more and more important for the security of any computer. Did you know that many applications dial home. Most of the time these isn’t a problem but you may want to keep an eye on what is happening. The solution to this is to monitor your internet connections using Little Snitch.

Little Snitch is a wonderful program. The basic idea behind it is simple. Every time an application wants to connect to the internet Little Snitch will pop up telling you what is happening. You can then decide to block the application or let it through. This means that you can monitor what is happening. As well as potentially block any unscrupulous applications.


Its a very powerful applications that enables you to monitor connections in real time through the use of a little popup. This is probably one of the best features since it enables you to quickly find out what is taking up all of your network resources. Many times I have wondered why my network is being used with no visible reason. As well as this it also enables you to set up various filters so you can automatically set up different applications privileges.

Like with many of the applications mentioned on this site I recommend you download and give it a try. There is a free demo to let you try the application out. The final price of the app is $24.95 which is a real bargain.


Edit: Big spelling mistake in the title that was fixed.

while ago I mentioned Freedom, the application to stop your network connections so you can get on with more work done. Well, I have been doing a lot of digging and found the Terminal command that does the entire step for you. Its obviously more manual but it gives you an insight into how ifconfig, the tool used, works.

As mentioned, the tool uses ifconfig. This is the Terminal command to configure and setup the settings for you network cards. If you pop open Terminal and type ifconfig, it will list loads of information about your network cards such a MAC addresses, duplexing and a whole range of other things I have no idea about.

To disable you network connection you can use the “down” command that takes down the network card. It is initiated with the following command.

sudo ifconfig en0 down

Sudo and the admin password is needed since its a high level system command. Ifconfig is the command we are using, en0 is the network interface command that we are talking to. After a couple of seconds it will kill the interface card and kill not be used. There is no output message it will just kill the network card.

Most computers now have more than one network card, eg ethernet and wireless. So if you really want to kill any network connections you need to know what there names are. Again, if you type ifconfig it will display the information regarding your network. If I draw your attention to the left hand side of the list it should display something like: en0: flags=…. This is the name of the network card (en0) that it is addressed at. For example I have lo0, en0, en1, fw0 plus others. Most of the time you only need to display the en versions, I think these stand for ethernet. If you want to find out exactly which ones are being used I suggest using one of the iSlayer programs, these clearly show the network you are running off.

You only need to disable en0 and upwards, if you are on standard network connections and not anything funky like firewire. If you disable ln0, your loopback address, you could really screw your system, since quite a few programs use the loop back address to communicate with itself and other programs. If you disable this programs will probably crash.

If you want to re-enable your network cards and communicate with the world once again, its simple. Just type:

sudo ifconfig en0 up

This brings it back to life. Repeat for the addresses you want to bring back up again.

This tool is actually designed to stop network cards communicating for testing and network analysis. But it is always useful if you want a bit of piece, but still use you computer. Optionally a far easier method would be to plug the cable out of the wall, but that is far to boring and has no chance of screwing with root system settings that can effect your whole computer. Have fun.

Every time you boot up your Mac you hear the familiar boot up sound. But it does get annoying after a while. Disabling it is quite easy, all you have to do is mute your volume. But you have to remeber to do this every time before you shutdown. This is a pain. There are methods in which you can get around this. One uses a preference pane. The other involves creating files that run on boot up and shutdown.

The best and most easiest method is to use a preference pane. If you head over to StartupSound.prefPane, you can download the preference pane. Once as you have installed it thorugh the installer. You can modify the sound value for the start up sound. To disable you just press mute. When you boot up again the sound will be gone.

The other method, which involves using a shutdown and boot up script is located at Mac OS X Hints, the post is here. By adding a file it achieves the same method. The only problem being is that you have to have the knowledge of creating files within Terminal. I prefer the Preference Pane method as it is a lot easier.

The boot process on a Mac is a magical process, all you see is a grey screen with the magic happening in the background. Did you know that very are various keys which you can use to change how you Mac boots and access certain settings. They are not for every day use, mostly troubleshooting. They are worth knowing if anything goes wrong.

There are a variety of keys which you can use. These have been found by searching the Internet on Apple’s website as well as other peoples sites. I have not tested every single command because I haven’t had time. Although I would take them in good faith.

During boot if you press:

C You start from a bootable CD such as your install DVD in the drive.

D Perform an Apple Hard ware test if you have your install DVD in the drive.

N Boot from a network compatible server. Only useful if you have the server.

T Start up in Target Disk mode. You can usually connect to another Mac through Firewire and do lots of funky things. Gone out of fashion and not used as much.

Option Start up using the Start Up Manager. Here you can pick which drive you want to boot from. Known to people who use BootCamp. You can also boot from a CD which is the same as press C.

Option then N Similar to the item above, except you get given the choice of booting from a network disk.

Option + N Boot from the first network boot image.

Command + V Boot up in Verbose mode, where you see lots of text whizzing by which is not a lot of use to you. I have written about this command here. It will also show Verbose output on shut down.

Command + S Single User Mode. This is where you can run a lot of high level tasks as a single user. Probably not for newbies. You could probably break your computer very quickly in Single User mode. More about it here.

Shift Start up in safe mode. Very useful if you have a problem and need an environment where you don’t want unnecessary things loaded. A good bet if you get Kernel panics during boot.

Option + Command + P + R Reset NVRAM. Although you will probably never need to reset this RAM it contents some useful stuff that can become corrupted. If you are having really bad problems this may be a good lead to follow. More information on Apple’s website.

Hold Eject or F12 or Mouse Eject anything that is in the disk drive. One to follow on from yesterdays topic.

I think that is just about it. I couldn’t find any more that worked with Mac OS X. If you have any more please leave a comment below. Its useful to have a list in case you ever need to use them.