Tag Archives: mac osx

How to change the dictionary in MacOSX

I love MacOSX, and one of the best features is the almost ubiquitous built-in dictionary. So it is surprising that I after 3 years I have only just now discovered how to switch the dictionary from the default American English to British spellings. For some reason this is not part of the normal System Preferences pane, nor does setting your region or system language have any effect on spelling. I knew there had to be a way, but could never find the trick until today.

In case anyone else is having the same problem, here is what you have to do:

  1. Open an application that supports the in-built dictionary (pretty much anything except for Firefox). If in doubt use TextEdit.
  2. Right click on a text input area and select Spelling and Grammar -> Show Spelling and Grammar from the menu. Alternatively, the same menu option is available from the Edit menu.
  3. Select the dictionary you want from panel that pops up. Although the panel looks like part of the application you are using changes to the settings here apply across the entire OS.
  4. Enjoy the sensation of spelling words with lots of silent letters just like Queen Elizabeth II and God.

spelling

Replacing a MacBook Hard Drive

My first-generation MacBook laptop had only one problem – its first generation 60 gig hard disk. Actually it used to have two problems, but I installed more memory in it ages ago. 60 gigs doesn’t go far in today’s world of movies and huge software packages, so I felt it was time to upgrade. One trip to the store and a $167 EFTPOS transaction later and I am the owner of a new 320 gig hard disk, which seems to be the current sweet spot for price vs. capacity for 2.5 inch drives.

Thankfully Apple have made the job of replacing a MacBook’s hard disk extremely easy, and they provide step by step instructions. All you need is a 10c coin, a Philips #1 screw driver, a piece of stiff card, and a secret tool not mentioned anywhere in the instructions!

torxscrew

The surprise turns out to be a manner of fastening of which I was hitherto unaware – a TORX screw. TORX screws are used to hold the metal shield surrounding the drive in place, with the screw heads slotting into the bay runners – these must be removed from the old drive to fit the shield to the new drive.

Luckily I happened to have a #1 TORX bit in my tool kit, but finding an unfamiliar screw while a $3000 computer lies in bits on the dinner table is not an experience I wish to repeat.

driveinfo

After replacing the drive, I booted from the Leopard install disk, ran the Disk Utility to format the drive and then restored my data from my Time Machine drive. The end result is that my computer is set up exactly the same way as it was before, except I now have 250 gigs of free space to play with. Much better.

Mac OS X Version 10.5.2

I just installed the latest patch for Mac OS X on my MacBook. It fixes a whole host of things, almost none of which I ever found to be a problem.

First the bad news – the update take a very long time. First there is 5 minutes of watching a progress bar (no problems here), then there is a reboot and 5 minutes of watching an alarmingly blank screen, than another reboot and then another 5 minutes of blank screen before at last being dumped unexpectedly back at your desktop. This is not quite the Apple experience I signed up for when I bought my MacBook.

The good news is that 10.5.2 seems great so far. A few cosmetic issues have been fixed and the desktop seems a little snappier, probably due to the new graphics driver that is included.

MacOSX Leopard – Time Machine

Talk about bad luck! The week before Apple’s latest and greatest operating system is released, my MacBook hard drive decides it can no longer go on living. As I result, I have lost a years worth of email and photos just days before. If the hard disk had waited just a few more days then everything would have been safely backed up using the new Time Machine feature in MacOSX.5.

Let me begin by saying that Time Machine is not the last word in backing up, you can definitely buy better software. However, Time Machine may well be the prettiest piece of software ever created for any purpose whatsoever, so much so that I am actually looking forward to accidently deleting something in the future.


Time Machine Restore Screen
Restoring files with time machine, pity you can’t see the moving starfield in the background

Although it looks great, and works well, Time Machine is a little strange compared to other backup tools. The Mac filesystem has no equivalent to Windows’ Volume Shadow Services, so you cannot literally roll back a folder transparently. What Time Machine does is take periodic snapshots of your entire hard disk and stores it on another volume, usually some type of removable USB drive.

The first backup you take is basically a copy of your entire filesystem (the files are not compressed and can actually be accessed in the finder). Every half hour after that, time machine will create a new backup directory and copy any files that have changed.

Much of the implementation is done with UNIX-style links to directories, so that files that have not changed since the last backup are not re-copied. This has some important implications (both good and bad) that I have not seen mentioned anywhere else:

GOOD: The entire filesystem is stored so it is simple to do a complete recovery if your entire hard disk fails.

GOOD: The backup directory structure is so simple that you don’t even really need the fancy flying-through-space GUI to get your files back.

BAD: Links to folders are not supported on any other filesystem other than MacOS. This means you have to reformat your backup drive. Which leads to:

BAD: Very limited network support. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have everything backed up to a network share? Why yes, yes it would! Well you can’t – unless your network share supports links to folders – which it doesn’t (well, if you are running your share off Leopard Server it does – but you get the point).

BAD: Backups are only done every half an hour hourly, and only 1 backup is kept for each day earlier than 24 hours ago. Other backup tools backup every file as soon as it is saved.

GOOD: Unless you are stupid and backup to another partition, your backups are on a different physical drive that will hopefully survive whatever calamity that destroyed your data.

Although it is not the mythical perfect backup software, Time Machine is a very useful addition to MacOS. The very fact that it is bundled with the OS and very easy to set up is sure to save many hours of tears and frustration for Mac users.