Aichon's Profile

It's going to be 106°F outside today and tomorrow where I live (about an hour out of Houston, Texas), and that's typical for this time of year. We already keep the blinds shut during the day, but there's so much ambient heat that it doesn't always feel like it makes a difference.

One thing that really helps to cut costs is simply bumping the A/C up a degree or two and acclimating yourself to it (only takes a few days). To pull some numbers that are probably incorrect off the top of my head, I think I've heard that you add 10% to your A/C bill for every degree under 78°F. I live in a house with a few other guys, and after some of the other tenants left for the summer, the remaining tenant and myself bumped the A/C up 1-2 degrees from where it had been around 76-77°F, which resulted in us shaving $60 off of the bill from the previous month, despite the temperatures climbing higher outside. Granted, some of that savings is simply the result of having less electronics and appliances running in the house, but the majority of it is almost certainly from the change to the A/C.

We've also closed the A/C vents (and doors, when possible) to bathrooms, closets, the kitchen, and the empty bedrooms, which helps to push more air to the places where we spend the majority of our time, and we've kept the doors open between the places we use, which has helped to keep the air circulating better. The result is that even though we bumped the A/C setting up a few degrees, the two of us who are still here feel cooler, since we're getting more cool air and circulation to the places that matter.

You were spot-on with your suggestions for using Onyx, Activity Monitor, and upgrading the RAM, but I cringe every time I hear someone suggesting "repair disk permissions" in order to fix something that it /does not fix/. This whole cargo cult regarding it started back in the early days of Mac OS X when it was indeed capable of curing several common ailments that users were facing. Over time, it became a first step in pretty much every novice troubleshooting guide, despite the fact that it only actually cured one sort of problem. That said, it hasn't been a useful maintenance tool ever since 10.5 came out in 2007, since 10.5 changed the way that things work under the hood, and at least one Mac User Group I checked is actively discouraging its use for maintenance tasks. Even when it was useful in the pre-10.5 days, it never was really responsible for offering improved system performance.

Just to run through some gripes, permissions are referred to as "incorrect" rather than "corrupted" when they're not set as they should be, and your computer doesn't become "confused" or get slowed down by them, nor is there such a thing as "overlap" in the sense that you used it (they're simply changed). Instead, if your permissions are incorrectly set (which happens for the reasons that you correctly identified) to the point where they're impacting the operation of the computer, you'll see much more significant issues. For instance, applications may fail to launch, errors may appear during typical use, software may crash, or, in extreme cases, you may even have a kernel panic. Long story short, things break, rather than slow down.

If you just stop and think about it for a moment, the idea that your computer gets slowed down because of incorrect permissions makes no sense. For it to make sense, it would suggest that software which has been incorrectly forbidden from accessing a file is able to take an alternative, but longer, route to access that file. But if that were true, it would mean that the software was accessing a file it was forbidden from accessing! Talk about poor security!

So, to close all of that up, any perceived speed improvements you've seen were, regrettably, likely just you seeing what you wanted to see.

For some more information on repairing disk permissions from back in the days when it was actually useful:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2963?viewlocale=en_US

Also, I'd add that if users are on 10.6 or earlier, they should make a point of quitting applications when they're not using them in order to free up memory. Of note, not all applications quit when their last window is closed, so you should check your Dock to see if it is still running (running applications have a light under them). In 10.7, this is no longer a concern, since the OS will dynamically quit running applications that you're not using in order to reclaim memory when it needs it (10.7 automatically saves and remembers exactly how you had apps, so quitting them doesn't cost you anything).

I never shut my Mac mini down unless I'm transporting it or restarting it for an update, but I do make sure my monitors are off if I'm stepping out, since monitors are still massive power drains. The mini draws so little power when its idling that the hassle of booting up isn't worth the savings from shutting it down, plus I use it as my alarm clock (nothing wakes me up quite as well as having to remember how to type my password in the morning) and I routinely have things running at night.

Yeah...I think I'll trust Mythbusters on this one, since they describe their methodology, whereas Reader's Digest gives no indication of where their numbers are coming from. For all we know, they grabbed them from someone else who was citing old wive's tales.

Couldn't agree more with mmmmmmmmmmmmm's comment. No matter how long you wait, Apple always has something better than what you bought in the pipeline. If you always just buy when you need it, you'll always make the right choice and can rest easy with that knowledge.

That said, if you can put off "needing" it until an update comes out... ;)

It IS fraud, since the terms you agree to when making the purchase make it abundantly clear that you either need to be currently employed by, enrolled at, or accepted to a university in order to have the benefits of the discount. The .edu address merely represents (or misrepresents, in this case) your claim to be a student.

People who game the system ruin it for the students who actually need the discount. Or did no one else stop to wonder why Apple switched a year or two ago to offering flat discounts that weren't as good as the old blanket 10% student discounts on everything that had been in place since at least the 90s?

Demonstrate some integrity.

You mention AirPlay, but then didn't consider the original product that launched it for Apple in 2004, back when they still called it AirTunes: the Airport Express.

http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/

Apple still sells them, and they cost just $99, work with Macs and PCs, are fully functional 802.11a/b/g/n routers that can handle your house's internet needs in addition to streaming audio, work with any speakers (they have a jack that supports both analog and digital output), can have their audio streams remotely controlled by any iOS device via the Remote app, and don't involve adding any dongles to your computer.

Is there something obvious I'm missing that justifies paying 4x more for the playGo? Because as far as I can tell it does a lot less, costs a lot more, and adds a lot of unnecessary clutter.

For taking notes, Yojimbo has always done the trick best for me.

It should be noted that simply having https is not, in and of itself, proof that you're safe online. For instance, if you're somehow led to a phishing site that looks like your real banking site, they may set up an https connection with you just like your real bank does. So while you may have an encrypted connection, the person sharing the connection with you could still be a bad guy.

The way to check for something like that is to look up the SSL certificate that's been issued to them to verify that they are who they claim to be. My browser shows me the certificate information if I click on the tiny padlock symbol, and I can look it over to ensure that the certificate is valid.

With how easy and cheap it is today to backup your files on a daily basis, I'm amazed more people don't do it. With a Mac, Time Machine does hourly backups automatically for you with no hassle or need to touch anything, and, if you know where to look, $100 can cover everything (shipping too) for a bare 2TB drive and an enclosure to go on it, which is enough to keep a few years worth of backups. Plus, when you buy a new Mac, you simply plug your Time Machine drive into it, and it'll automatically set everything up exactly as you left it on your old Mac.

Windows has come a long way too and makes backing up relatively painless.

When drives used to be more expensive, backing up required a lot of effort, and automated solutions required a degree in Computer Science to understand, I could see why people didn't backup their data as often as they should have. Even I was guilty of that. But considering how far backups have come in the last five years, and how cheap drives have gotten, it's well worth the meager cost when you compare it to the massive amount of time you may need to spend to recover or reproduce that data otherwise.