My 2009 27″ iMac is starting to show its age. So when its hard drive started crunching this morning (and bringing the machine to a crawl), I wanted to know a little more. The command-line utility fs_usage is good if there’s not much going on, but if there’s a lot, the information flies by far too quickly to get good sense of what’s going on.

fseventer — donation-ware by Robert Pointon of fernLighting — is a great way to figure out what’s going on. It provides the interesting information from fs_usage, but it does so in a fun, visual, animated way. Highly recommended.

This set of instructions for turning on syntax highlighting in vi (vim, in fact) worked like a charm.

Recently my Finder started crashing multiple times per day, so I opened up the Console application and looked for the crashlogs. Looks like Dropbox was the culprit. In each of the 14 Finder crashes I’ve had since November 4 2013, the following line appears in the crashing thread:

4 com.evenflow.dropbox.dropboxbundle 0x0000000102cad2d0 -[DropboxStream removeObserver:forPath:] + 206

After a short bit of Googling, I ran into this thread on apple.com, which contained the line:

“This may have nothing to do with your Finder crashes, but do you have a Lion-compatible version of Dropbox installed?”

…which got me thinking. I’m running OS X 10.8.5. Looking at my Dropbox version (Menubar > Dropbox icon > Preferences > Account), I saw that my Dropbox version was 1.6.4 and that the software had no mechanism to autoupdate nor a way to “check for updates”.

So I checked Dropbox’s website, and lo-and-behold, the current version is 2.4.7, which I promptly installed. Hopefully this cures my woes!