Thinking about replacing my iMac’s internal HD. Making a note here of someone else who has done it so I don’t forget.
Monthly Archives: November 2013
Unknown file activity on your Mac? Boot up fseventer
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.
Turn on Syntax Highlighting in Vi in OS X
This set of instructions for turning on syntax highlighting in vi (vim, in fact) worked like a charm.
Finder crashing? Check your Dropbox version
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!