The IAX client I’m writing is coming along nicely. It’s now in a state that makes the program usable. And today I made changes so I could compile a universal binary. And the program works on my PPC mac, but I use some libraries I needed to change the makefiles for, so I don’t know if they work on a Intel Mac. It would be cool if I could get the first release to support universal binaries, so hopefully I can find someone who has a developer machine, or a pc with a hacked Mac OS X for Intel on it.
Hibernate on your older Powerbook or iBook
On the latest versions of Apples Powerbook, there is a function called hibernate. Normally when you close the lid on your Powerbook to let it go to sleep, forgetting to plug it in to a charger, all your unsaved data will be lost. With hibernation activated, you just plug in your Powerbook with the depleted battery and press start. Now the desktop comes up, just the way it was when you put your machine to sleep. But this only works on the new machines? Well, some people beg to differ. Go read it and see if you can hack your machine to get it to work. I did it on my Powerbook G4 867ghz and have had no trouble so far.
Update: I had to turn it off because my machine had problems waking up. Apparently there is problems with the 12″ 867mhz machine.
Apple Pages
I’m currently looking for a new job, so I needed to write a CV and some other stuff. So I thought that this would be an excellent opportunity to try out Apple Pages. Sure, it’s a bit buggy and slow in some instances, but over all it’s actually a pretty decent program. It won’t replace Microsoft Word for power users, but for people like me, who need to write simple documents, it’s perfect. My guess is that Apple have not done to well selling this program. And if they go the normal route, they’ll just stop updating it and let it die. This is a lesson that Apple really need to learn from Microsoft. They have to stick to it, improving the program, and the buyers will come.
Change SIP in iChat AV
In apples voice/video chat program, it appears that it uses some kind of SIP protocol to communicate. But Apple, why not implement SIP phone ability into iChat AV? Being able to make voice phone calls to other SIP phone systems would be really cool.
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger memory problems
I’ve been generally happy with tiger on my powerbook. The Spotlight search really has helped me finding my stuff. But I’ve had problems with slowdowns after working with my computer for a couple of days. I never turn of my computer, just putting it to sleep when I’m done working, and after a couple of days the machine would get slower and slower. I finally gave up and started to search for the problem. Turned out that Dashboard (when loaded) ate memory like a hog! My guess is that their is a memory leak when using some of the widgets. But for me, Dashboard is to slow to be of practical use for me, so I opted to disable it. And now the machine works great again.
If your interested in disable Dashboard, do the following:
Open Terminal (you’ll find it under Applications/Utilities)
Type defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
To enable it again, write defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO