So Steam has now been released for the Mac. Whilst this is a massive step forwards for the Mac as a platform – finally giving Apple a credible position regarding gaming (after the 2007 deal with Electronic Arts, which didn’t even promise Mac native games but merely wrappers around Windows titles
In December of last year, after only nineteen months of use, my 500GB Time Capsule died of a dead PSU. As documented here (a great graph, sadly lacking a scale on the y-axis…) the average lifespan of a Time Capsule was, for these first generation units, nineteen months and 20 days – and mine was only eighteen days short of this.
In any case, Apple offered to replace my out-of-warranty unit free of charge – but noted that they had no backup service to recover the contents. When asked, they did say that they were happy for me to dismantle the Time Capsule and backup the data myself though. Them’s fightin’ words 
After a long slog ironing out some last-minute bugettes (and a major performance issue I’d accidentally introduced by attempting to bubble-sort an 10,000-entry strong list) I’ve just posted an updated release of Æther Tool to Apple for approval.
This is my first commercial app, admittedly, but it has taken a great deal of time, sweat, and (almost ;) tears to progress this far… and it makes me wonder how other small- or one-man developers approach the development process and how long this generally takes.
And now, following in the footsteps of the seminal “How 12 Hours, 2 Guys, 6 Cups of Coffee = 1 iPhone App there’s Sahil Lavingia‘s oneweekapp.com.
It’s been bugging me for a while now that – ever since upgrading to Xcode 3.2 and Mac OS 10.6 – the list of recent projects in Xcode’s initial window and in its “Open Recent File” and “Open Recent Project” menus are all blank.
I wrote this answer in response to an email, and thought it would probably be better to share it with everyone 
The two current solutions are to remove ‘GrowlMail.bundle‘ from “~/Library/Mail/Bundles” (or wherever it is installed), or to execute the command:
defaults write com.apple.mail GMSummaryMode -int 2
… to disable the Detailed Summary mode, which misinteracts with the Safari 4 version of WebKit.
There is currently a great demand for laptops which provide the user-friendliness of a Mac without the cost and weight of a MacBook or MacBook Pro, or without the cost of size of a MacBook Air.
Given that the ever-increasing varieties of Intel Atom-based netbooks are low-cost and roughly equivalent in hardware terms to the original MacBook Air, they make a tempting target to conversions to “MacBook Mini”s.
Indeed, there are a large (and also increasing) number of guides which will tell you how to get OS X running using a variety of ISO images downloaded via BitTorrent and hacked kernels which then require extensive changes to the installed system and come with copious warnings not to upgrade the OS when Software Updater prompts you to… and even then it’s common for basic functions such as sleep or USB not to work (although it has to be said that no method is entirely free from caveats).
This guide doesn’t work like that. This guide will describe how to install OS X from an original Leopard installation DVD and how to end up with an entirely unmodified system (*) which will not break when Apple issues updates.
Well, good news and bad here…
The good news is that, with the DSDT fix (although in all honesty I’ve not tried without) the 10.5.6 upgrade does the right thing and reboots correctly. Even better, a modified SystemConfiguration is no longer needed in /System/Library. May be due to this, the screen is also no longer stuck at full brightness… although due to the following issue, I don’t know whether it can be modified.
If running Mac OS on a non-Apple laptop, then there’s a sting in the tail of the forthcoming 10.5.6 update: it appears that the new kernel only wants to run with ACPI HPETs, and will fail on boot if legacy i8254/RTC timers have interrupts assigned to them.
To fix this, a replacement ACPI Differentiated System Description Table is required. efi_boot, version 6.1 or above, has the ability to replace the DSDT supplied to the kernel from the system firmware with a customised one: Simply place the alternative DSDT.aml in the root of the EFI volume – generally /Volumes/EFI/.