Cool Mac Gear

In a letter that appears below, reader James Rae Smith chastises me for failing to suggest to another reader who complained of serious stability problems under OS X, that he ought to run some repair diagnostics. Point taken.

There are several ways to check for and repair disk problems in 0S X. The most intuitively familiar to users migrating from the legacy Mac OS is Disk Utility, an 0S X analog of the venerable Disk First Aid program that's been around since at least System 6.

Unfortunately, this utility in OS X has a major shortcoming: it cannot check the disk its installed on. Consequently, in order to use it, you must first reboot the Mac from a bootable CD-ROM or other alternative startup volume on which there is a copy of Disk Utility. That's more hassle than I'm unusually up for, unless there's absolutely no alternative, but you can find Disk Utility on the OS X installer CD-ROM. Choose Installer + Open Disk Utility, and click the First Aid tab. The Disk Utility window will open, with a field on the left showing mounted volumes, and a tabbed field on the right allowing you to choose from various verification and repair options. Click in the volume you want to check to highlight it, and then click the Repair button.

Disk Utility will then run various diagnostics on your disk's formatting. If at the end of the run, you get a message: "The volume [disk name] appears to be OK," no problems have been found, or any that have been it will have been successfully repaired. If you get the message that the disk is damaged, but Disk Utility can't repair it, you need a heavier-duty disk fixer, like Micromat's Drive 10 or Norton Utilities.

Or you can run the Unix fsck (file system check) command line disk utility, which happily does not require you to boot from another volume, but which does require you to reboot into Single User Mode and run it from the Unix command console.

To get there, reboot the Mac while you hold down Command + S. Instead of the Happy Mac icon and the Aqua startup screens, what will appear is a stark black screen covered with white Unix code hieroglyphics as Unix goes through its startup routines. When things finally settle down, at the very bottom of the lines of code, you should see the localhost # prompt.

At that prompt, type fsck -y (be careful to include the space before the hyphen -- Unix is picky about syntax) -- then press Enter.

The fsck program will now run through a bunch of diagnostic routines, and report back. If it says "The volume [disk name] appears to be OK," you're done. If it says "File system was modified," fsck has found problems, and you will need to run the diagnostic routines again. Proceed as before with the fsck -y command, and repeat as many times as necessary to prevent produce a "Disk appears to be OK" message.

Now type "reboot" (without the quotation marks) and press Return to get yourself back to the friendly GUI world.

From Charles Eicher

I'm surprised more people aren't aware of a good solution to the sleep battery drain on MacOS X and machines like your Pismo.

I also have a Powerbook G3/500 and encountered the same battery drain. The problem is that MacOS X continues to run the screen saver while the screen is blanked. It continues to burn processor cycles when it should just be sleeping. If you want to really see your battery drain, run something really CPU-intensive like the Maya screensavers. The solution is to download and install the screen saver "Basic Black" from Epicware. It does nothing but blank the screen during sleep. No animated graphics means no CPU drain. Download it at:

http://epicware.com/macosxsavers.html

Also, if you have other computers on your network, or a cable modem connected, it might be a good idea to turn off the option Energy Saver:Options:Wake for Network Administrative Access. Cable modems are continually bombarded by administrative packets, it can keep your CPU engaged and burn power.

With these tips, I now get good sleep battery life on my Pismo.. well, I did until my battery died, after about 18 months of use the battery now only holds a 20 min charge. And my Pismo has the "pink screen of death." Oh my Pismo is in sad sad shape..

Hi Charles;

Thanks for the excellent tips, and I'm sorry to hear that your Pismo is ailing. My son's Lombard's battery is suffering the same disease. Not as robust as the older PowerBook batteries I guess. My former (now my daughter's PowerBook 5300 battery is still going strong well into its sixth year of use.

Charles

Re: Battery drain

From: Duffy Brook

Re: OS X Odyssey 71...

Thought I'd chime in to say that I've found battery drain while sleeping to be absolutely minimal on my 2000 PowerBook G3/400 (firewire). I frequently take my PB home to "work" over the weekend, close the lid on Friday afternoon (sleep) and when I wake it up Monday morning maybe 15 minutes of available battery life has expired. This has held true from 10.1 to 10.1.3.

It seems the battery drain issue may be machine specific.?.

And as for Chris Long's "Phooey" post... I just started using Suitcase 10.1.1 with OS X 10.1.3 a couple weeks ago and find it to be seamless, painless and simple to use. I didn't replace ATM deluxe in my Classic environment though. Why fix what ain't broke? I just wish Suitcase had better font management within apps (i.e. Type Reunion).

Best, Duffy Brook

Hi Duffy;

You may be right that the rapid battery drain is a Pismo/Lombard issue. Has anyone out there experienced this problem with a TiBook or iBook?

Charles

From Derek

Charles, this article may be of interest to you...

Olympus America Debuts Voice Recorder (3/13/2002)

Olympus America announced today the easy-to-use DS-330 compact and ergonomic digital voice recorder with direct connect to all PCs and Macs.....

..."The optional AS-3000 Transcription Kit (DSS Player Pro transcription module with footswitch and headset) can further streamline this process. Automatic transcription is also possible through the use of optionally available voice recognition software, such as IBMs ViaVoice...."

From James Rae Smith

Hello Charles

First I would like to agree with the correspondent who said he would like you to edit the replies you get when they duplicate one another almost exactly. You should also feel free (as a contributing editor) to edit replies if they are too rambling or dull.

Second a few thoughts occur to me as an ordinary user concerning some of the posts to your column:

1. To Chris Long who is finding Suitcase problematic, has he thought of trying out Font Reserve by DiamondSoft. It has been given a fairly good write up by Matt Neuburg on Tidbits here http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06751

2. If Scott Rudin's Mac is as crash prone and freezes as much as he says I would suggest that perhaps he has problems that are probably not just to do with OSX. Assuming he has run all the diagnostic utilities he can, I would suggest he try trashing some of his preference files which may have become corrupted. Then he should seek some expert help. While I have experienced some problems and a few kernel panics they have been very rare and getting rarer with every OS update and iTunes 2.0.3 in particular is very stable for me. Mind you after each kernel panic I did run fsck as a minimum precaution. I also cannot understand why some of these thoughts had not occurred to you as a technology writer and your only response to this post was to tut tut and sigh sympathetically. Surely OSX (as opposed to some of the apps running on it) is not that unstable on your machine? Or could it just be that the opportunity to take another pot shot at OSX was just too tempting for you?

3. As an ordinary user, I do not see that using the Terminal is any worse than opening a MacsBug window. The Unix commands are longer and harder to remember but they can do almost anything you want them too short of fixing you breakfast. I believe that you can write routines that will allow you to type something easily remembered into the Terminal and it automatically replaces it with the hard to remember Unix stuff (but again I do not have enough Unix knowledge to tell you exactly how). I hope someone more knowledgeable can enlighten us here.

4.In OS X O 71 William Baltyn asked why only IE has options for configuring helper apps. A similar panel from the classic Internet control panel has also disappeared. In general these have gone because OSX now supports file extensions as well as file types so they are unnecessary. If he is looking for an app to take over browser downloads may I suggest trying iGetter. This works for me with Omniweb and is quite fast and handles resumable downloads fairly well.

I am afraid I find your protestations about how you would like to like OSX increasingly unbelievable. Why don't you just own up - disliking OSX is a perfectly respectable intellectual position. In your heart I think you know you will only like OSX if it becomes OS 9 with protected memory and multitasking and no performance hit, which unfortunately for you will never happen. As you would say, sigh.

All the best
James Rae Smith

Hi James;

Thanks for the response to several readers' queries, and for sharing your thoughts.

Last one first; I want to like OS X because it is where the Mac platform is going, and despite my griping, I trust that it will get better (although your hypothetical "OS 9 with protected memory and multitasking and no performance hit" sounds like the ideal OS to me ;-) ).

I'm not plugging away at this project out of perverse masochism. I'm trying to get familiar and comfortable enough with OS X that I can eventually switch to it for production without having to spend 16 hour days getting my work done. It's taking a LOT longer than I expected, but it's not for lack of will. It does have to do with the beta-esque flakiness of both OS X and many of the applications I need in order to do my work. I find this frustrating and annoying, and say so, but I'm not making it up. Some of my problems with OS X are also due to unfamiliarity and ignorance, and that is a big part of what this public Odyssey is about. Often I'm being educated by readers more than educating them, but I hope it's a bit of a two-way street.

I've only had one kernel panic, and that was due to a known issue with alpha software, so not OS X's fault. We have discussed fsck several times here.

Still like MacsBug better than the Terminal though. It's simple to summon and the commands are two letters. ;-)

All the best to you too.

Charles

Browser Mini-Shootout

From Joel

I'm curious, which versions of the other browsers did you use? OmniWeb is my browser of choice, and while I realize that it's still the slowest, the latest beta I think narrows that gap considerably, as well as improving compatibility with various websites.

Joel Young
http://www.inreverie.com

Hi Joel;

iCab was version 2.7.1. OmniWeb was version 4 point something (I'm not on the Pismo at the moment), whatever the download du jour was back in January.

I should check to see if there's a later version than the one I'm using and run the comparo again.

Charles

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore