safariomnibar port for powerpc 13. Jan 2012
I did a port of Olivier Poitrey’s SafariOmnibar for Macs with PowerPC processor running Safari 5.0.6 on Mac OS 10.5.8. Go ahead and grab the current version over at Github.
old swedish mailbox in helsinki 16. Dec 2011
In the staircase of my current residence in Helsinki I have discovered traces of swedish language history. The mailbox sign says “Bref och Tidningar” which is swedish for “letters and newspapers”. It is not uncommon to find swedish labels in Helsinki since there is swedish speaking minority but this one caught my attention because it had a non-standard spelling. Since the house has a Jugendstil architecture my assumption was that maybe it’s an old spelling from the turn of the last century. I did some research and found some statements supporting my assumption.
Before the spelling reform of 1906 the v sound was represented by hv- at the beginning of some words, -fv- medially and -f finally. One may still encounter forms like hvad (vad), hvem (vem), gräfva(gräva), bref(brev) in older texts. (Swedish: a comprehensive grammar, Philip Holmes and Ian Hinchliffe, Routledge, 2003, page 584)
Furthermore I found out the house was actually built 1900 by the finnish architect office Usko Nyström, Petrelius & Penttilä which is six years before the spelling reform so it seems quite reasonable they’ve used the old spelling on the mailbox.
vox for mac os x website moved 15. Oct 2011
The minimalist Mac OS X audio player of Alessio Nonni has moved. Check out the new Vox website for a Lion compatible version. If you enjoy the app don’t hesitate to make a donation to support the suffering italian economy a talented developer!
really empty the safari cache 11. Oct 2011
After telling Safari to empty the cache I wondered If Safari actually did what I told it.
$ du -sh ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari
629M /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari
Hm, 626 megabyte don’t look like obedience to me. Let’s see what’s in there.
$ du -sh ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/*
173M /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/Cache.db
5.6M /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/Extensions
450M /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/Webpage Previews
64K /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/com.apple.opencl
450 megabyte of “Webpage Previews”?
$ find ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/Webpage\ Previews -type f \
| sed -E 's/.*\.([^\.]*)/\1/' | sort | uniq -c
7016 jpeg
400 png
No wonder we need gigabyte sized hard disks today. Let’s delete the crap altogether.
$ rm -r ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari
And let’s make sure it doesn’t come back (works in Safari 5.0.3).
$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2
So, what have we gained after restarting Safari?
$ du -sh ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari | awk '{print $1}'
3.6M
Nice, especially in times of undersized solid state disks.
downgrade safari 5.1 to 5.0.x on lion 11. Oct 2011
If you want to downgrade Safari 5.1 to Safari 5.0.x on Lion you can download Safari 5.0.3 from the original Apple servers and extract just the Browser with Pacifist. The installation image is called Safari5.0.3SnowLeopard.dmg but it works just fine on Lion. Have fun!
