Quick Look should display Spotlight comments as "alt text"

A modest suggestion for Apple's OS X:

When hovering over a "Quick Look" display, Spotlight comments should be displayed just like "alt text" in a browser window.

Lion: Hardware Growler crashes

For anyone using Lion and Hardware Growler (part of the excellent Growl package), you may have noticed that it crashes under some circumstances. (For example, see )

And if you're using it faceless, you may not even notice for awhile - say, til you realize you're waiting for a Growl that'll never come.

Fortunately, this is easy to slap a bandage over, with a simple bash script (all on one line):

while true; do if [ $(ps jaxwwww|grep [H]ardwareGrowler|wc -l) = 0 ] ; then open /Applications/Growl-1.2.2/Extras/HardwareGrowler/HardwareGrowler.app; echo "$(date): launched one"; fi; sleep 1; done

(I know; a hard-coded path - you'll have to fix it if your path differs - if you know a better way, feel free post in the comments.)

I tried using a longer sleep, though the resource utilization was indistinguishable, so I left it at "1", which means it recovers almost instantly.

This can be "automated" even further: Into a text document, paste this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>WindowSettings</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>ExecutionString</key>
<string>while true; do if [ $(ps jaxwwww|grep [H]ardwareGrowler|wc -l) = 0 ] ; then open /Applications/Growl-1.2.2/Extras/HardwareGrowler/HardwareGrowler.app; echo "$(date): launched one"; fi; sleep 1; done</string>
<key>Columns</key>
<string>44</string>
<key>Rows</key>
<string>15</string>
<key>WinLocULY</key>
<string>678</string>
<key>WinLocX</key>
<string>611</string>
<key>WinLocY</key>
<string>0</string>
</dict>
</array>
</dict>
</plist>


Save it as "something.term".

Double-click / launch the document and it opens Terminal.app for you. Add it to your Login Items, in the Users & Groups (nee Account) preference pane, and it's automatic.

(I believe the "WinLoc" keys are ignored in favor of an offset from the most recent Terminal window; pity - I'd like to place this at the same location on the screen each time. Though of course, Lion's "Auto Resume" handles this nicely too. :)

Lion: Use spacebar to scroll or page

In Lion, using the space bar to scroll doesn't work very well - or, sometimes, at all. Even if it just worked a moment ago, in the same page.

Here are a few workarounds I've discovered:

1) Click in the area you want to scroll (ex: within a web page) and then press space.

2) Press the down or up arrows and then press space.

3) This is weird: Press a shift key and then press space!

coreaudiod using too much cpu

Strange; my MacBook was performing fine, though I happened to notice that the CPU usage of the "coreaudiod" process was constant at about 10%.

There was plenty of idle, though it was enough of an irritant - especially since it had the highest cumulative CPU time of all processes - that I wanted to look into it.

(BTW: Nice concise man page for coreaudiod. :)

Interestingly, CPU usage dropped down under 2% as soon as I plugged in headphones, and jumped back up to 10% when I unplugged the headphones - very consistently, each time.

I profiled coreaudiod with Instruments (part of the Apple Developer Tools).

It was spending a lot of time in DspFuncHelper::process_IIR_xmm_LR(). The interesting symbols in the symbol stack under that: DspFuncEQ, IOAudioEngineUserClient, IOA_HWDevice, IOA_SingleDevice, IOA_Device, CAPThread.

I tried turning the iTunes EQ off. And then toggled it a few more times. No change. I tried quitting iTunes. Nothing I tried made a difference. I don't have any other audio apps (*) so I dropped it there.

There's some chatter online about it, though none seemed useful. (Mostly the standard voodoo of "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" (ref: The IT Crowd)

However there was one suggestion by a user named "bompi" in the Apple Discussions, to use launchctl to stop the process gracefully:

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.audio.coreaudiod

It automatically restarts - and even if you're listening to something at the time, there's only a very brief interruption.

I'd still like to figure out what happened, why, and how to prevent it, however this at least is a temporary fix.

*Correction: Obviously there are other apps that use audio, though no significant ones came to mind at the time. However, I do use Skype and that can obviously use audio - and I'd been conferencing about 12 hours earlier -- with some audio trouble (on my end only; the other side reported that it was fine). FWIW, it was Skype v5.0.0.7980 and I see that v5.0.0.7994 is available so I'll try that and see if that makes any difference...