Mac OS sleep isn’t really sleep. It’s write out an image of memory, then sleep. Useful when you want to swap batteries without shutting down, but not much otherwise. I found out about SmartSleep a couple of weeks ago and it has one dead simple rule: just sleep if the battery is above a threshold and do sleep+hibernate otherwise. Now I’ll no longer have to stick my ear by the disk to listen for it spin down before throwing my portable in a bag 
Computers, General, OS X
OS X
Fink works almost all of the time, and if something’s missing, it’s surprisingly easy to write a package description. But when Fink breaks, it makes for an unpleasant user experience. Granted, I work off the “unstable” tree, but it’s not my fault that’s the only place to get anything remotely recent.
The build error I ran across was reported over a month ago, and it’s a little riling that it wasn’t yet fixed and that the suggested solution I found was to install a third-party update (XQuartz) to an Apple package (X11). Details below the fold…
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Computers, General, OS X
fink, OS X
Spotify is an online music service with a slick Mac client. I had a coworker briefly show me the Windows client over the summer, and I can’t figure out why I wasn’t more impressed then. It has a dead simple, iTunes-like interface: search for songs, queue them up and they play immediately.
The “Artist radio” feature is promising, but limited to songs by (manually?) pre-selected, related artists. The other radio feature only lets you pick decades and genres. Spotify could really use a sprinkle of some of that Music Genome magic that Pandora uses. Browsing the music catalog, they show you exactly the information you want, and don’t skimp on listing full discography on one page, which is pretty cool. Though, if only the play queue and history persisted across app restarts…
What I really appreciate is that it feels like care was taken in the design of the app. While it’s nice to read that Spotify does aggressive caching on the client and uses P2P distribution, it’s a completely different, blown-away feeling when it actually works smoothly and nearly instantaneously. (Okay, granted, music is relatively low bit rate.) The UI is equally slick: “Top 10″ lists are presented as a gridview with the top 3 items showing album art, a song’s popularity is always shown next to a song, there’s song de-duplication in search results and everything (searches, albums, artists, songs) can be grabbed as a link.
General
music