…To MacBook

When an application in OS X is stalling on you and you have given up on regaining control of it, the best thing to do is kill it before it takes down your whole machine. Usually you would right click on the application icon in the Dock and choose the menu item “Quit” or “Force Quit” if available and that should do the trick.

Dock Menu When Right Clicking Application

Or you could click on the top left corner “apple” icon which will bring up a menu where you will see something called “Force Quit”. Choosing that option will open a small window with a list of the running applications which you can forcibly kill.

Force Quit Applications

Sometimes though a key component of OS X fails on you which you don’t have an option to force quit like the above mentioned methods. I came to such a situation when the Dock froze on me the other day. It just would not come up at all. Today I had a similar situation when I had cover flow switched on in the finder while I was browsing an external hard drive that has 20 gigs of hundreds of subfolders inside hundreds of subfolders that contain thousands of photos. Cover flow could not handle this and it wouldn’t allow me to do antyhing else either. I had an application crunching data for the past 5 hours so restarting the machine was definitely not an option. I needed a way to cleanly kill Finder without destroying any other work going on. In situations like this you need to go beyond the GUI and directly to the terminal. Yes, I know, now that I am writing this article, I noticed that the “Force Quit” application actually has Finder as an option but being someone from a linux background I immediately go to Terminal for anything I need rather than look for GUI solutions.

What you need to do is find the PID (Process ID) of the application you need to kill. To do this, type the following in Terminal:

ps aux | grep Finder

The result of that command will be something like:

sergemadenian   131 97.1 25.9  1213744 542124   ??  R    Fri12PM  54:49.70 /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder -psn_0_40970
sergemadenian  3932   0.1  0.0   590472    192 s000  R+   10:07PM   0:00.00 grep Finder

“ps aux” is the command that prints out all the currently running processes from all users. ” | grep Finder” will restrict the results of the “ps” command to show only the lines that contain the word “Finder”.

From the above result you can tell that the Finder application is question is the first line and I have set the PID in Bold and red “131″. You can also tell that this process is struggling because immediately after the pid we see the CPU and memory usage which in this case is “97.1 25.9″ (those are percentages).

Now that we know the PID (131) all you need to do is run the command:

kill -9 131

“-9″ tells the OS to kill immediately. That took care of the offending Finder window and I noticed that a new Finder process had been kicked off by the OS. If a new process had not automatically been kicked off, I would have had to start it manually by running the command that was running before which I’ve marked in blue and bold ”

Same process applies to any application including the Dock. All you need to do is find the specific PID by changing what you filter with grep. For the Dock as an example, you will need to run:

ps aux | grep Dock

Remember that the PID is not a universal number (that is your Finder application will not have 131, even my computer will have a different PID for Finder when I restart it) so you need to always find the unique PID running at the time.

I usually try to post tutorials on this blog to help users figure out how to do things on their new macbook, it’s also mostly for my own benefit because I look back 6 months later and wonder “how did I do that?”. Today I will be posting a product review (angry rant) about the $70 Mighty Mouse from Apple which people shouldn’t even waste time on even if it was given to them for free.

First off, what is the Mighty Mouse? it’s a wireless mouse by Apple that looks cool and works great when you first start off. Here’s a description off of Apple’s own product page:

“How do you improve on the mouse that has everything? Remove its tail. Mighty Mouse — the mouse that changed the way you scroll — has gone wireless. Now you can take that seamless, touch-sensitive, 360-degree scrolling design with you wherever you go.“

I was given one at work left over from another colleague who switched jobs. Setting the mouse up was pretty easy and straightforward. The mouse worked great. The wireless feature is amazing because you don’t need to pull the wire as it gets stuck on something on the desk.

The pain started shortly after setting it up and using it for about a week. The mouse scroll just stopped working. First it wouldn’t scroll up, then it would’nt scroll at all. Since it’s a mouse ball as a scroll wheel, I knew this had to be issue with dirt. No problem, I remember the old days when there were no lasers for mice and the ball would collect dirt and get stuck. I’ll just open up the hood and clean the scroll ball… how do you open up the hood to this thing?  The bottom door just leads to the battery. Maybe I need to take the batteries out. Nope nothing there. I’ll look online. wow, there’s actually no easy way to open up and clean the scroll ball. 

This problem isn’t just something that happened to me. I went around the office and found out the same issue with a wired mouse that comes with the iMac. I also found other who had the same problem that comes and goes every now and then. A google search turned up many results for this issue, here’s one of them from http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com:

“The fix? Blow compressed air around the scroll ball, or just push on it really hard and roll it around (that worked for me). If you’re lucky (I was), it will start working again.”

“If you’re lucky”? is this what we’ve come down to? luck of the draw to fix a hardware issue? Apparently I’m not lucky this time. That solution has worked in the past but now it has been two days and nothing seems to work. I will have to just open up this mouse and hope it’ll be as good as new when I put it back together. If it doesn’t, I don’t really care anymore because I’m going to dump this $70 dollar mouse and get a cheap $5 one that will probably work without causing this many problems.

I’m finally back. I had to close the site for a while because of a bad spam problem. While I was away I learned something new about the macbook. How to get some diagnostic data on your battery.

Issues with my battery started recently. What would happen is the battery would be chargning, reaches “finishing charge”, then the adapter light turns green and the battery indicator turns to “Charged”. A few seconds later though the adapter light turns orange again and the indicator goes back to “Charging” then “Finishing Charge”. It basically looks like it continuously charges and doesn’t stop once done. This definitely can’t be good for the battery.

Well I took it into the apple store and a genius looked at it and basically told me that my battery has passed the recommended number of cycles and it is pretty much downhill from here. The typical “Cycal count” is around 300 and I was at 318. You can tell this by going to the apple icon at the top left of your screen, click on “About this mac”, in the dialog that comes up click on the “More Info” button and then under hardware find the “Power” section. In that section you should be able to see more details about your battery including the cycle count.

A few tools I found useful for battery info:

1. Coconut Batter: http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/
   if you don’t want to go throught he “About this mac” dialog. You can download coconut battery. This will pretty much tell you the same info but also allows you to save the details at any point in time so you can view it again later. It also has the default charge for most mac laptops so you can tell how much charge your battery has lost.
2. iStat Pro by iSlayer: http://www.islayer.com/index.php?op=item&id=7
   iSlayer has a cool widget that tells you the overall health of your laptop. Things like CPU load, heat of the processor, the heatsink, the hard drive and battery info as well.

This is the first thing that really went wrong while using my macbook but Apple was great in quickly replacing the cover and getting my laptop to brand new conditions. Read on for details.

I was just working on my macbook, set on a table and not even on my lap, when I pulled my hand up and a piece of the case was stuck to my arm. I didn’t drop it, I haven’t even got a single scratch on this computer. It’s fairly new. When I did some research online I found out that this has been happening to a lot of people and there are pictures everywhere on the web with very similar to identical cracks.

you can see many others with exactly the same pattern of crack on the flickr pool My Mackbook Was Cracked By Itself.

My picture is taken from a cameraphone so it’s not too clear but here’s a much better example from markcph on flickr:

As you can see from the flickr pool, mark’s and my picture, all these macbooks have cracks in the exact same position in the exact same manner.

my guess is it’s a faulty design. look at the same place on top of the monitor, there’s a little bezel that comes out that rests on the place where the crack is when closed. I think that raised area is causing a lot of pressure on the top skin and the skin does not have any support underneath and so it cracks. Look at the crack on mark’s picture above. You can see that the vertical wall at the front comes up to support the top skin but it is thin and the raised part that comes down actually rests on the top face where there is no support underneath. Again looking at mark’s picture you see that are as black because it’s just empty underneath. This is causing the crack.

I went to the apple store with a multitude of evidence that the crack is being seen by many others than me and that it’s a design flaw. I was prepared to fight if they said it’s my fault because I’ve been taking so much care of the laptop. I went to the apple store on Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, CA. I talked with a genius who, without any problems agreed to change the top cover of the laptop. He looked in their inventory and noticed they had one in store and took the laptop in for repair. He also mentioned that he’s seen a few of those already. I was pleasantly surprised that I didn’t need to argue or even prove that this was done by no fault of my own. The employees t the store were very friendly and prompt. I handed in the laptop at around 7:30 pm that day and by the next morning at 10 am I had a call notifying me that the repairs were done and I could pick it up.

Now that I know why it’s cracking, I’m trying to avoid another crack by never holding the laptop from the front when the top is closed. I now always handle it from where the monitor hinge is.