Sometimes, just stopping and re-starting Spotlight will do the trick.

This is pretty easy just launch the Terminal and type the following:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

This tells Spotlight to disable indexing on all volumes – your Mac will prompt you for your administrative password.

Re-enabling Spotlight  is just as easy, just reverse the off to on:

sudo mdutil -a -i on

Now Spotlight will be back on and hopefully will index as usual.

It arrived on Monday morning, just before I left on a trip to the WES 2009 conference in Orlando. I got back on Wednesday but I made myself tidy up my physical desk before I unboxed it on Friday.

Now that it’s here and I’ve been using it for 1 day, 21 hours and 43 minutes (thanks to iStat) I can’t understand why I didn’t order one earlier. I always though that my two processor G5 was pretty cool, until now.

I decided that rather than migrate my old profile to my new machine, I should see how far Cloud computing has really taken me, and where does my ‘critical data’ really live. Besides it’s always nice to start with a clean machine and only install applications that you need (and actually use) rather than migrating the cobwebs (and unused preferences) from an old machine.

So here’s a list of (my) essential applications:

• MobileMe – now I have my Bookmarks, Calendar appointments, Contacts and Keychains, and most importantly all of my work documents from my iDisk
• 1Password – because life is too shortto remember things you can ‘write’ down
• Firefox – for all of those Add-ons that you can’t live without – 1Password, Better Gmail, Blank Canvas Signatures, Delicious Bookmarks, Gmail Manager, Google Gears, Web Developer, Xmarks, Xoopit
• Xmarks for Safari – love these syncing applications
• VMware Fusion – surpisingly easy to copy over Windows XP image from MacBook Air, and configure it for extra cores, memory and increase the disk space (boy does it run quickly on this machine, I think I may use the Office 2007 apps and not install the Mac native Office 2008)
• Perian – for all things digital in Quicktime
• Flip4mac – for playing WMV in Safari
• Tweetie – of course
• OmniFocus – the only ToDo application that works for me
• MarsEdit – for my blogs
• PreziDesktop – that I want to like
• Cooliris – because it’s cool
• Evernote
• Skitch
• TypeIt4Me
• DeliciousSafari

Don’t worry this is not a post about how the search for the Higg’s Boson will create a wormhole when the CERN Large Hadron Collider goes online.

More importantly, if you have a Mac desktop, and a Mac laptop, and if you use them side by side (so that you have lots of screen real estate, and when one is busy spinning colored circles waiting for a Microsoft Office application to open, you are scanning Facebook on the other) then you should check out Teleport.

It lets you use one keyboard and mouse for both machines (or more, if you’re really keen) and it lets you effortlessly cut and paste between them, and even drag files back and forth. It supports encryption and works on Leopard and Tiger, and an earlier version on Panther.

If you use it in combination with Screen Sharing on Leopard there is nothing that you cannot easily do when it comes to pasting between copmuters.

It’s donationware and since version 1.0 came out in November 2007 has been completely stable with my G5 desktop, Intel MacBook Pro, and G4 Powerbook. If you like it send Julien Robert some PayPal love.

Strangest thing – while syncing a dialog kept opening and asking for the password of my Mac, and the drop down showed that it was a kcsync issue. I’d enter the password, that the Mac accepted, but it wouldn’t sync the Keychain. Everything else was syncing fine, but not the Keychain.

Googling the forums LarryMcJ on the macosx.com forum provided the answer. From terminal enter the following to reset the Keychain password. Worked like a charm.

/System/Library/Frameworks/SecurityFoundation.framework/Versions/A/Resources/kcSync.app/Contents/MacOS/kcSync -reset

One moment there was 65GB of free space on my MacPro – then there was ony 25GB. What happened, where was the culprit, how to get that space back?

The answer was a wonderful utility from Tjark Derlien called Disk Inventory X. Not only does it list all of your folders and files in size order it has a great visual representation of the files as well. Click a large colored square and it pops us the name location and details of the abnormally large file.

It turned out that log.smbd had grown to 40GB in size, complaining of too many files. As to why that happened is another story, but Disk Inventory X could also be very useful for anybody trying to reduce the size of their important files in order to shoehorn their digital life into a MacBook Air.

Born for the Mac in 1989, TypeIt4Me has matured into a wonderful teenager. If you have words, or phrases, that you find yourself typing over and over again – product names, technical phrases, greetings, beginnings, endings, then you enter them once and trigger them with just a few letters. You can also trigger your favorite Applescripts the same way.

Although the application doesn’t support Syncing directly, as it stores all of the ‘Clippings’ in one easily backed up file, this file can also be synced between Macs using FolderShare or possibly DropBox.