It involves optimising the SQLite database Apple Mail uses to store indexes and subject lines of emails.

You can check your current 'envelope archive' size by entering this in the terminal:

ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

Then to optimise it (cleans out stuff that has been marked for deletion but not actually deleted, defragments the structure, etc):

sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum;

Then check your envelope archive size again to see the results…

ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

It compacted my envelope archive down from 55MB to 50MB — not a huge increase, but the speed difference was dramatic.

In particular, my 'sent mail' folder which had been taking 10 - 15 seconds to open (8,000 items) now only takes two or three seconds.

Read the full post and many informative comments here.

When you right click and select "Inspect Element" the Web Inspector window opens.

The Web Inspector provides numerous features which facilitate web development. Some features I found useful:

1. Live HTML and CSS Editing: In the Elements tab, you can browse the entire page source and edit elements as well as CSS styles and preview them in the browser.
2. Web Page Profiling: Personally, I found the resources tab most useful. In a single view I found out that there are some images on my front page which take a considerable time to load.
3. Script Debugging: In the scripts tab, you can execute scripts in the page in debug mode.

Before discovering this, I used CSSEdit's web browser. CSSEdit's X-ray mode allows me to edit HTML and CSS and preview on live pages. Anyone aware of some other great web development tools for the mac?

Fortunately the "An Epic Introduction to PyObjC and Cocoa" tutorial, is indeed an epic introduction to PyObjC and highly recommended for anyone planning to get started with Cocoa development in Python.

I have tried other WebDAV clients too, including CyberDuck, which seems to have some problems of its own. The best client by far is Transmit, so far it has always worked for me.

Its a pretty neat idea, and today I realized that it had already been done, and done with class its called JungleDisk. JungleDisk for a low fee of $20 allows you to download a client, it supports Mac, Windows and Linux and allows you to backup using the S3 Cloud.

The OSX client, allows you to seamlessly backup at regular intervals, or/and use your S3 account as a network attached storage device. S3 is cheap: 1GB/month costs only 0.15$. So if I where to backup my home directory, currently 100 something GB, I calculated it would only cost me round £100 to keep it on amazon/annually.

I'm keeping my 1TB external storage for time machine for now, I think JungleDisk would be very useful if I were to move/travel abroad then I could keep my backup on S3, and in any contingencies restore when I'm in need.

Another good online Backup software is Carbonite.

To achieve the seamless conversion of mkv to ipod format follow the following steps (you need Quicktime Pro for this).

1. Go to this site, and install Perian. Perian is a "swiss army" knife for Quicktime, it supports numerous file formats

2. After installing Perian, open the mkv file in Quicktime (you may need to restart quicktime).

3. Go to File->Export select Movie to Ipod, and your done!

A closer look:

Since I've started using firefox 3 I can't properly browse long pages. Firefox 3 seems to stutter when browsing long pages which severely impacts my experience on those websites. I've created this video to show what I mean, I opened reddit and tried browsing using Firefox3 at first, and then Safari. You would notice a stark difference in the really fast browsing in Safari compared to the stuttered experience in Firefox3.

The system I'm using a Macbook pro with 2.4 Ghz, 4GB RAM and Leopard 10.5.3.

After discussions with a friend who had bought the same model we identified certain applications which could be causing this. I removed VMware Fusion as a result. The problem became worse. In previous episodes of keyboard unresponsiveness I could simply restart and the keyboard was working. In the thread some claimed its a hardware problem but that was definitely not the case here. Because in one such episode where the keyboard became unresponsive, I plugged in another keyboard via bluetooth and strangely enough the same keys which were not working on the Macbook Pro keyboard were also not working on the wireless keyboard. Certain keys were working in both like F1-F12 keys.

So I reinstalled Leopard and did not install VMWare fusion so far the system has been working normally. I'm not sure if the problem was caused by VMware Fusion or some other software I had installed in the previous setup but removing it worsened the problem which might be a strong indicator that Fusion has some role to play in this. I hope to try out an update of Fusion.