Ok, so if like me you thought Lion 10.7 was a good idea and decided to upgrade only to find everything horrendously slow and unusable? Photoshop is a complete dog! I have a few tricks that may give the power back to your system.

1) ZAP PRAM http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379
2) RESET SMC http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964
3) Turn off Safari extensions
4) Repair permissions in the Disk Utility App
5) Reboot, hold down “Alt” select “Recovery Disk”, then “Disk Utility” and repair the HD volume by clicking “Repair Disk”. Then do a “Repair Permissions” again while in this recovery mode. Quit and reboot by selecting your drive as normal. Wait for Spotlight to finish a new index before opening any Apps.

Maybe do this, I didn’t need to:
6) Delete glyph fonts you don’t need. Google “Lion problem fonts”
7) Update Microsoft Office 2008, or delete it.

And hopefully you’ll be whizzing around in no time.

Using Time Machine is a breeze – it’s backs up everything mac perfectly. But if you use dropbox you’re probably noticing your hard disk is rapidly filling on it’s own volition even though you exclude this from the Time Machine backup. (my dropbox weighs in at 30GB)

Even after doing this exclusion via the Time Machine System Pane it will still backup a hidden Dropbox cache database that increases with every dropbox change you make. This cache includes all those files you ‘thought’ you deleted and consquently Time Machine will backup huge files every hour. My hidden cache is an unnecessary 1.5GB, which was backed up every hour!

It’s kept hidden in your user folder <your home folder>/Dropbox/.dropbox.cache

How to exclude the hidden folder
Do this by using the “options” button in the  Time Machine system preference pane.
1 – Click the add icon
2 – Check the ‘show invisible files’ checkbox
3 – Select the “.dropbox” folder in your home folder
4 – Confim by clicking Exclude

And you’ll notice backups taking less time straight away. Mine dropped from 1.5GB to 46MB.

View hidden files in the future by reading this post.

So my Apple Mighty Mouse completely broke last week. Which meant only one thing, adoption of a new Apple Magic Mouse. First impressions we ok but then the accidental input annoyances started to happen when using Photoshop. The canvas would slide all around the screen as if I were painting on a runaway train. This was all down to my ring finger balancing on the right-hand side of the touch sensitive area.

Many articles suggest holding the edge instead, but it’s way too sharp to make it comfortable. Then I discovered this little third-party system preference pane called “MagicPrefs” You are able to configure your Magic Mouse to your hearts content. Four finger taps, clicks and swipes all allow for a different action.

I however, opted for removing the sensitive area from my ring finger resting place and adding a dashboard open on Apple logo tap. The mouse is back and I’m once again on the smooth express.

Love this traditional raincoat from Sweden. On the Christmas wishlist for£300 posted to the UK, shame I’m 10pence short.

From Stutterheim.se

We spotted this amazing feather print on the window today and it seems little chirpy even lived to fly another day!

So I accidentally dropped a .htaccess files on my desktop and it instantly dissappeared, very annoying as any (dot)files become hidden on the Finder. After a Google search I came across this problem solver.

If you open up terminal (Applications > Utilities) and type the following lines, one at a time:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

Once you’ve deleted the files you’re looking for, hide them again.

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder

To conclude Plot Watch for this year, this last weekend I pulled up most of the veg and turned the plot soil (perhaps for some winter stuff!).

I found that the most rewarding and best cropping vegetables have been potatoes, courgettes and french beans. The tomatoes were a steep learning curve and I’ll definitely spend more attention on them early on next year. However the peppers, beetroot, carrots and pumpkins have all come up with low or no yields mostly due to soil conditions.

The courgette plants have been the star vegetable, with 4 plants producing at least 1 fruit of around 6 inches every day throughout July and August.

The potatoes have proved rewarding too, I will plant twice or three times as many next year. From planting 12 tubers we now have a box full of spuds in the larder to last for a month or three.

Our three cooking Apple trees are heavily laden in fruit, so what better to do over an August bank holiday than pick apples and make delicious recipes. Mrs D picked some blackberries from the front garden and together with the apples baked a wonderful crumble, as well as stewing the rest for the freezer.

It’s tomato fortnight, they have all turned red and we have more tomatoes than we know what to do with. Time to take a Hugh F-W idea and bake them down to a rich tomato base for the freezer ready for any future bolognese or chilli dishes. On that note, the chills are also following the tomatoes lead and also ripping in colour whilst on the plant.

I’m a great advocate of this little site Quidco. Simply search for your shop on Quidco, click through to the shop using their link and make the purchase as normal. Within hours your transaction is tracked and a few weeks later it’s paid directly into your bank account. There are some great deals on there – I’ve recently cashed in on £70 when I signed up to O2 broadband for a year and £15 for LOVEFilm to send Free DVDs to me for a month.

In two years of online shopping we’re approaching £1000 cashback. Not bad for clicking a few links!