The Computer Next Door

Taming Snow Leopard's Beastly Aspects

Frustrated with the problems I was having with Snow Leopard (application crashes galore), I did a Google search for "application crashes snow leopard how to fix" and finally found some helpful postings on how to fix my issues.

2 solutions were listed in iLounge for how to solve the issues I was experiencing:

Two Proposed Solutions to Snow Leopard Crash Problems

I decided to take the following approach:

1. First do Solution b as described in this forum.
2. Then do Solution a as described in this forum.
3. Then run the disk utility on Mac OS X (Utilities / Disk Utility) to verify and then repair permissions.
4. Restart.

Results: Very good.  I have experienced only a couple of application crashes since undertaking this approach (compared with numerous crashes/day before I did this).

I recommend doing the same thing if you are having problems with your Snow Leopard installation.  And hopefully Apple will issue a patch in the near future so we don't have to jump through such hoops.

Thank you to iLounge for helping to tame the beast.

About This Weblog

The Computer Next Door is written by Meryl Enerson, joined by the occasional guest author from the consultants of Enervision Media, a digital media consultancy based in upstate New York.

This blog is non-commercial in nature. No products or services are provided to us for free by any of the vendors written about.

Another Day, Another eBook

On my laptop, this 2-page layout with a "bookmark" offers a fair facsimile of the experience of reading a traditional book

I decided to expand my horizons recently and read a loooong format eBook - the new Dan Brown novel, "The Lost Symbol."

I bought it on Barnes & Noble's website (see my previous post on the Barnes & Noble eReader experience). Having finally figured out where to store my Barnes & Noble eBooks, I purchased the book for $9.99 (standard price for eBooks these days), and  downloaded 2 "copies" of it:

1. One to a network drive, accessible to both my desktop Mac and a laptop Mac.
2. A second download to my iPhone, from the Barnes & Noble eReader application.

Then, I proceeded to read it on both my iPhone and my laptop, just to see how I felt about this.  I like to read the kind of genre fiction Brown writes in the wee hours of the morning, so it needed to be on one of my portable devices.  So, I started out on the laptop (with the 2-page view, the novel actually feels like a novel), bookmarked where I left off, and then picked up the eBook again on my iPhone.

Not unsurprisingly, the copy of "The Lost Symbol" on my iPhone had NO idea where I had bookmarked the book on my laptop.  Although I knew I had bookmarked the laptop version on Page 100, the page numbering scheme on my iPhone was a little different, so, in order to find where I could resume reading, I had to search for an odd phrase from that page.  It worked, and I took up again on the iPhone.

The bookmark and search features within eBooks make this all possible.  Does it sound like time well-spent?  Maybe not.  But so far I am enjoying the read on both devices - partly because I can do it, and partly because each in its own way offers a reasonable facsimile of reading an actual paper book.

(One last caveat, however: I may or may not I feel the same way when I get to the end of this tome!