Syntux the geek » Software

Free your Mac memory for free

Syntux — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 07:57:01 +0000

Mac OSX is beautiful, not only in its design, but also in its memory management. However, sometimes the inactive memory takes long time before released.

According to Apple support Inactive memory is

information in memory is not actively being used, but was recently used.

For example, if you’ve been using Mail and then quit it, the RAM that Mail was using is marked as Inactive memory. This Inactive memory is available for use by another application, just like Free memory.

However, if you open Mail before its Inactive memory is used by a different application, Mail will open quicker because its Inactive memory is converted to Active memory, instead of loading Mail from the slower hard disk.

In many cases you will need to jump from a heavy application into another, and then you will need either to accept the system performance, which is not deadly bad, or use a simple command line to free your memory.

First, how to monitor your memory?
Mac OS X comes with Activity Monitor Application that gives you a glimpse about your system resources, one major resource is your memory.
Read Apple help on Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

Now, how to free the inactive memory without having to reboot?

Open your terminal app and run
purge

Checking the ManPage of Purge, purge task defined as force disk cache to be purged (flushed and emptied) with a description Purge can be used to approximate initial boot conditions with a cold disk buffer cache for performance analysis. It does not affect anonymous memory that has been allocated through malloc, vm_allocate, etc.

No need to download an app to free your memory and moreover, you do not need to buy an app for that purpose, it comes for free.

Mac OS X Speed Freak

Syntux — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:00:52 +0000

Speed Freak, at a user-specified interval, reprioritizes applications so that the frontmost (or active) application gets more processor time than background applications. By default in Mac OS X, all processes have equal priority. By using Speed Freak, you override this default by increasing the priority of whatever application you are currently using, resulting in faster application performance. Speed Freak accomplishes this through the Unix “renice” command.

Speed Freak does not affect graphics card performance and will show little to no increase in 3D games. Although Speed Freak does not affect network performance, the increased CPU priority it offers should increase performance in internet applications. For example, web pages with complicated HTML should render faster but download speed will not change.

Open Source Cloud Computing Software: Build, manage and deploy private & public clouds

Syntux — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:55:24 +0000

Cloud.com helps organizations quickly and easily build, manage, and deploy private and public clouds. Extending beyond individual virtual machine images running on commodity hardware, the Cloud.com CloudStack provides an integrated software solution for delivering virtual data centers as a service – delivering all of the essential components used to build, deploy, and manage multi-tier and multi-tenant cloud applications in a simple to install software package. Because Cloud.com focuses on removing the complexity of cloud infrastructure by integrating all of the key components, customers realize instant efficiencies and without the overhead of integration, professional services, and complex deployment schedules.

With CloudStack as the foundation for infrastructure clouds, data center operators can quickly and easily build cloud services within their existing infrastructure to offer on-demand, elastic cloud services. Cloud.com believes that cloud computing is a major shift and an entirely new paradigm in data center computing. Cloud computing delivers higher efficiency, limitless scale and faster deployment of new services and systems to the end-user, thereby changing the economics of the data center by shifting the delivery of IT resources to an on-demand model.

	On Demand, Virtual Datacenter Hosting Provide users with a virtually unlimited amount of computing power – on demand
	Customer Self-Service Administration Free up IT resources for more business critical needs by delegating administration to the cloud users
	Comprehensive Service Management Define, meter, deploy and manage services to be consumed within your cloud
	Secure Cloud Deployments Isolate compute, network and storage resources by user, location and deployment
	Common Cloud API Support for common cloud APIs like the OpenStack API and the Amazon Web Services API
	Open Source Complete transparency, increased flexibility, lower cost and no vendor lock-in

Burn: Simple but advanced burning for Mac OS X

Syntux — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 08:51:23 +0000

There are a lot of ways to approach burning discs. Burn keeps it simple, but still offers a lot of advanced options.

Keep your files safe and share them.

Burn your files to a disc so you can access them later on. Choose different filesystems so you can share your files with people with different operating systems.
Change advanced settings like, file permissions, the disc icon, file dates and more on the fly in Burns inspector.

Let the music be with you.

Create standard Audio-CD discs with ease. Just drop your audio files in Burns audio list. Want more music on your disc, Burn can create MP3 discs. More and more players support these discs. Higher quality, no problem, Burn can create DVD-Audio discs, which can contain more and higher quality files.
Burn offers advanced options like CD-Text and mp3 tag editing to personalize your disc.

Share your movies.

Made your own movies and want to share them with family and friends? No problem. Burn can create a wide range of video discs. From VideoCD to DVD-Video discs. And DivX discs to fit more of your videos on a disc.

To personalize your DVD-Video disc, burn can create interactive menus. Choose a theme in Burn or create your own.

1 + 1 makes 2.

Allready have discs you like to reproduce. Don’t worry, Burn can help you. Burn can copy discs or use disk images to recreate your discs. With one drive Burn still will be able to copy a disc, by temporary saving the disc.

Converting.

Forget worrying about conversion. Burn will take your video and audio files and turns them in the right format.
In the preferences you can set the options for quality and size.

Tags: disc icon, mp3 discs, quality files, interactive menus, disk images, video discs, cd text, videocd, video disc, allready, file permissions, family and friends, audio cd, burns, operating systems, conversion, fly, worry, music

Refinery: Customising your Mac has never been easier.

Syntux — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 08:47:43 +0000

Revamp the Dock With Refinery,

giving your Dock a whole new look is as simple as drag-and-drop. The Live Preview feature lets you see your changes as you make them, and you can export your favorite docks as Refinery Dock files, which you can import back into Refinery later. And it only takes one click to restore your Dock to its default state.

Customize the FinderChange

your Finder sidebar, toolbar, and alert icons easily with Refinery. Simply drag a new icon into Refinery, and press Apply to change the icon. You can also enable the viewing of hidden system files, enable a special path bar, as well as some other useful options, such as enabling the option to quit Finder from the menubar.

Refine your System

Have you ever wanted to change the background for the Login Window? Simply drop a new background into Refinery. Change the way screenshots are made, customize Crash Reporter, or change the Alert and Clipping icons. All of this and more is possible with Refinery. To restore, use the options on the bottom of the window.

Adjust your AppsRefinery

allows you to enable and disable hidden features in Mac OS X apps like Address Book, Dashboard, and Safari. For instance, did you know that you can have more than one window in iCal? Or that you can change how messages are displayed in Mail? These options can be enabled from the Apps section of Refinery.

Universal Restore

With Refinery, you never have to worry about things going wrong. The Universal Restore feature lets you restore all of the options in Refinery with just a few clicks. You can also use the more selective options on the bottom bar to individually restore certain sections of the Refinery settings. There are also restore buttons on certain option panels.

System Requirements

Refinery requires a Mac running Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6 (Leopard or Snow Leopard). Refinery is a Universal Binary, so it works on both PowerPC core and Intel core computers.

Other Stuff

Tags: snow leopard, mac os x, powerpc core, preview feature, bottom bar, login window, refinery, mail, default state, new icon, hidden features, menubar, clipping, docks, dashboard, address book, os x, system requirements, safari