Well, I remembered that the beta stored a ridiculous amount of cache for the top sites previews and thought, hrm I wonder if thats the cause… turns out it was (at least for me anyway!). You can clear out the cache in the official release by going to the Safari menu > Reset Safari and selecting the options below.

Safari 4 Reset Top Sites and Clear the preview cache

Of course you can select more if you want to.

Facebook loaded much faster, as did iGoogle. Not sure how efficient the public release will be at maintaining a tidy web page preview cache but the above steps not only made the pages load faster, it stopped the errors I was getting for some reason – I can only guess that Safari was having a hard time trawling through the cache and gave up the ghost and pretended it didn’t have a connection by timing out… that’s just my guess obviously.

Anyway hope this helps anyone else who has a similar problem.

Thanks to my friend Spode I tried out Mint Linux on my old Laptop (HP dv2054ea) and started wondering how well I could integrate it with my Mac.

Mac’s have a nice discovery service called Bonjour which will look for devices that are advertised using Bonjour. There is an open source version called Avahi – this will allow you to use Linux to advertise services that you want to share from your Linux box – such as afp based file share (where Netatalk comes in).

Now this is where you need to be careful – Mac’s will require encryption to let you connect up to any file shares and so you need to do a bit of compiling with ssl enabled of the netatalk package. There is a blog post by someone who’s set up his share’s so that you can even use your linux box as a remote time machine (similar to Apple’s time capsule).

Since I already have a time capsule, I didn’t need to set up all of the things suggested there but most of it applied to what I needed and all in one page!

The “ndrew’s rem…” below minty is the VNC connection advertised from the avahi daemon running on ‘minty’ (the Linux Laptop). I’m pretty sure I didn’t have to define that in avahi, it just advertised it.

So, if you want to set this up, go follow the relevant parts on the article at kremalicious.com.

Big mistake, apple discussion forums and comments on iusethis all say that it breaks Leopard. It doesn’t just temporarily break things, in my case I installed it, ran it, it crashed, then every other program running crashed, then i couldn’t log out or restart! Only thing left was to hold the power button and try and restart and uninstall.

Well that didn’t work because on boot up, you can’t get past the blue screen before the login window. Most people with this problem have managed to safe boot their mac and delete the application files. Just my luck that I can’t even get that far!

So yes, avoid this software completely! More fool me for thinking that I could need more than the OS X built in firewall. Thankfully I have everything backed up on my time machine so I’ll just wipe and restore when I dig up the Leopard install DVD.

I almost don’t want to post the icon of this page but I think it deserves to be shown so you know to associate this logo with MacMurder…

Update: I called up applecare who told me of another little keyboard shortcut for startup – the ALT a.k.a Option key. This asked for my firmware password then allowed me to select the Leopard install disk. From there you can select Utilities > Restore System From Backup and use your Time Machine to restore the system completely.

It’s going to take a while (3 and half hours) but at least it will be restored! No idea why on my particular issue, none of the other startup key commands would work.

Obviously every one knows Apple make the iPod, but that shouldn’t mean their software that is used to get music onto and off of it should be lacking in a core ability – to be able to play music without skipping on their windows version of iTunes!

The interface of iTunes is pretty ok, the bad thing is that it can be a bit slow if you are scrolling through your library but the whole deciding to skip despite doing everything that users on the internet have tried – the only one that vaguely worked was turning the default 24bit playback to 16bit! But it still happens and its the most annoying thing.

I am just shocked that there hasn’t been a fix or update for the software so if you are listening apple, FIX YOUR WINDOWS VERSION OF iTUNES!! Despite me wanting an apple mac laptop at some point, its not happening soon because they just aren’t cheap.

Ok, rant over… now go get an iPod

The stable version includes the following that all run from the USB stick:

• Apache 2.0.55
• MySQL 4.1.15
• PHP 4.4.1/PHP 5.0.5
• PhpMyAdmin 2.6.4-pl4

Thats pretty decent I reckon, worth a look if you’re a geek

WordPress can even be installed if you are really erm, strange… see here.

My friends that I have mentioned it to have said “well whats the point?!” to which I respond, after having thought the same thing, “It makes demonstrating a web site to a client very easy and doesn’t mean they need web hosting or access to the internet”.

How cool is this site / music player!? You can download a plugin for Itunes / winamp / windows media player and it sees what kind of music you play and builds up a profile for you.

On the last.fm player it also lets you search for similar music to a band or group you type in. Can also search by “tags” for genres etc.

It is very cool and the player is pretty lightweight too