Cleaning up with Hazel

Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m not a neat-freak.  If you know me well enough, you know that I can be an out-right slob.  My wife has tried to train me in other ways, and it’s sorta worked. But I still leave things laying around that need to be dealt with — including things that should go straight to the trash.

I’m that way with files on my computers as well.  I let files sit around long after I need them and then, surprise!,  I have a problem with hard drive space. I end up having to scramble to find files to delete, and end up finding ISO images and tarballs of forgotten installs that I could have delete months, sometimes years go.

After  my clean install of Snow Leopard, I vowed I would be better at cleaning up after myself.  I would delete files that I know longer needed, remove those MP3 files after I import them into iTunes,  and empty my Trash periodicially.  But, really, who am I fooling? I’m not going to do daily or weekly sweeps of my hard drive seeing these things.  That’s where Hazel stepped into my life and made things much easier.

Hazel cleans up after you.  Essentially, you tell it where to look, what to look for, and what do to.  Want to import MP3 files automatically into iTunes? It will do that. Want to delete files that were downloaded more than a week ago?  It will do that.  Delete the Trash every month?  Yep.  Oh, and if the Trash bin gets large, it will delete it automatically — but only if you tell it to.  What if you want to do something weird with the file?  Well, you can write an AppleScript or a shell script to handle that.  And you tell it all this in a nice, mostly-intutive  GUI.  (Click on the Screenshots link on the main Hazel page for an idea.)

And added bonus is that it can delete application files when you delete the application.  What’s that?  You thought OSX did that for you when you moved an app from the Application folder to the Trash?  Well, look in your user’s Library->Preferences or Library->Application Support folder. Yeah, you see a lot of folders there for applications you no longer have installed.  If you had Hazel installed, it would see that you have moved an Application to the Trash and it will ask you if you want to delete the user-level files as well.

I think Hazel is an application that every Mac owner should have.  So, really,  at least try it out. Now. Go.   It’s worth far more than it’s $21.95 price tag.

The Harrowing Journey From Tiger to Snow Leopard

Unlike most Apple users, I didn’t make the quick jump from Tiger (10.4) to Leopard (10.5).  Mostly because I’ve learned the hard way not to be the first in line for upgrades.  And when I read about the changes they were making, I thought “I’ll wait until they work out the kinks.” And then they announced Snow Leopard (10.6)  and touted the $24 upgrade but, if you looked close at it, that was only from Leopard to Snow Leopard, where little was changed on the service (but much under the hood was redone).  A little looking and I found that I had to get the Mac Box Set with 10.6, iWork, and the new iLife, which I wanted anyway.  And lots of my tools that wanted to use only worked with Leopard on up anyway.  So Snow Leopard it is.

I ordered my Box Set and waited for Amazon to ship it (it was $20 cheaper there and no taxes. Yes, I’m that cheap!).  When I got it in my hands, and got ready for the upgrade . . . I did a backup first.  SuperDuper is my friend.  Before this process was over, it became my lifesaver.

So I stuck the Snow Leopard disc in, and told it that I wanted to upgrade.  The machine rebooted, the Snow Leopard install came up, and said it was starting and then . . . it quit, telling me that there was not enough room left on the drive.  Which was very possible — there was a lot of junk on that drive.  So I took the disk out and rebooted, thinking I would remove some more junk and then do the upgrade.  And then it happened . . .

The machine wouldn’t boot.

My Mac would start up just fine, give me the Apple logo and then shut down.  I put the Snow Leopard disc back in and that didn’t boot either!   A little research showed my assumption about it booting from the DVD drive if it couldn’t boot anything else was wrong — instead it just stops.  You have to hold down “C” during the boot sequence to get it to boot from the DVD drive.  I went to find my Tiger install discs and booted with that.  I went to run the DiskUtility and did “Repair” but it said it couldn’t.   Arrgggghhhh.

I tried the DiskUtility with the Snow Leopard and it wouldn’t even Repair it — it was not a Snow Leopard hard disk!!  Arrggghhhh again!

Now I had a choice.  SuperDuper makes my USB hard drive bootable.  I could boot off of it but that doesn’t solve my problem — the boot info on the hard drive was messed up. If I booted from the USB drive and removed enough stuff to make Snow Leopard install.  But, still, nothing can repair my drive.  My data was safely backed up and I know that I didn’t need it all anyway and, with SuperDuper, I can go and copy the files that I wanted off of it anyway.  So I took a leap and erased the drive.

You read that right. I wiped the drive clean with the Snow Leopard installer and installed from scratch. Of course, the installer was more than willing to do that.

After that, things went mostly well.  I copied our Music and Preferences folders over and Safari, iTunes, and Mail all saw the changes and updated their databases.  The copying part took a while, but after that it was all smooth.

But I had lots of problems with MacPorts.  Emacs.app needs some manual guidence , Python2.4 has some weirdness, and PostgreSQL/PostGIS are always a pain to install.  But I got them going.

A clean install was a good thing — it got rid of the junk and I was able to move just the files that I needed.  And, thankfull,  SuperDuper demostrated that it’s worth 10x it’s $28 price tag.

So do your backup kids.