Mac OS X tunning tips

I am experimenting with some tunning strategies in my mac and, of course, will be sharing with you along some topics in this blog. For now, since I am still testing whether they are all effective, I'll be sharing just two simple tips.

First of all, install Snow Leopard. Upgrade is seamless, since I have Time machine configured, I didn't even have the trouble to back up stuff, and wouldn't have needed to restore anything, anyway. It finished upgrading and everything was working, no data was gone and all programs would still work. Kinda different from a Windows upgrade, surely. However, if you use Macports, you will have to through a process of upgrading it, take a look at this: http://syntatic.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/macports-snow-leopard-upgrade/

Snow Leopard initiates faster, sleeps and wakes up faster and occupies less space in my disk. Those are all the reasons needed for upgrading. But other reasons are 64bits, multicore and OpenGL optimizations.

The other tip is disabling the Spotlight. This one may not be applicable to everyone, but I never use Spotlight, so I find it really useful to disable those indexing operations that slow down my mac sporadically. If you also want to do that, go to the Terminal.app and issue:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

 The mdutil allows you to manage metadata used by spotlight.

Brain-computer interfaces

Since we have spoken about Ipad and the way that it's interface should revolutionize de world, I have decided to talk about what I actually think is the revolution itself, Brain-computer Interfaces.

We are actually talking about interfacing with devices solely by using your brain. Actually, research on this topic is often related to prosthetic devices, acquired blindness vision substitution and other benefits for people with special necessities. It is undeniable that this research may bring unmeasurable possibilities for these users, however, I can't stop myself from picturing future computer interfaces based on this technology. I know for sure that everyone has already seen the Monkey and prosthetic arm video.
I bet that Avatar stuff does look a little less impossible now!

One can only imagine the large number of applications and games that could benefit from such interfaces, however research is still some years away from mapping brainwaves perfectly and farther from doing so for different individuals and brainwaves patterns. Another issue and always worth considering is the price those interfaces would impose to our monthly low budget of tech gadgets. Shall we break our piggy banks for this ones?

Peter Crouch's

I want to take a pause in the topics that I usually talk about here, and talk about Peter Crouch's girlfriend. I am not sure if everyone here is aware of who is Peter Crouch. He is England's national team and Liverpool's center forward, nonetheless a really tall, lousy and ugly soccer player with a huge lack of physical coordination. Take a look at his girlfriend:

Which makes me wonder, for the millionth time in my life, about the weight money has in girl's decisions about whether hooking up with someone.