Welcome to katnoodle - online journal and scrapbook.

If you, like me, have thousands of email messages in Apple Mail (on Tiger) and have found over the years it gets a little sluggish, then this handy tool may well fix it.

Vacuum Mail by Leland Scott just plain works. I won’t bore you with the gory technical detail other than it rewrites the index for your Mail database – see Leland’s site for more info.

Thanks to Leland my mail is fast and fun again.

This might be handy for anyone who experiences what I’ve just been through.

My iTunes library is stored on a shared disk (networked via an Airport Extreme base station) which works nicely.

However, after trying to import a troublesome CD my machine refused to play any music purchased through iTunes Music Store and then, to cap it all, decided to restart with NO MUSIC in the library.

This is a tad disconcerting but luckily easy to fix. Before you do anything BACKUP YOUR ITUNES FOLDER. Yeah, yeah I know – just don’t come crying to me when it all goes wrong!

First the missing library problem.

• Quit iTunes.
• Open your iTunes folder and inside should be several ‘Temp File n’ (where n is a number). These are backups of your iTunes library.
• Chances are your ‘iTunes Library’ and ‘iTunes Music Library.xml’ files are very small, but the most recent ‘Temp File’ is much bigger.

• Delete (really!) both ‘iTunes Library’ and ‘iTunes Music Library.xml’ and rename the most recent large ‘Temp File’ to ‘iTunes Library’.

  That should fix the missing library. You can also save some space and delete all the old temp files once your library is working again.

  Next I had to solve the authorisation error.

  After a bit of Googling it turns out Apple provide a help doc for this. Although they say it’s only for iTunes 4 and 5 I can vouch it works just fine on iTunes 7 too.

  Run Terminal app and enter the following command line instructions:

  sudo mkdir -p /Users/Shared
  sudo chmod 777 /Users/Shared

  That should allow your machine to store it’s authorisation stuff properly again.

  Restart iTunes and you should be good to go.

  See, Macs do f*ck up!

... where have you been all my life

Rita is quite an amazingly innovative (really!) illustration/drawing application for Mac OS X. It’s also the work of one guy, Niklas Frykholm, who appears to be sickeningly talented!

It’s incredibly easy to use, has loads of funky drawing tools (hatching, highlights, freehand shapes and ovals), several mad drawing tools (hex grid) and totally kicks ass when used with a graphics tablet.

And whats really cool is it’s all done with vectors (So no nasty pixels when you zoom in) and an infinite drawing area – no arbitrary size restrictions – very nice.

I’m not going to write much more now as I have to go play … but for now check out Niklas’ website and grab a demo version.

If you, like me, love Rita, then $20 seems unreasonably, in fact, embarrassingly cheap. I envisage getting more out this than I ever have out of Illustrator*, ouch!

Maccam is a fantastic application (driver) that supports zillions of unsupported, ‘pc’ webcams on OS X.

What does this mean? It means you can buy any of the ‘PC only’ cameras listed on Maccam and use them on your Mac, just like any other webcam.

And you know what, it’s open source too, which means it’s free download, joy! So if you use it and like it, don’t forget to donate some money to these guys.

Big love to the Maccam developers, thanks.

I like Trebuchet MS.

It’s clean, attractive and just looks good.

It’s a Microsoft font which ships with Windows, hence it’s also safe to use for web design work.

Unfortunately, Trebuchet MS has a nasty secret.

It was invented by Vincent Connare.

No problem you think, so what?

Vincent Connare also ‘invented’ Comic Sans.

Ug, ouch!

Now that’s what I call a user interface …