Mac Crashes, More

My MacBook Pro has been slow and quirky for the past week. Yesterday I had to hard reboot twice. The second time made my machine decidedly unhappy: just about everything running decided to forget its preferences. That meant all my Inquisitor shortcuts were gone; my news feeds were gone; my iTunes library was hosed. A recent backup made this less of a problem than it could have been, but it was still a hassle.

After restoring my files, I took the opportunity to track down the root of my machine’s instability. As it turn out, Application Enhancer was running, most likely installed by Airfoil. APE being a notorious cause of instability, I eschewed it post-haste. Things have been less strange since.

I also disabled FileVault and secure virtual memory, which was painful. I’ve read countless times that FileVault isn’t supposed to degrade performance but experience has consistently shown me otherwise. A pity.

As much as I enjoyed the incredible flexibility and OS integration of Voodoo Pad, it does more than I realistically need. As soon as I started using it to build an “outboard brain” I realized that I prefer to collect information and synthesize it into coding, writing, or some other activity. Passive collection of anything more than bookmarks just isn’t my style.

I’ve gone back to using a “Life” project in TextMate for short-term notes, numbers, ideas, and so forth. Not having to worry (read: not being able to worry) about styling text, quirky list behavior, and other RTF oddities is a burden lifted. Witch makes getting to that project that much easier and Megazoomer lets me focus on TextMate and only TextMate.

I find the combination of blogging and del.icio.us to be a fine outboard brain, but I need more granularity than the broad categories that TextPattern allows. Tagging may be the feature that forces me to migrate yet again.