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Showing posts from May, 2010

My First Video Call

[update: reformatted the post] In today's world you'd almost want to bite back "dude video calls are ancient history... lame." But come on, who makes regular daily video calls. Do you? I'd love to hear on what device, on what network in which country :-) I made my first ever (decent) video call a few days ago. I say decent because I have a vague recollection that I may have attempted a video call in the past, but it either didn't work, or was of too rubbish a quality to really consider a success. Anyway it went like this. I usually tote a first generation iPhone, but today (because I need to use TomTom and had to update the satellite info) I had to put my one and only SIM card into my rather aged HTC Kaiser (TyTN II). At some point during the day I pressed a strange little button on my Kaiser's dial screen by mistake, and suddenly my face popped up. In a couple of split seconds I figured that I'd hit the video call button, and the front-facing came

Convert Inactive to Free Memory on a Mac

It's easy to do, but it took me a little while to find out how... Covert the "Inactive" memory used by my Mac (as displayed in Activity Monitor) to "Free" memory. First you might want to know what the difference between the two is. This is explained clearly by Apple support here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342 And yes we know that the Mac has an incredibly smart memory management system, and it's wonderful that Macs are able to distinguish between completely unused memory ("Free") and memory that was used earlier but that hasn't been marked as "Free" just in case we want to use it for the same app again ("Inactive"). Unfortunately my experience is that if you have next to no "Free" memory left, and tons of "Inactive" memory, everything you start up feels sluggish. So, to solve that problem manually, all you need to do is to flick open a terminal, type purge , and hit enter. It may take a little