Yosemite on a 2007 iMac

One star reviews in the App Stores are a constant source of fascination and the release of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) has provided rich pickings. Of course it is frustrating when things are not working properly but many reviewers seem to imagine that the problems they experience with their computers are universal and affecting everyone – there would be rioting in the streets if that were the case. Some even seem to suggest that positive reviews are some form of Apple inspired conspiracy…

who wrote five star

The reviewers share their homilies so the rest of us can benefit from their wisdom and insights. One common theme is that Yosemite should never be installed on an older computer as it will be unbearably slow…

Mediocre

I write this on a 2007 iMac with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor which is the oldest Mac that is able to run Yosemite. It is used and abused on a daily basis. The update to Yosemite was going to be the excuse to clear it out, reformat the drive and have a fresh clean install but I chickened out as it would be too much hassle to set everything up again and so Yosemite was just slapped on top of everything else…

Over 40000 emails (I did not notice the palindromic number when I took the screen shot)…

Screen Shot 2015-04-26 at 20.10.28

Over 1000 apps in the Applications folder…

Screen Shot 2015-04-26 at 20.11.06

A couple of hundred bits and pieces installed with Homebrew and a menu bar full of stuff half of which I have forgotten what they do…

Menu bar icons
Menu bar icons

Not to mention half a dozen terabytes of external storage hanging off the back.

So how does Yosemite run on this aged, under powered, over loaded wreck? Splendidly…

A couple of minutes worth of Activity Monitor monitoring the activity (that is what it does best) recorded with Screen Flow – so they both occupy high ratings but nothing too taxing.

Thankfully some reviewers manage to figure out that their frustrations are fixable…

15 min fix

Whilst others plant their tongue firmly in their cheek…

Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 10.34.03

Kim Fowley

Kim Fowley (July 21, 1939 – January 15, 2015)

fowley

The Worst Record Ever Made – Althea and the Memories

And some edumacation for the youngsters…

Hey Joe – The Leaves

Wanted Dead or Alive – The Rogues (includes Fowley)

Flower Punk – Mothers

Marks and Spencer web site

Apparently Marks and Spencer sales have been hit by a website move…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/28205935

who would have thought it?

Go to…

http://www.marksandspencer.com/s/beauty/virtual-makeover-counter

and click on Register to be confronted by….

M&S certificate query

Apparently a sub-domain of the Marks & Spencer site is running from a GoDaddy site…

http://makeover.marksandspencer.com

Caveat emptor.

Set up Xiki with Aquamacs

Step by step set up using Aquamacs editor with the awesome Xiki…

From these instructions.

Ingredients:

A Mac running OS X Mavericks which should have Ruby 1.9.3 as the default version.

Jewellery Box to manage your Ruby versions (RVM) and gems

The Aquamacs editor.

Xiki

Recipe:

Open the Terminal and install the Xiki gem…

$ gem install xiki

Verify that all is well…

$ xiki

A Xiki directory will have been created in your Home folder so jump into that…

$ cd ~/xiki/

Then run the set up script…

$ bash etc/install/el4r_setup.sh

You will now need an editor that will see an invisible file (the dot at the start of the name hides the file from being listed in a Finder window: .el4r). I use BBEdit but the free version called Text Wrangler will do the job…

Show hidden files
Select the Show hidden items option

Add these lines to the end of the init.rb file in the .el4r folder within the xiki folder within your Home folder…

$LOAD_PATH.unshift “~/xiki/lib”
require ‘xiki’
Xiki.init

KeyBindings.keys # Use default key bindings
Themes.use “Default” # Use xiki theme

Fire up Aquamacs and it should drop you straight into Xiki…

Welcome to Xiki in Aquamacs
Welcome to Xiki in Aquamacs