I’ve had the uneasy feeling for some time that spotlight was not
quite the full deal. I’d search for something, and not really be
satisfied with the results.
Anyway, today, I needed to find a phone number that I’d mentioned in
an Adium chat last week. Something to do with Anthony, and it had
two 8s in it. But spotlight denied any knowledge of such a file. :-/
In the end, I browsed my Adium logs manually and found it, but it
annoyed me enough that spotlight couldn’t even perform this simple
task, that I started looking into it.
The file (that I found manually) was definitely being indexed, since
mdls returned all its metadata. But neither the GUI spotlight nor
mdfind found it. A bit of googling around turned up no better
suggestion than “blow it away”. That is, apparently the spotlight
index can become corrupt, and forcing it to rebuild is the only way to
fix it.
This is accomplished with the command:
sudo mdutil -E /
(which erases the index for the startup volume).
Of course, OS X will then go and rebuild the index, which in my case
took less than a couple of hours.
And now I can find that Adium transcript!
A couple of cool things of note about my iPod and iTunes 4.9. First,
and this has probably been there forever and I just didn’t notice, but
when you’re playing a track, and click the “select” button (the centre
of the click wheel), the progress indicator changes from a bar to a
diamond. I couldn’t figure out why, until yesterday I happened to
“spin the wheel” while in this mode—and I was zooming through the
track! Cool! This is a much quicker way of moving around in a long
track than my previous technique of holding down the forward or back
buttons, which would cause the player to fast forward (or back) at
about 20x normal speed.
Second, and this is definitely new in iTunes 4.9 (well, firmware 1.4
for the mini anyway): syncing podcasts now checks for what ‘casts will
be removed in a sync (because they’ve been played) as well as what
will be added before calculating the available space. Previously, it
had pained me greatly (having “only” a 6GB mini) that I’d have to
manually juggle my iPod contents when syncing if I had lots of new
‘casts. Even though those on the ‘pod that I’d listened to (and would
be removed by my smart playlist) would have freed enough space for the
new ones, iTunes was not smart enough to work that out. But with the
new explicit support for podcasts (they’re a “first class” thing on
the iPod now, not just another mp3), the sync removes played ones
before updating news ones. Cool++!
I know it sounds like a cliche (ok, is a cliche), but podcasting is
really changing the way I think about radio—most of the podcasts I
subscribe to are ABC or NPR radio shows, and now I can listen
to them when it suits me, not just if I happen to be near a radio (and
sufficient silence) when they are being broadcast.
I was quite quick to complain
about
about my ear jams. I’m tempering my original judgement a
little… after giving them a bit more of a go, I’m finding listening
to some types of music decent enough. (E.g. The White Stripes, who
seem to be heavy on the mid-range in production anyway, or Beck, where
the prominent bottom end really helps.)
Just don’t try for anything like a Bach violin concerto. I’m still
saving for a really good pair of in-ear buds.