Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Here's an OS X tip that I figured out on my own, and I don't know if it's documented anywhere else. How to see 2 kinds of dock icons at once in Apple Activity Monitor: I like having Activity Monitor running, and I like its feature of its dock icon showing information. (Right-click its dock icon then select Dock Icon if you're not familiar with this.) However, I want to see CPU History as well as Memory Usage because to me both are important to tell you what's going on with the computer at the very moment. At a glance, you can tell if the computer is processing data or if it might be swapping page files or if it's locked up tight in a crash. Seeing this data can often help me understand whether I should, for example, continue waiting for the beach ball of death or any other seemingly stalled activity. Activity Monitor only lets you see one thing in the dock icon, but here's how to see two instead of one.
- Start Activity Monitor.
- Set its dock icon to one kind of data output (you choose).
- Minimize Activity Monitor.
- Activity Monitor appears as a minimized application icon next to the Trash.
- Right-click the original Activity Monitor dock icon and set it to a different kind of data output.
Voila! Now you can see two kinds of Activity Monitor data at once. The one in the minimized icon is considerably smaller, so I like having that one show Memory Usage and the original Activity Monitor icon show CPU History. Yes you can get separate dashboardlike utilities which show you a lot more information but at a cost of an extra process running on your system and taking up memory and probably more processor time than Activity Monitor.—Edits for Danny's website: added Josh E's reception. Stretches. Weight training: push-up, superslow dumbbell fly. Stretches. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Patrick and I watched Obama's speech from yesterday. Computer technology support task force meeting. Job postings project. Small web edits for Cindy. Attended a webinar by information technology people at UC Davis which described how they migrated all their students from Geckomail to Gmail. I will probably talk more about this another day. Dinner at home with Patrick: cow ravioli and meatball in Patrick's homemade spaghetti sauce. Shopped online.