Haeber and his team in Detroit

Photographers

Urbex at its finest.

I suspect a key reason that urban exploration photography so appeals to me is that you see the recent past through the mantle of a veil of decay and decrepitude. What was once vibrant and magnificent is now sad and rotted. The decay somehow heightens the sense of a locations magnificent past. It’s also no surprise that probably the best urbex work is being done in America for no other nation places so little value on the appearance of its land. A car is old? Dump it in the field. A factory closed? Place barbed wire around it and let it rot. Cheaper than flattening it. Seldom, it seems, is any attempt made to raze and redevelop the land which created so much wealth back then.

Jonathan Haeber, that prince of urbex artists, took his team to McLouth Steel in crumbling Detroit. He relates that McLouth was once one of America’s largest steel producers. The photographs accompanying his article are outstanding and very worthy of your time. Click his magnificently lit picture below to see more.

Click the picture for Haeber’s documentation of McLouth Steel.

If you are interested in American industrial history, there’s no finer way of getting a snapshot than the chart put out by Financial Graph & Art of the changes in the Dow Jones Industrial Average of common stocks from its inception in 1896, when it numbered 20 stocks. Today it’s 30. You don’t have to be a money management maven to appreciate what this chart shows. For example, in 1896, fully 50% of the Dow was comprised of metal, mining and rail, with agriculture the runner up at 25%. America made things. Finance (which produces nothing) and retail (which has us spending what we do not have) were mere slivers. Today? Finance – one third. Retail – one third. Everything else – the remainder. America borrows to buy garbage. The chart also shows how very few businesses survive for long and just how wild some of the market’s swings have been through our never ending booms and busts. I gaze at this chart often and never fail to learn something new. Just like Haeber’s photographs.

An efficient Lion installation

OS X

Saving space.

If you use a Solid State Drive for your Mac OS and apps, then you know that the small, costly SSD can fill up quickly. If you download Lion from the App Store onto a machine with Snow Leopard installed, the download is what Apple calls an ‘incremental’ one. Only changed files are updated. OS X aficionados swear than the only real OS X installation is a ‘clean’ one, meaning you install Lion on a fresh drive or partition and then migrate over from your Snow Leopard drive or partition just what you need. I have never seen any comparative performance measurements to substantiate this claim so, until I do, I disregard it as so much urban myth.

So assuming you do an incremental install, one thing the installer will not do is erase apps and files you no longer need.

Which are these?

First, any PPC app – one written to run on Apples using IBM G3/4/5 CPUs, will no longer run. The brilliant PPC emulator software known as Rosetta, included through the last version of Snow Leopard, is no more. Which of your apps are PPC? Go to Applications->Utilities->Activity Monitor and click on the ‘Kind’ column heading to sort your apps by Intel, Intel (64 bit) and PPC.

Activity Monitor displays which CPU apps run on.

Well, guess what. As long as you have copies of your PPC apps in a Snow Leopard disk or partition, you might as well delete these from your Lion installation because there’s no way they will ever work.

Well, how about all the other crud which has built up from generations of machines? Time to fire up the free Omni DiskSweeper which, after a few minutes grinding (or few seconds if you use an SSD) will tell you where all your files reside, sorted by size in decreasing order. Now you can get serious about purging stuff, but do make a backup before you go ballistic.

Here’s my Users directory – the biggest part of which is MobileSync (backups of iPad/iPhone etc which could be erased); Music can be moved to an HDD. VirtualBox is only needed if you must run Windows. That lot comprise some 18gB of the 30.3gB,meaning you only really need 12gB for Users:

Add to that Applications, which means Applications+Library+usr:

All the Lion stuff adds another 5gB.

Here are my biggest Apps:

From the above approach you can figure what you need on an SSD boot drive which is to contain OS Lion + Users + Apps/Library and hence how large the SSD needs to be, allowing +10% for free space used for temp/scratch files, Mac OS X updates and any new apps you decide to add.

I suspect that, unless you have tons of big apps and/or a huge mail database, 40gB will do it nicely for you – meaning use 36gB and keep 10% free. My SSDs are 120gB but if I was normal you wouldn’t be reading this.

Update:

Reader Fazal Majid has pointed out below in his Comment to this post that there’s a free app named Monolingual which does all of the above and more. I used it and gained 0.51gB on my SSD (Monolingual erroneously reported a gain of 1.0gB) compared to the status immediately after upgrading to OS Lion. It took a couple of minutes to run and I could see it extracting PPC code from many current apps like iPhoto and Lightroom. The apps remaining on my HackPro continue to run fine.

You can download Monolingual by clicking below:

Click to download Monolingual.

However, a check of the Library->Application Support directory disclosed that related files in this directory were not removed. They are, for the most part, small, but it’s a shame the app authors did not go all the way. Still, the price is right.

Thanks Fazal!

Windows with Lion

OS X

For the masochists among you.

My prime, nay, sole, motivation for installing Windows on my Lion Hackintosh was to allow me to look at some computer games our 9 year old had programmed which run on Windows only. (At this juncture feel free to speculate at the wisdom of a parent who sends his son to a class which uses Windows).

If you have your original Windows discs it’s free, as easy as any Windows task ever is and works. Mine is Windows XP SP3, but any version through Windows 7 is supported, not to mention many flavors of Unix and, for those unwilling to hack their PC, you can even run Mac OS X from within Windows.

The product is the updated version of the one I ran under Snow Leopard and is named VirtualBox. Created by Sun it’s now part of Oracle and it’s free. Set it up right (the instructions are good but ‘techie’) and you can run Windows in an OS Lion window and cursor directly to that window like any other OS window. Windows runs in its own space and viruses cannot migrate to the OS installation. Several years with VB under Leopard and Snow Leopard have not resulted in any problems on the Mac side. Yes, I still get the inevitable lock-ups on the Windows side.

You can download VirtualBox here; it’s professionally supported and I have found it to be bug free.

Here’s a snap of Win XP running in Lion:

By all accounts Windows 7 is far better than XP or Vista so if you must have Windows and do not want to have to boot into a separate partition or use another machine, this is one way to go. Speed is fine on my Hackintosh and you don’t have to be Einstein to do this successfully. Sound worked out of the box as did wireless broadband. Once I installed the included ‘Guest Additions’ software (it’s under ‘Devices’ in the VB menu) I was able to set screen definition to full screen and the mouse cursor no longer had to be clicked in the Windows window to make it work. Looking at the simply awful font rendering in this OS I can’t help wondering how anyone with any aesthetic values could use this garbage. Whatever.

During the long, rambling installation process, which I had to redo from scratch as the Lion installation trashed my previous VB/Win, I grumbled about Windows to a friend, who is an iPad/Mac babe. Her reply was priceless:

Windows will always be with us! At least it attracts most of the viruses!