setting up a mac again 

Dented iMac

I did a project at Digg/Betaworks in the fall of 2012, and on the last day there, they were holding a silent auction for excess and out-dated computers. I bid one day’s day-rate on a 27″ Late 2009 iMac and won. I dropped the thing on the way up the way up the stairs at home, but it worked and continues to work. The stroke of luck about the machine is that I’d bought and sold a Thunderbolt display about a year earlier, which is another story: while I still couldn’t afford a display, I’d managed to come home with a whole computer instead. With an inexpensive miniDVI cable it works as a second monitor for my laptop and can run an Archive Team Warrior simultaneously.

Fast forward a few months and some Finder tasks run really slow. The time after boot, when things start up. Opening the Applications folder. Little things were definitely strange for a machine that’s basically a bullet train at actual work. And the speed problems were much worse with multiple users signed in; nothing I’d tried around Spotlight had helped. I thought I cleanly reinstalled the iMac when I got it, but I wasn’t so sure, and Mavericks didn’t seem like it had changed the behavior.

So, recently I was reminded about booting into Recovery mode and since everything on this machine is either on git or Dropbox or a Drobo, I zapped the machine to a clean install of 10.9 and made a gist of all the little things that make a computer feel like home.

The gist has my .zshrc file, a list of all the defaults write options I’ve set, and a mega list of apps and utilities — ievms and xcode CLI tools and something that quiets the iMac fan — that are easy to forget until you realize you need them.

Not in all the same ways, but the machine was still slow: for a minute, Finder would show blank folders from an Open dialog on pretty much any app. What finally fixed that was disabling AppNap for Finder, which I added to the gist.

sudo defaults write com.apple.Finder NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES

It ate a day, but it was kindof fun. I’m glad I documented the process. And I didn’t let myself fall for buying more RAM, an SSD, or a whole new computer.