Stop Spotlight From Indexing External Drives

Posted Sunday February 28th 2010

Spotlight in OS X annoyingly indexes external devices like USB pen drives and cameras when mounted. You can block spotlight by using the ‘privacy’ setting in preferences, however once unmonted this seems to get forgotten. To make sure spotlight never indexes a drive you can add a hidden file to the root folder of that device to prevent it getting indexed forever. Create a file called .metadata_never_index

For example to block my camera all I did was :

touch /Volumes/CAMERA/.metadata_never_index

Now if only there was a setting to block all external drives…

Tags: Computing

Getting Text Back From All Caps In Photoshop Elements (Not CAPS LOCK!)

Posted Monday February 8th 2010

After getting rather confused as to why my text layer in Photoshop Elements 6 would not budge from being in all caps (no not because of CAPS LOCK!) I discovered that to get it back to normal you need to do :

Mac :

Command ('Apple Key') + Shift + Y

Windows :

Ctrl + Shift + Y

This will put the text back to sentence case or lower case (whatever it should be before it was being forced into all caps)

Tags: Computing

Shortcut To Show / Hide Hidden Files In OS X

Posted Sunday January 18th 2009

Working with OS X is a pleasure for me, but there are some things that really frustrate me, like having no easy way to show/hide hidden files. Whenever I wanted to do this in the past I had to first Google it, then open up terminal and change the Finder config before relaunching Finder:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

But no more! Tim Fletcher has written a small application that can be dragged into your finder toolbar which runs the command. So no more Googling necessary.

See his page here and download it for yourself: http://www.timothyfletcher.com/journal/posts/finder-button-to-showhide-hidden-files-in-os-x

Thanks Tim!

Tags: Computing