Resolve Microsoft Office opening slowly on Mac OS X

I was using Microsoft Office 2008 (which was never that fast) and decided to try out Office 2011 for Mac to see if it offered any speed improvements. Even after the initial opening where it takes a while to build its font cache (I should have picked up on this foreshadow), both Word and Excel were extremely slow to open documents. By slow I mean 1-3 minutes sometimes. I kept scratching my head and looking for fixes online and then finally resolved the problem by using Font Book to validate my fonts and subsequently removing all the conflicts it found.

Over the years I had collected fonts and used the Apple Migration Assistant to transfer my “mac world” between four different computers.

I followed Apple’s guide to validate fonts and after successfully removing all of the conflicts it found, Word and Excel sprang back to life. Photoshop CS4 and Acrobat X were much faster as well and I experienced the “beach ball” much less.

To prevent bad fonts from being installed in the future you can now have Font Book automatically validate fonts before installing, from Apple:

Related Links: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=FontBook/2.2/en/5285.html

Fix the “No front page content has been created yet.” in Drupal 7 problem

You can hide the “No front page content has been created yet.” in Drupal 7 by adding the following to your local.css:

#first-time {
display: none;
}

Improve the speed of Backblaze.

Adding your “Downloads” folder and additional file types can improve the speed of Backblaze. Open System Preferences and select the Backblaze preference pane, then click Settings. Screenshots below:

Eben Moglen Is Reshaping Internet With a Freedom Box – NYTimes.com

Internet access should be added to the human bill of rights. I can think of nothing more freeing than an open Internet. To anyone in search of answers for themselves with a disdain for authoritarian figures pushing their fact-less truths, the Internet is the greatest source of empowerment.

“…a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers.”

Eben Moglen Is Reshaping Internet With a Freedom Box – NYTimes.com.

Migrating from an @cox.net email account to Gmail

Google has instructions that are pretty easy to follow here:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=21289

a couple notes specific to Cox in Santa Barbara:

• Cox’s POP server is pop.west.cox.net
• Do not check ‘leave mail on server’
• Apply label of checked messages (it will label them with your cox email address – useful info to some)

Once that is done you must stop your email client from checking the cox servers. You can typically do this by:

• on iPhone, deleting the cox account
• on a computer, deactivate the email account or delete it (preferably deactivate)

If you don’t stop your email client from checking the cox email account then the email will never appear in your Gmail box

Now if you want to retain your @cox.net email account for outgoing mail on an iPhone you must add the account manually (if you select “Gmail” as the account type it will enforce your Gmail address – not such a bad thing). for manual settings you punch in your cox.net email address and configure the account manually, here are the settings:

IMAP account type

• email = @cox.net email account
• imap server = imap.gmail.com – use SSL yes – port 993
• smtp server = smtp.gmail.com – use SSL yes – port 445
• login = your GMAIL account id
• pass = your GMAIL account password