If you use an external drive on your Mac and find yourself looking at the spinning colour wheel all the time waiting for the drive to spin up again, then this tip is for you.
Just go into system preferences and then energy saving and untick the box that says “put the hard drives to sleep when possible”.
There are more elegant solutions allowing you to control spin down timeouts, but this is the quick fix.
Contiuing my project to get my Mac to feel like a proper PC and not cause me mental strain every time I switch to it from Ubuntu, I have started using a proper UK keyboard and have now found out how to make it have the correct keymapping.
For full details go here:
http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2005/11/20/using_a_british.php
In a nutshell though:
download this file:
http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/resources/2005/11/20/british-windows-3.keylayout.gz
Then unzip it and put it in:
/Users/{yourname}/Library/Keyboard Layouts/
Then go to System Preferences - International - Input Menu
you should see just below british something called British 3. Tick that box and also ensure the box at the bottom is ticked (‘Show input menu in menu bar’)
Then restart the machine and you should have proper UK keyboard, with an easily accessible # key – woot! 
If you regularly swap between a PC (Ubuntu for me) and a Mac, then this little tip might just save you a load of hassle.
The biggest bug bear switching between the two systems is that the combinations [ctrl]+ etc are now [cmd]+ which is not on the same keyboard locaation and is generally a bit more fiddly to use, especially if you have spent a lifetime using [ctrl].
Open the System Preferences and select Keyboard & Mouse under the hardware section. Click on Keyboard tab. Next press the Modifier Keys button located at the bottom left. Now swap the Control and Commands keys.
That’s it, feels like a proper computer now 
Perhaps it’s the 30″ monitor that is seducing me, or the cute way windows can pop open and closed. Maybe it’s the fact that as a Linux user I see a lot of things that I recognise thanks to OSX being a unix based OS.
Now that I have my Ubuntu Jaunty laptop and the Macs talking to each other I can use my laptop as a mobile web server and the Mac as my internet browsing and now that I am setting up some IDE’s, possibly even my coding station.
On the downside though I am stuggling with the lack of right click, the US keyboard layout with the ” and @ switched round and the cramped [apple]+, [apple]+[v] copy and paste.
Still its interesting to finally get to play around on a Mac after hearing and reading all the hype and the almost evangelical Mac users. I have to admit they do have a point – its very slick.
I do love Ubuntu though, and Jaunty has proved an even nicer refinement of an already awesome OS. Plus the fact that I can run Ubuntu on commodity hardware and expect excellent performance, security and stability as standard.
I suspect (though I haven’t done the sums) that value for money wise a Ubuntu based system will give me more for the same price when compared to a Mac. They aint cheap and that’s for sure!
