For quite a while now I’ve had a problem on my iMac where, after a few days, launching any new application would result in the CPU gauge going to 100% for thirty seconds, and the temperature and fan speed rising accordingly — which wouldn’t have been so bad if I didn’t have a bunch of AppleScript applications that I regularly had to launch, or if I didn’t have to restart Safari every so often to reset resources.

I used to think the likely culprits were either Firefox 3 or Mercury Messenger, because it seemed to happen in a more reproducible way after I’d open them a couple of times (I won’t delve into the reasons why Firefox and Mercury are intrinsically associated in specific, uh, tasks), so I cut back on using one, or the other, or both — and today it started happening again even though I was certain I hadn’t used either since I last booted up. I went scrubbing my InputManagers folders again, as those are the prime suspects when something goes wrong with every application’s launch sequence, but there was still only 1Password, and removing it changed nothing. So I started thinking about alternate solutions, and suddenly remembered hearing about this Unixy thing that OS X has and I heard it lets you look at everything your computer does or something.

I googled a bit for the dtrace syntax; here is, for future reference, the Terminal instruction that did the trick:

This tells dtrace to display in real time every file that’s being opened on disk; I looked at what was happening at the moment when the CPU went crazy, and I ended up removing the macam QuickTime component (which lets you use legacy USB webcams) and apparently solving the problem. I don’t know why a QuickTime component would start loading with every single program after a certain uptime delay, or why Mercury and/or Firefox would be accelerating that process, so I’m not 100% sure that I found the true root of the problem, but at the very least I did find a useful Unix comment, and hence this post.

I was looking again for a way to make Twistori into a screensaver on my Mac, but this time I found it: IdleWeb [via] lets you use any web page (or several pages, and I don’t know how it works in that case) as a screensaver. All you’ve got to do is set it up in “kiosk mode,” otherwise it seems to reload the home page after five seconds, when the site’s Javascript redirects to an internal URL. (And it’s only the preview that’s screwed up because it’s on a small screen; the actual screensaver displays the page flawlessly.)

Orange vient de m’appeler pour me demander comment je me servais de mon iPhone, si j’en étais satisfait, etc. (Je n’ai répondu au numéro masqué que parce que j’attends une livraison.) Ils sont en train d’évaluer l’intérêt de renouveler le contrat d’exclusivité avec Apple ?

Now available for download; it’s a little too CPU-expensive for my computer (although disabling page curls in the Preferences helps) and crashed when I added the fourth feed to a “Garoo Network” page, but it looks nice and works as advertised. If you’ve got an Intel Mac (2GB of RAM is probably preferrable) and have never really cared for RSS aggregators, I strongly recommend you give this one a try — it looks to be great for randomly surfing the daily news and discovering stories, rather than methodically reading every little post that each blog or news site publishes. If my iMac could handle it better, I’d probably keep Times around to have an occasional look at the stock-provided News and Entertainment pages.