Wednesday 9 July 2014

Hide twitter app worldcup menu

Since the World Cup started the Twitter app has been suggesting I look at the latest World Cup game. I'm not that interested anymore but it keeps on bothering me. 

The good news is that you can disable or hide the world cup menu in the Twitter app by tapping and holding on the world cup banner till you get an option to "Hide" or "Never Show Again", or "Cancel". Choose Hide or never show again and it's gone forever.

Tuesday 8 July 2014

Spotlight not working?

You just tried to use Spotlight and it found nothing apart from a dictionary word?! Spotlight seems to shut itself down for a variety of reasons  - one being lack of disk space - it seems to need about 5% of your disk space to free to operate effectively. Here's one way to fix it.

Firstly you can check if Spotlight has indeed stopped (from a terminal):
mdutil -s /
If it says: "No index." then you can re-enable it again - making sure you have about 25GB free if you have a 500GB hard drive - you'll need to type in your password as it requires root privileges:
sudo mdutil -i on /
It should say "Indexing enabled" - sometimes you have repeat this last step a couple of times until it says "Indexing enabled".

If you have no joy enabling it you can go one step further and try erasing and rebuilding the Spotlight index:
sudo mdutil -E /

Or as a last resort try removing it manually - firstly you should disable Indexing:
sudo mdutil -i off /
And then remove the index:
rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100
And finally re-enable Indexing:
sudo mdutil -i on /

Once you have enabled Indexing again be prepared to wait for a few hours before it's finished (it'll tell you roughly how long if you click on the Spotlight icon). However you can actually use Spotlight whilst it is building the index - it starts to provide some results fairly soon after it begins indexing.