Last week I issued a caution about Squeeze possibly causing kernel panics.  Well, it turns out that Squeeze wasn’t the root cause, but it probably just made my problem more evident.  If you want to give Squeeze a shot, go for it!  Don’t let my experience scare you off.

The problem was that one of my 4GB SODIMMs was bad, and that was what was causing all the kernel panics.  I had previously tried testing my RAM with TechTool Pro, but it didn’t find any issues.  A friend of mine suggested that I tried Memtest OS X.  Low and behold, it found issues left and right!  I tried removing and swapping sticks and narrowed it down to one specific stick.  The RMA is in and while I’m temporarily down to 5GB of RAM (long story) instead of 8GB, I can at least run stably now.

EDIT: I found that Squeeze wasn’t the root cause of my problems.  If you want to try Squeeze, I think you can do it safely.  However, I’ll leave the instructions below for how to “uninstall” Squeeze.

So after Saturday’s install of Squeeze, I’ve had some issues with my Mac.  Here are the issues I’ve observed so far:

• Random hard OS X crashes
• CrashPlan engine crashing
• Spotlight indexing never completes

Of course, I can’t say that Squeeze caused all of these issues, but I think that it’s not worth the risk to save 600MB on a 500GB hard drive.  If anything, I’m going to say that Spotlight issues were the root cause of the CrashPlan issues, and I have no idea about the OS X crashes.  However, I was able to fix it pretty quickly.  After removing the directories from the Squeeze interface, just run this command from terminal for each directory you “squeezed”:

mac:~ myhome$ afscexpand Dropbox/

The command will complete after a minute or so (depending on size), and you’ll be left with your files in the original uncompressed state.

I saved over 600MB in a matter of minutes with Squeeze.  Make sure to grab your copy soon before they’re all gone!

I finally got around to playing with TinyGrab from the MacHeist nanobundle today.  After playing with it for a little bit, I have a bone to pick with them.  See this blatantly false description posted on their website:

What’s wrong with it? Well I’ll tell you! It takes no where near 30 seconds.  More like 5 seconds! IF THAT!  TinyGrab is seriously cool, and it’s cross platform (OS X and Windows).  Of course, the image you see above was generated and hosted by TinyGrab.  And it can do more than just screenshots - you can upload any image you have and have it generate a random URL for you.

Even if you didn’t get it in the MacHeist bundle, it’s only a one-time £10 payment for the premium service, which gives you unlimited screenshot-posting bliss.  And if you don’t want to pay, there’s a limited free account you can get that just limits you a bit, but it should give you an idea of how cool it is.  Check it out at http://tinygrab.com/.

BONUS CONTENT! Since TinyGrab works with the built-in screenshot tool in OS X (it really just grabs the file off the desktop when it’s generated), you can of course use all of the features of OS X.  And since it’s working with the files off of your desktop, you may want it to automatically move the files to the trash (or a folder elsewhere) to keep your desktop clean.

And if you forgot the screenshot hotkeys, here’s what will work with TinyGrab:

• Command+Shift+3 = Capture entire screen and save as a file
• Command+Shift+4 = Capture dragged area and save as a file
• Command+Shift+4 then Space bar = Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and save as a file