While the new spotlight in Leopard is much more powerful than it was in Tiger, there are still those of us that would rather not have our system eating up system resources. Unfortunately, adding “SPOTLIGHT=-NO-” to /etc/hostconfig no longer does anything.

To disable spotlight (non-destructively), open up Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app), and execute the following two commands:

sudo chmod 0000 /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/Metadata.framework/Versions/A/Support/mdworker

(This will disable the spotlight indexing)

sudo chmod 0000 /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app

(This will remove spotlight from your menu bar)

If at any time you want to re-enable spotlight, simply run disk utility, and have it fix permissions on your boot drive.

Disclaimers:
* You should probably reboot after running those two commands.
* Doing this will disable any features that explicitly depend on spotlight, such as searching mail content.
* I believe that disabling spotlight will break Time Machine. If this is wrong, or there’s a way around it, let me know!

…have been posted, and there was much rejoicing!

I’ve posted some projects that seemed worthy of going online for various reasons, from a 6800-series motorola language plugin for BBEdit to a simple uninstaller script for legacy install logs. If you find any of them useful, leave a comment and say so =)

As you may have noticed (if you’ve been here before), garrettreid.com has undergone a major overhaul. It’s about time, considering I was 12 when I designed the original site, and I didn’t know HTML very well.

To save time and effort, instead of coding my own page, I’ve elected to use WordPress. It seems that WordPress will make it easy for me to not only maintain some semblance of a webpage, but also archive small projects online that may be of use to other people.