Ah, I know I’ve ranted a bit about ‘subs’ before, but a couple of things to complain about this month.
First off, apologies to Ryan Style, whose perfectly reasonable question about Safari for iCreate’s helpdesk this month got replaced by an answer about iChat AV that got written by my predecessor over a year ago for some other question. Can’t imagine how that happened. Ryan, if you want the actual answer, click on the “continue reading” link at the bottom of this entry.
Now the second complaint. Don’t mess around with jokes (or ‘jokes’ in my case) unless you know what you’re doing. Two ‘sub’ amendments occurred in a couple of articles of mine this month (no names mentioned).
The first changed “Macs” to “Mac computers”: gosh, that sounds naturalistic, doesn’t it?
The second changed “the most powerful Mac in the universe” to “the most powerful Mac in the known universe” (my emphasis). So we’ve gone from a slightly geeky reference to He-Man (“the most powerful man in the universe!”) – although take a look at this Slate article to understand the rationale behind my joke choice – to a Dune reference (“the emperor of the known universe”) that isn’t even a joke. Why, why and thrice why?
Possible reasons
- To be pedantic? After all, there may be planets out there we haven’t discovered that have life forms using even more powerful Macintosh computers
- To be philosophically pedantic? There may actually be more than one universe and it may contain parallel versions of ourselves using Power Mac Octos
- To piss me off? It’s always possible
- To stop it being funny or even a joke? It’s a serious business, this Macintosh journalism
- Some other reason? Fill in the blanks yourself on that one
Bloody ‘subs’. Leave my stuff alone unless you know what you’re doing. Or just let me know what you’ve done so I can help you if you have any questions. Blimey, I always used to let authors see what I’d done to their work before it went on the page, just to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood anything. So how’s about it ‘subs’? Or are you worried you’ll be told off for doing things wrong?
The actual answer to Ryan Style’s question:
Safari stores images you download off the Internet in a “cache” on its hard drive. This is supposed to speed things up, since Safari doesn’t have to fetch the images again if you return to that web site. But sometimes Safari’s caches get corrupt and all you get are question marks or half-downloaded pictures instead of the corrupt images.
The way to fix this problem is quite simple, fortunately: go to the “Safari” menu next to the Apple icon in the top left-hand corner of the screen and select “Empty Cache…” from the menu. When you get the warning dialogue, click on the “Empty” button. Safari will then empty its cache. Browsing to your favourite sites will be a little slower at first, but you should get your PalPal images back.