Jeff Gamet

Get It Try It

Jeff Gamet fancies himself a 'design and prepress pro' and has written a book on design with OS X Tiger aptly titled 'Designer's Guide to Mac OS X TIGER'. It's a steal at $19.50.

You'll find chapters devoted to fonts, printing, creating and working with PDFs, managing color, networking, shifting between Classic and Mac OS X, Mac OS X's built-in design and productivity tools, system maintenance, security, and more.

Don't expect too much from the networking, security, and system maintenance bits.

Gamet is also 'morning editor' for The Mac Observer. Today he published a real gem. In the morning of course.

TMO Quick Tip - Deleting Stubborn Files

Occasionally, Mac OS X will refuse to delete a file from your Trash no matter what you try. You can always use the Terminal application to force empty your Trash, assuming you are comfortable using the Unix command line, or you can use one of these applications to do the dirty work for you.

Gamet goes on to name Mac Helpmate, Cocktail, and Super Empty Trash.

There are even more applications out there that can force empty your Trash. If you have a favorite, share it in the comments.

A commenter at TMO also points out that OnyX can also force empty the trash - which of course is absolutely great - but other commenters claim it does not work - which is not great.

Still other commenters claim NONE of these utilities work.

Really Stuck?

If you're really stuck and no amount of fan mail to Szymanski or anyone else can get you the help you need to force empty your trash, try these other suggestions sent by a site visitor who claims to have found them at Mac OS X Hints.

• Repair permissions. Use Cocktail, OnyX, or Super Mac Cleaner.
• Wipe and reinstall. This has been reported to be fairly effective.
• Reset your firmware. Do this on startup. You might have to do this several times.
• Remove all unnecessary fonts. Fonts can sometimes stop you from emptying your trash.

Humdinger

An anonymous site visitor has contacted Rixstep with an interesting application to add to the pool. It's called Humdinger and you can find it here.

ftp://rixstep.com/Humdinger.tar.bz2

Humdinger leads you through all the arcane steps of safely force emptying your trash.

Humdinger is so called 'brainware': if you use it you must promise to use your brains for similar issues in the future.

Of course if you have no brains like Jeff Gamet, you're excused.