Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with beachball

Beach balls are too small. I need bigger spheres.

abirae — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:34:27 -0800

GiantSphereFilter: Help needed creating a 4 foot wide tennis ball. Details inside A friend of mine was hired to make props for a tv show in New York. The next one he has to make is a 4 foot wide tennis ball. He has been looking all over New York and the internet for four foot spheres to use as armature. It is trickier than you would think.

Here are some armature ideas that haven't worked so far:
- Yoga Balls - seem to max out at about 3 feet in diamater.
- Beach balls - Even when advertised as huge, have been too small when inflated.
- Hoberman Spheres, tents and umbrellas - too tricky to build on

My friend is good at this sort of thing, and may just build the sphere out of rings of pink industrial foam, but I thought the hive mind might have some good ideas for easier ways.

Mac Diagnosis

vacapinta — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:57:58 -0800

MacFilter: Diagnosing a spinning-beach-ball of Death on a Mac. Every day or two, my older Powerbook (12", OSX 10.4.10) will just hang. I can't access the Finder. I can access some applications but can't start new ones (Icon just bounces forever in the Dock)

I'm comfortable with the Mac command line but most Unix commands hang. If I do a 'ps -aux' for example, just a hang until I Ctrl-C. I can do simple stuff like change directories and whatnot.

Eventually I just do a hard reboot and it all works again. But is there anything I can do to further diagnose this problem either now or when its happening? The machine is otherwise reliable and, yes, I have everything backed up.

Thanks!

Help me recover text from BBEdit midcrash!

jdroth — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 10:28:37 -0800

I'm using BBEdit to type a long weblog entry. I'm deep in the process of writing, so I don't save for a long time (so no lectures). Finally, when I'm nearly done, I save. I get the spinning beachball of death. I sense trouble, so I try to close other open applications via the dock. No go. The first app I try to close hangs the rest of the system. It's been five minutes now and the spinning beachball of death keeps spinning, but nothing else is happening. I can move the cursor, but mouseclicks do nothing. I have a feeling that the computer will stay like this until I power down or until you, my dear fellow mefites, help me to recover my precious writing. Is there some key combo that will let me close specific apps? Exposé does nothing right now. Help! Help! Alternately, is there a way to recover my text if I simply shut the computer off?