You know what they say - It only takes one bad apple to spoil the whole bunch. As much as I love my iBook, Cromarty, he's got some really annoying habits. The one that really bothers me is his reluctance to tidy up after himself. Whenever he goes on the network he leaves an awful mess behind. Look at all these ".DS_Store" files on the shared network drive. There's one in every folder he's looked in!

That's not the worst of it. I could probably live with one file in each folder in the same way I used to put up with Windows and its Thumbs.db files. Imagine you have a folder with photos in it. If you open all these photos on the iBook it leaves behind another "hidden" filed for every one of them. As below:

So, if you happen to connect to that photos folder from a Windows machine, you don't see your photos at the top of the list but all those damn "data fork" files. At first I shrugged it off but I am finding it harder and harder to ignore. Part of me thought they were doing it on purpose to annoy Windows users. This may not be the case as it's still happening on my new Linux server. Now I've had enough and I am not the only one. You can even get software to get rid of the files it's such a problem. As Stephen Garrity says:

OS X leaves hidden files all over the place (apparently to save folder-specific Finder settings). This is a deal-breaker.

My only option is to slap Cromarty's bum and send him to sit in the corner on his own. If he can't get on with the others then he will have to play on his own, relegated to an internet-only existence. Unless I can get this to work that is, then I might let him off.