Category: Technology

I transport my MacBook Air daily between home and the office—closing the lid to put it to sleep, and opening the lid to wake it. Twice per day, every day.

I’ve always hoped that the Mac OS is designed to handle these interrupts gracefully, but I’m beginning to wonder. It seems that each time I restart my Mac, I see evidence that things are getting suspended or stuck—Carbon Copy Cloner alerts me to the fact that my backups haven’t run in a while, HazelHelper starts posting literally thousands of notifications, OmniFocus alerts me to 900 items that need archiving, and even the visual appearance of icons on the desktop change.

So I’m beginning to wonder whether I should get in the habit of just restarting the machine every day.

I’ve been unable to install Yosemite on a mid-2011 iMac. Apple are aware, but so far haven’t been able to help. Here’s the story.

Continue reading Unable to install OS X Yosemite on Mid-2011 iMac

I’m in the process of recovering from a Dropbox disaster, and wanted to document it here in case it may prove useful to others.

Continue reading A Dropbox disaster

For years, I’ve been accumulating an archive of files at home on an external drive connected to a Mac mini. These are files that I do not expect to need in the future, but at the same time wouldn’t really be happy about losing—for example, snapshots of filesystems of computers I’ve retired, some source media, etc. All in all, the drive contains some 300 GB of data.

Continue reading The Odyssey of getting my data into Amazon Glacier

A couple of days ago, I posted an article detailing how to use Keyboard Maestro to create todos in OmniFocus 2 that are linked to original messages in Mail.app. Security-conscious Ben Brooks thought the idea was neat, but couldn’t give it a try, as it relies on the use of the OmniSync Server.

That got me thinking, and I came up with a simpler way to achieve the same thing—directly, without having to generate and send messages to the OmniSync Server Mail Drop. Continue reading Simpler method of getting message-linked todos into OmniFocus 2

As I wrote about in the past, I host my email on a Mac mini with OS X Server, and on which I run Mail.app and SpamSieve together to provide a server-side spam filtering and rules-processing solution. While this setup works great for remote spam filtering and management, it is somehow causing a separate, irritating and confusing problem. Continue reading Junk mail mystery — Nearly every message in Mail.app is being marked as spam

I have a MacBook Air, and my wife has an iMac. The challenge is to have shared access to our family’s documents, while securing those which are confidential. This article describes our solution.

Continue reading How to share confidential documents using Dropbox and Espionage for Mac

In the past, all the devices in my home operated over a single wifi network—including four Macs, an AppleTV and several iOS devices. I’ve long suspected I was probably overtaxing the wifi, and listening to the recent “taming wifi” episode of the Technical Difficulties podcast inspired me to do something about it.

Continue reading How to setup a roaming wifi network over ethernet with an Airport Extreme and Airport Express

For the past few days, the CPU on my 11″ MacBook Air, running OS X Mavericks 10.9.1 has looked like this:

Periodically—and frequently—a process called, “tccd”, would momentarily ramp up its CPU usage to around 50%. At the same time, the process’s memory would grow and grow. When I checked this morning, it had grown to 1.3GB.

In this post on the Apple Support Communities forum, a user reports high memory usage of the tccd process, but there are no solutions proposed.

In another post someone mentions that the tccd process manages which applications have access to your contacts. That appears to be correct—after I deleted the TCC.db database, the OS started popping up lots of dialogs asking permission if this app or another could have access to my contacts.

But resetting the TCC.db database unfortunately didn’t solve my problem with the tccd process using lots of CPU and memory.

Watching the Activity Monitor for a while, I noticed that Hazel’s “hazelworker” process sometimes ramped up around the same time as the tccd process—you can see this in the screenshot above, in fact—so I started poking around there.

What I found is that several of my Hazel rules involved moving files to a folder which no longer existed (I had moved it a few days ago). After fixing those rules, to my amazement, the problem with the tccd process completely disappeared.

So, somehow, the root of my tccd problem was the existence of broken Hazel rules.

If someone stole my MacBook Air, the computer’s data should be fairly safe, due to my use of Apple’s FileVault 2 whole-disk encryption. But what if someone got access to my computer while I’m still logged in? Or what if someone got hold of my login password?

Certain data, like website passwords, are already encrypted via applications like Apple’s Keychain and AgileBits’s 1Password. But how can we secure non-encrypted documents like bank statements, contracts, etc.?

In the past, I considered using applications like Knox, which make it slightly less cumbersome to deal with encrypted disk images than dealing with them directly. But, unfortunately, Knox didn’t go far enough in the area of usability—it basically makes you deal with Finder-mounted volumes—to convince me to use it.

Recently, though, I discovered a product that did — and it’s called, Espionage.

Continue reading How to keep your data safe with Espionage for Mac OS X

Update 2014-03-12: OS X 10.9.2 seems to have fixed this. A few days ago, I re-enabled iCloud Keychain on my Mac, and since haven’t experienced these issues any longer.

Original problem…

For a while now, the CPU profile on my MacBook Air (running OS X 10.9.1) has looked like this—quiet, with periodic high-load bursts from a process called, ‘icbaccountsd’:

Looking in the Console.app, I found my logs flooded with messages from this process:

• icbaccountsd: [ICBLocalDictionary getIdMapping:] Mapping Error detected
• icbaccountsd: [ICBLocalDictionary discoverLocalIAAccounts:] Unknown high level account
• icbaccountsd: [ICBSyncOperation mergeLocalChanges:] Account not found
• icbaccountsd: [ICBSyncOperation mergeLocalChanges:] Looking for UUID: (null) from remote key

This article on the Apple Support Communities pointed to another article which hinted that the root problem is related to iCloud Keychain.

I disabled iCloud Keychain on the Mac, restarted, and have seen no further logged messages from icbaccountsd. A pity—as iCloud Keychain is a concept I’d found very useful.