Recently, my MacBook Pro, running Mac OS X Mojave, got into a state in which the Finder wasn’t uploading or download files to and from…
The path less traveled.
Recently, my MacBook Pro, running Mac OS X Mojave, got into a state in which the Finder wasn’t uploading or download files to and from…
A challenged I’ve always faced in running Keyboard Maestro on multiple Macs, is the maintenance of macros that are common to all, i.e. when updating…
Apple recently introduced in the Numbers spreadsheet the ability to pull live stock prices from the internet, making it now possible to track portfolio performance.…
In reviewing Lance’s performance at the Spanish national championship this past weekend, the GM trainer from Andalucia strongly encouraged us to buy “ChessBase” as a…
In a recent blog post I explained how I secure my home network with a VPN. In that article, I also explained how I enabled…
In this article, I describe how I added security to my home network by installing a router that directs all internet traffic through an encrypted VPN connection. The adventure includes my experience with the FlashRouters company, the Tomato router firmware software, an OpenVPN connection to the Cloak network, the Linksys E2500 router and the Netgear Nighthawk R7000 router.
This morning I posted an article about some CrashPlan-related issues discovered when migrating my wife’s dead iMac to a new machine. Another lesson learned in…
Last week my wife’s four-year old iMac died. When the new one arrived, I set it via migration in the form of a USB-connected drive…
TextExpander is a Mac utility for creating auto-expanding text shortcuts—“snippets”—that can save you time on things you repetitively type, such as email signatures, your telephone number or boilerplate responses to support emails. With version 6, Smile decided to move away from paid upgrades, to a subscription plan that would cost roughly $5 per month. The move was controversial, a situation which is well documented at Michael Tsai’s blog. I’ve been using TextExpander for 10 years, but decided against continuing with a subscription plan.
To prepare for a possible clean install of the OS, I’ve been trying to move some local mail archives to the IMAP server, using Mail.app on OS X 10.11.1. Here’s how that’s going:
In dire frustration, I just posted the following to the Symantec forums: I have a mid-2011 iMac, with an SSD startup drive. At some point…
In this post, I describe why, after years of using the wonderful Mac/iOS VPN product, Cloak, I’m experimenting with an alternative approach, that combines Private Internet Access (PIA) and Little Snitch. (2015-08-28 — As mentioned in an update at the end of the article, I’ve actually now switched back to Cloak, but using Little Snitch as the kill-switch.)
The passcode to unlock my 1Password keychain is long—very long—and typing that in on an iOS device is time consuming and error-prone. Fortunately, Agilebits provides…
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.…
Just wanted to document a number of additional annoyances I’ve run across in using Photos.app on Mac OS X. No feedback when violating sharing constraints…
Recently, Flickr introduced a Mac Uploader application, promoting the idea that with 1TB of free storage, Mac users could now store a copy of all…
For years, my photo management workflow has involved: Importing my photos into whatever Mac application I was using at the time—beginning with iPhoto, then later…
In my daily work, as well as the maintenance of three blogs, I frequently need a tool that allows me to conveniently share files and screenshots. This article discusses my search for that elusive perfect app.
For many years, I stored the majority of my data in Dropbox. A few months ago, however, I migrated to BitTorrent Sync (BTS), and haven’t looked back. This article explains why.
Mac OS X 10.10.3 introduced version 1.0 of Photos.app, Apple’s iCloud Photo Library enabled replacement for iPhoto and Aperture. Over the past couple of weeks,…
Earlier this year, I described how I used Dropbox to share confidential documents among our family’s Macs. Unfortunately, that approach proved too problematic and I’ve since had to switch to a new approach—based on the Tresorit service—which, while not a perfect solution, does represent an improvement.
For many years I was an avid reader of TUAW, “The Unofficial Apple Weblog”, for my daily dose of Apple-related news. But then something happened.…
Great collection of commentary by Michael Tsai on the new Photos for Mac app. Some time ago, I switched from Aperture to a file-based approach…
A while back, I ran across an article (which for the life of me I can’t find now) in which the author meets with a computer hacker at a public location—a Starbucks coffee shop—and demonstrates the surprising amount of information he can collect by intercepting the traffic between the Starbucks public wifi and the locally connected customers. It is truly scary!
