macOS Archives

Anything related to Apple, Macs and macOS

How to burn an ISO image with OS X El Capitan

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Sometimes it’s important that things change for no apparent reason. You know, the way they move things around in supermarkets just to drive you crazy. If you’ve tried burning an ISO image to disk in El Capitan recently, you know what I’m talking about: because the option to burn an ISO has been removed from … Read more

How to use the new Apple System Font SAN FRANCISCO on your website

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Apple have a new System Font in El Capitan and all of their other products starting 2015: it’s called San Francisco. It’s very similar to their previous font Helvetica Neue, but apparently San Francisco is better for your eyes (not to mention the fact that Helvetica Neue isn’t owned by Apple, and obviously we can’t … Read more

OS X Server vs. Parallels Desktop – Overhead Differences

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Screen Shot 2015-11-04 at 10.28.17

Ever wondered if there’s a difference in overhead and memory usage when you’re using a VM instead of OS X directly? Here’s a comparison for website hosting.

The above graph shows the difference of hosting one of my websites for the last few days on OS X Server (in blue) that I got from Hostgator (using their HostGator Thanksgiving Deal 2016 coupon), and in a CentOS VM under Parallels Desktop 10 on the same hardware (in red).

The traffic logs show that the amount of requests and visitors has remained the same, so we can deduce that the load put on either OS X and the VM is the same. There is a little more overhead when using the VM, but not as much as I had feared: the requests have to be forwarded to another software layer after all, and that takes some CPU power.

Let’s have a look at memory next:

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How to kill the “accept incoming connections” dialogue on your Mac forever

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Have you ever come across the above dialogue, asking if you’d like to “accept incoming network connections” on your Mac? It’s caused by the Firewall and it’s meant to be helpful. Because if you have an app that needs incoming network connections all the time, you can just add them to the Firewall rules (under … Read more

How to reset the PRAM (or NVRAM) on your Mac

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On a recent chat with Apple support, the representative suggested I reset my PRAM. From what I understand this will clear BIOS like values that may cause a Mac to malfunction. It only takes a second to do – here’s how: Press CMD+OPTION+P+R, then start the system. You’ll need three hands or a portable keyboard … Read more

How to start Mac OS X Yosemite in Safe Mode

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Hold down SHIFT during normal boot, until the loading bar appears. It will take longer than usual to start the system. Some services are not available. Safe Mode will clear several caches and verify the startup disks. From the command line, or on remote systems, boot into Safe Mode using this: sudo nvram boot-args=”-x” When … Read more

How to show hidden files in the Mac Finder

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Hidden files start with a . on UNIX like systems and OS X is one of them. While we can show hidden files in a Ternimal session by using something like ls -a, it’s not so easy to convince the Finder to show such files. If ever you need to see them, execute the following … Read more