I passionately *H*A*T*E* the startup chime that my Mac makes when I switch it on. At least on my MacBook, if the volume is turned down before I shutdown, the system restarts silently. I guess it’s somehow linked to the internal speakers. Sadly on my Mac Mini this approach doesn’t work: due to the lack … Read more
There’s a built-in command line tool in every Mac called caffeinate that prevents your computer from going to sleep, even when the lid is closed. This is the default behaviour if an external monitor is attached, but if that’s not the case, MacBooks just go to sleep as soon as you close the lid. While … Read more
Usually the top command shows you how long a Linux system is up and running – but sadly not on OS X, or Darwin more specifically. There is however a command line tool with the descriptive name uptime which will tell you how long your Mac has been running, precisely the line that’s missing from … Read more
It’s often necessary to know what the exact type of CPU that’s installed on your system. For example, you may need to know if you’re dealing with a dual core or quad core system, or a 32/64 bit system. Only the CPU can tell you this. Here’s how to find out the string you need … Read more
Windows users have a great free tool called ISO2USB which efficiently transfers ISO images to a USB stick. Mac users don’t have such a luxury – at least I haven’t found one yet. Instead we can make use of a command line tool named dd which can do this for us. It needs a few … Read more
Yesterday I was trying to open an installer which was offered as a .dmg file. That’s a disk image which mounted itself fine, but when I ran the installer contained in the disk image, all I got was an error message: “ZBrush to Keyshot Content Installer is damaged and could not be opened”. At first I … Read more
When you’re trying to open any of the Adobe CS5 or CS6 applications in Yosemite, you’ve likely encountered a friendly message such as this: This happens because CS5 and CS6 applications were relying on Java 6, and the current version at the time of writing is Java 8. I’m not an expert on Java, but … Read more
It’s easy to remote control your Mac, no matter if it’s hosted in a data centre far away, or if it sits in your bookshelf across the room. But when you do, you’ll notice that the screen resolution is often not what you’d expect on the monitor you control your Mac from. This is a bit … Read more
