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
root is the most powerful user in Linux and UNIX systems, from which OS X is derived. The root user can read, write and delete every file on the system and – when placed in the wrong hands – destroy the entire system in a flash. Even power users on a Mac have very little … Read more
A new “improvement” in Yosemite is the progress bar that comes up when you start your machine. What you Mac does under the hood hasn’t really changed from Mavericks, but the progress bar implies that a long running operating is happening the background. It can look grey with a black background, or dark grey with … Read more
Every Mac has an integrated hardware test called – not surprisingly – Apple Hardware Test. When you get a new device, or if you’ve recently upgraded your memory, it’s worth checking if everything is working as expected. Otherwise you may encounter weirdo bugs sometimes down the line. To start the test, simply shutdown your Mac, … Read more
