Category: MacOS

Mac OS X Mavericks Breaks SMB Network Shares

Well, my wife and I had a rude surprise today when her MacBook Air would no longer connect to our Windows Home Server. The operating system on the MacBook Air had been upgraded to Mac OS X 10.9 (AKA Mavericks) a while ago but this problem seemed to only manifest itself earlier this week. The …

Continue reading

How to Increase and Decrease Volume by Quarter Steps in Mac OS X

Up until Mac OS X Lion you could use a handy shortcut to increase and decrease the system volume by quarter steps by doing the following: Option + Shift + Volume Up to increase volume by a quarter step, Option + Shift + Volume Down to decrease volume by a quarter step. But what if you are …

Continue reading

Getting Internet Sharing to Work on Mountain Lion

My wife is over in Denmark by herself at the moment but wanted to share her in room internet connection (a cabled Ethernet connection) to her other devices over Wi-Fi. She had recently upgraded her MacBook Air to Mountain Lion (Mac OS X 10.8) but had used internet sharing on that computer in the past on …

Continue reading

LogMeIn Hangs or Refuses to Refresh Screen

On odd occasion, I need to connect to one of my home computers to get a file, kick off a download or one of those random things that need doing. I have used LogMeIn for a while for this very purpose across my Windows PCs, MacBook Pro and also my iPad to make sure I …

Continue reading

Upgrades Aren’t Always Painless

Just a quick update for today. With the impending release of Windows 8 it’s a good time to remind people that upgrades (be it hardware or software) aren’t always seamless or painless. Whilst there isn’t an expected problem with people upgrading to Windows 8 from Windows 7 or even Windows Vista you should always prepare …

Continue reading

XBMC for Raspberry Pi

For the first time since last Monday, I’ve had a chance to start tinkering with the Raspberry Pi. I had to borrow an SD card from one of my cameras but will buy another one to sit permanently in the RPi. I did burn one of the suggested Linux distributions to the SD card just …

Continue reading

Mac OS X, Safari and New Tabs

Just a short note for today. One annoying that I have found with my MacBook Pro is that when I am using Safari and open a new tab the cursor is not in the address bar ready to accept a web address. This is quite annoying given that I have just hit “Command + T” to …

Continue reading

Fitbit Aria Wi-Fi Smart Scale Unboxing

Update 29/03/2013: Corrected an error with the specs – the Fitbit Aria only support the antiquated 802.11b Wi-Fi standard. I’ve had a steady trickle of new gadgets coming in recently and I was quite stoked to finally receive the Fitbit Aria Wi-Fi Smart Scale in the mail after waiting a few months for it to …

Continue reading

Check Your Java For Explotability

A quick tip tonight for people with Java installed on their computers. Generally, there are three principles regarding the safe usage of computer software: If you weren’t looking for it then don’t install it on your device, If you do need the software then always keep it up to date, If you no longer need …

Continue reading

Slow or Infinitely Long Shutdowns on Mac OS X

Just thought I’d share a potential solution for a problem that I faced today. The copy of Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro had never been activated and given that I hadn’t used it in ages I thought I’d wipe it and replace the Windows installations on the laptop with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. …

Continue reading