When an Apple goes… bananas

 Mac  No Responses »
Mar 082014
 

apple-bananaQuickly sharing with you all what happened to a good friend of mine, hoping that similar cases will find the solution he applied useful.

It’s out of doubt that OS X has much less issues than its “colleague OSes”, and when it does  the issues are often caused by 3rd party apps…

However there are some considerations which should remain valid, like the one saying that a decent operating system should never allow a 3rd party app to block its basic operations.
And I think and hope that Apple will strengthen OS X over time against these odd situations.

Back to my friend running Mavericks 10.9.2, here’s what he wrote on Facebook:
“I rebooted my Mac to clear a small problem. Came up fine. Logged in. It did not go to the expected desktop, but to a *second* login screen. That one won’t accept any password I can think of. Cleared NVRAM, booted to diagnostics, booted to recovery and checked all disk permissions and issues. Everything checks out. Still no love.”

Time went by, and some hours later a comforting comment appeared on the post…
“It’s all fixed. Seems the latest Dropbox was the culprit. Recovery was pretty straightforward, and I’m right back to my desktop, all settings, data, preferences, etc. intact.”

Solution:
“1. Boot Mac with Command-Option-P-R to clear NVRAM.

2. Boot Mac with Command-R to enter Recovery mode; run Disk Utility. Repair Permissions/Repair Disk

3. Reboot with D, run hardware diagnostics

4. Reboot with T, connected via Thunderbolt to iMac and make another backup copy of all personal data; and then

5. Reboot with Command-R again and do a Reinstall OS X. (It’s non-destructive.)

One last reboot to clean it all up, login and get back to work. Right where I left off.”

I think sharing these bits is useful, do you agree? Please use comments to let me know your opinions and to add precious knowledge and experience to help apples and bananas to stay always on different trees 😉

Singing Mac

 Mac  No Responses »
Jan 092014
 

macsingLots of people claim that the Mac can talk… sure, cool, yeah.

But did you know your Mac can sing?

Yes, and with a very simple process.

First, locate your Terminal app, normally hidden among the utilities or in the Other group in the LaunchPad:

The Other Group

 

Then, in your Terminal, copy and paste the following commands:

say -v Good “da da da da da di du di du di di di du du du di du du di du di du di du di du”

…or if you’re not in a good mood

say -v Bad “da da da da da di du di du di di di du du du di du du di du di du di du di du”

Or, if you’re in your melodic day:

say -v Cellos “da da da da da di du di du di di di du du du di du du di du di du di du di du”

Have fun, with your “sing-a-mac session”.

RoarinPenguin

 

Screenshotting in Mac

 Various  1 Response »
Sep 302010
 

Found out very nice shortcut thanks to friend of mine who knows Mac since longer time than me (at least the modern ones).
Press Shift+Command+4 to get a selection of the screen to be saved on desktop in PNG format instead of Screen Capture utility saving in TIFF.
Add Space Bar to select the whole window the mouse is on and save as PNG on desktop.
Very handy, hence not to self.

Turn your MacBook in 64 bit

 Mac  No Responses »
Mar 142010
 

Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking… sure , boot with 6 and 4 pressed and your Mac will boot in 64 bit mode.

But I’m talking aout the other way around: haveing your modern MacBook booting in 64 bit mode, and possibly turn it into 32 bit only when you need it (sure, by keeping 3 and 2 pressed while booting).

Here’s howto:

  1. Check your Mac is capable of doing it by issuing in terminal the command:
    ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi
  2. If output is something like “| |   “firmware-abi” = <“EFI64”>” this means Yes, you can!
  3. Open a Terminal and cd to /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/
  4. edit com.apple.Boot.plist
  5. under Kernel Flags insert
    arch=x86_64
    between the <string> and </string> tags
  6. reboot
  7. Enjoy

Of course, a good pre-check if you could be fine is to boot keeping pressed 6 and 4… if it boots 64bit then you’re ok.