For many years, I was using a hot corner to lock the screen of my Mac, but I always wished there was the equivalent of Windows-L in Windows to do it. I have no idea when this keyboard shortcut was added, but tapping the CTRL-CMD-Q shortcut will lock your Mac […]
Apple
HOW-TO: get rid of the screenshot preview in macOS
A good few years ago, Apple changed how their screenshot function (CMD+SHIFT+4) worked by adding a small preview before it was saved. This allows you to edit the screenshot before it’s saved and used. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I used that […]
Apple
HOWTO: Fix missing Thumbnails in Finder
I recently upgraded to macOS Monterey (yeah, finally) and immediately noticed that previews of new images weren’t showing up in Finder. Old images did have a preview image so something was wrong with how previews were generated. Searching online, I found a few solutions, including one that involved deleting the […]
Apple
error: btn: invalid btn_btree.bt_key_count
I recognised the symptoms: Excessive disk trashing. General slow down. Backblaze and Time Machine causing the rainbow spinner. My filesystem needed first aid. I think I can trace this back to the latest macOS update. I swear that half the updates cause filesystem corruption of some sort, but it also […]
Apple
High Sierra and coreutils
Since MacOS High Sierra has been out for a long time this is probably old news to the tiny minority using coreutils. When you upgrade you might find that “df” and other commands don’t work properly. Every time I opened a terminal after upgrading I saw errors saying commands had […]
Tech
Unmount USB drives from a script in macOS
I have a number of external drives hanging off my laptop, but sometimes I want to disconnect them. I used to go into Finder and click the eject button but I have five drives now so that’s getting unwieldy. There are a few different ways of doing this. I wrote […]
Apple
Reboot fixes Mac OS X Crackling Sound
Just in case this happens to anyone else who upgrades to OS X El Capitan 10.11.15, another reboot of a Macbook Pro will fix the crackling sound that starts after music has been playing for about two minutes.
Linux
Do more with your old MacBook
Have you got an old MacBook that Apple doesn’t support any more? Can’t install the latest and greatest version of Mac OS X on it because the CPU is too old? You’re probably seeing a warning from Chrome that Google has discontinued support for Mac OS X 10.5.3 or whatever […]
Apple
Windows screenshots on a Macbook Pro laptop
Creating a screenshot in Windows is normally simple. Press Print Screen, fire up paint and paste it in. However what do you do when you have a laptop keyboard without a PRT SCN button? It’s rather simple actually, thanks macrumors people. To create a screenshot on a Macbook Pro laptop […]