I should have realised something was wrong when Lightroom previews were taking so long to generate. The disk holding my photo archive is corrupted, and macOS “First Aid” reports an exit code 8 when it does a file system check.
Luckily, the disk still mounts, and I have another disk where I can copy everything off, and multiple backups, but this is not a nice thing to wake up to.
On the other hand, there are hundreds of thousands of files there, and the file system check couldn’t tell me which ones were corrupted, and might need to be restored from Backblaze.
I’m trying to share a Time Machine volume with another Macbook on my home network but it’s not working. I’ve tried Google, and read through a few Reddit threads, but I haven’t been able to get it to connect. So, I asked Perplexity for help.
It helpfully listed a number of things I could try, but then I saw tip number seven.
When you look up advice online, don’t copy and paste any instructions into your computer without knowing what it does.
What does sudo rm -rf /Volumes/* do? It recursively deletes everything in your /Volumes folder. A little bit destructive.
I told it that was a dangerous command, and it went on to talk about using the mount command to list every mounted volume and then unmounting them with umount.
Me: Tip 7 is not helpful. That would delete all the data in /Volumes/
Perplexity: You’re absolutely right, and I sincerely apologize for that dangerous suggestion. Thank you for pointing out this critical error. You are correct that deleting the contents of /Volumes/ would be extremely harmful and could result in data loss. Let me provide a corrected and safer approach.
PS. Otherwise, Perplexity is great. I’ve had great success with it and other AI tools when developing software.
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 screen. Apparently, if you have a small magic keyboard, then CTRL-Shift-Eject will do the job too. This Stack Exchange Question shows the shortcut wasn’t available in 2015. Users had to resort to all sorts of tricks to lock their screen with the keyboard. An updated answer from 2019 reveals the shortcut, so I guess it’s at least four years old.
An apple on the ground. Like shortcuts, you never know what you’ll find.
Hot corners are great and all, but I’ve had so much trouble making sure the cursor stayed in the corner. I’d watch to make sure my mouse didn’t move, and the screen remained locked. Otherwise, I turn my back, I’m heading out the door and the screen lights up again!
Loads more keyboard shortcuts here if you’re interested in that sort of thing. That page may also explain why something strange happened on your computer while you were typing into the wrong window and changed a Finder setting, for instance.
Pangea Arcade is free on the Mac App store right now. There are 3 classic arcade games in this app based on Centipede, Asteroids and Missile Command so there’s plenty of gameplay on offer here!
I’m trying to install it but the App Store has frozen on my machine. Hopefully it’ll stop being a buggy POS sometime this morning so I can download this. *sigh* (Thanks James for the news!)
I’m sure I’ve heard this before but the video is new to me. Enjoy!
Odd that their C64 isn’t plugged in. The power cable went in at the side. The joystick ports are strangely blacked out too. Gosh, might it not be a real Commodore 64? (via)
April 30th, 2021 – replaced the iframe video with a YouTube embed.
I’m downloading Half Life 2 through Steam on my Macbook now. I don’t expect it to run any better than Portal did however. Glad I have the Orange Box on my Xbox if I want a decent game of either! (Thanks giantbomb!)
Steam launched for Mac this morning and I’ve just installed it, along with the 33MB update that downloaded as soon as I started the programme. They’re giving away Portal for free until May 24th. Thanks Alex for the heads up!
I’m downloading it even though I just got a window saying my system didn’t meet the minimum system requirements. Oddly enough it mentions “Windows driver version” so that might be just a bug. The download is very slow but it’s hit 75% so not long now. More later …
An oldie, but as they say, “a goody”. For all the Mac fans who are sick and tired of their computers crashing. (Hey Mark!)
Found this on a CD while sorting through my CDRs and music collection. Most are now ripped to MP3 and the physical media is heading into the attic for safe storage.
Why is it that most of my compilation CDs are from about 10 years ago? Does music become less relevant the older you get? I’ve never bought music online but if I do, Blue Lights on the Runway by Bell X1 will probably be the first album I buy. Love “The Great Defector”, their current single.
One of my external drives failed yesterday and for an hour I thought I had lost a lot of family videos and other stuff. My photos are backed up on to another drive with backuppc, but there simply isn’t room to backup everything there. Luckily the drive came back after I unplugged it and let it cool down but I don’t trust it now. I think I need a RAID server with at least 1TB of space to be future proof for the next 2 or 3 years.
I would love an application that you could point at a directory or a list of files and directories and it would burn them onto multiple DVDs, filling each disk to it’s maximum. Backing up my photo archive has always been a bit painful, trying to find and remember which directories I had just burned, comparing file listings, etc.
Tar doesn’t cut it however. I want to be able to restore a single file or directory by looking at the DVD contents in a file manager.
I used to have a DOS app that did this. I can’t remember what it was called, but point it at a directory of stuff and it would prompt for a floppy disk, write to it, prompt again, write, and so on until finished. Simple.
Is there a Linux or Mac app that will do that? I think I’ll write a shell script to do it if nobody else knows of an alternative.
Here’s a cute animation. The love story of an office PC and a Mac!
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