Macintosh

When installing the excellent Atom Editor with Platformio-ide, the main window inside the editor would hang on my new Mac. I uninstalled the program and deleted the .atom directory and tried to reinstall, the application would freeze the main window, and I had to force-quit the program. After a lot of experiments, I finally found a way to fix the problem. (Having a problem with the Atom editor asking to restart over and over? Jump over here) ...

After finally building my first Hackintosh, I decided that the AMD Ryzen™ 3900X processor would be perfect, although Apple never made a Machintosh machine with an AMD processor. I used the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite motherboard because it has everything I need for my build. But I decided to upgrade my working machine with a Bluetooth/Wifi PCI-E card to be able to use the SideCar function in macOS. Being able to connect Bluetooth equipment is also lovely. After Googling around, I found a card that filled all my needs. It’s the Fenvi FV-T919, a Bluetooth 4.0, and 802.11 a/b/g/n/AC compatible Wifi-card that uses ICs that are supported in macOS directly, so no patching needed. But after installing the card, there was a problem when trying to shut down the machine from the macOS side; the computer would shut down and immediately start up again. Fortunately, I’ve found a fix for the problem. ...

When building my AMD Hackintosh, I decided to prepare for a future upgrade of my CPU. I based my current build on an AMD Ryzen 3900X, but I plan to update it to a Ryzen 3950X. So I decided to install a CPU water cooling system. ...

I had an annoying problem on my 2015 MacBook Pro Mac OS when watching movies on Netflix using Safari. When in full-screen mode, the display would flash/flicker a couple of times a minute. Well, after digging around, I found a solution for it. Why Does the screen keep flashing when watching Netflix? Some MacBook Pro’s have dual graphics cards. Mac OS switches between them depending on what kind of work you are doing, and by switching cards it saves batteries. Unfortunately, the built-in Intel graphics cards are the reason for the flickering and flashing. So we need to turn on the high-performance graphics card when watching Netflix. ...

I’ve written an article on how to remove the purgeable portion on a hard disk on MacOS, but in High Sierra, Apple has changed the file system from HFS+ to APFS. Because of that, my old guide doesn’t work. So here is how to remove the Purgeable part of the disk in MacOS High Sierra. ...

Finding System Files in Finder Don’t you hate it when you need to find a .plist settings file or any other file that is in one of the Mac OS system files folders? I do. So here is a little tip on how to do global system files search directly in the Finder. ...

Can’t Remove Purgeable Disk Space Note: If you have MacOS High Sierra installed, you need this guide instead. When trying to install Bootcamp on my MacBook Pro, I had to delete a lot of files to get enough space to be able to accommodate for a Bootcamp partition on the drive. But even after removing around 60 GB of storage, MacOS Sierra could still not make a large enough partition for Windows. When checking with Disk Utility, it showed that indeed I had enough space, but there was a part called Purgeable that was impossible to move. No tools from Apple are available to handle this, but here’s how I fixed it. (not actually my disk, forgot to take a screenshot) ...

Generator functions and Python. Doing your administrative stuff faster. Often when I need to monitor something on one of my linux servers, I always gravitate towards these papers. I always forget how to use them, so putting them here is for me as much as it is for you. Go though the PDF presentation about Python Generators for System Administrators. and fiddle around with the example code. I’m pretty sure you can find stuff you need to to and you will be amazed of the speed of the code. It took a while for me to wrap my thick head around it, but the end result is great!

Running LTspice IV on Mac OS X Before I start testing a new idea for an electronic circuit and building it on a breadboard, I usually want to check it with LTspice. It’s a fantastic piece of software for testing almost any kind of component. Nearly all manufacturers have a spice equivalent for most of their parts. But there’s a snag. The Mac version of LTspice is a piece of crap. Having to run a virtual PC or reboot using BootCamp feels unnecessarily slow and convoluted. But there’s a way of running it as a “normal” Mac application. Here’s how to do it. ...

There’s one thing that I fear when it comes to my storage and that is to lose all the pictures I’ve been taking for all these years. I have seen customers of mine that have lost all their images due to a hard disk crashing and seen the tears. I usually do my regular backup using TimeMachine on my Mac to an Apple Time Capsule. But my photo library in Adobe Lightroom is too big to fit on the SSD drive used in my MacBook Pro, and TimeMachine doesn’t do a backup of external drives. So I use rsync to make a backup to my NAS which uses RAID–1 for extra protection. But I don’t want to rely on a single backup. A fire, burglary or simple hardware failure makes me uneasy. So I also do an off-site backup using the excellent Arq backup program. ...