Jacken's Computer and Electronics Blog
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.
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.
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!
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.