Nearly 20 years old now, the Dictionary app seems to be slowly slipping into oblivion. It still provides access to reputable sources and Wikipedia. | Continue reading
Orientalism, a duel in fancy dress, gladiators in the Colosseum, the assassination of Julius Caesar, and the cynic Diogenes. | Continue reading
Who to believe and what to do about warnings apparently sent by Apple, particularly its new threat notifications. | Continue reading
From the snowy landscape of Brueghel's Hunters to Monet's Magpie, with Pissarro, Signac, Caillebotte and others. | Continue reading
Keybags, wrapping keys, VEKs and KEKs all explained. Did you realise how Recovery Keys are implemented? Or how the SSV protects against read errors? | Continue reading
A series of barren trees in the snow, with ancient stone tombs and plenty of crows, Nordic ports by moonlight, ending with a burning windmill. | Continue reading
Details of the chain of information, from the UTI of the file to be opened, through LaunchServices' database of document types. How to deal with problems. | Continue reading
The humble mouse seen in Millais' portrait of Cinderella, Klimt's Fable, still life paintings, and an illustration by the artist who died with Captain Scott. | Continue reading
This has become more complex with increasingly popular hybrid drives that support USB4/Thunderbolt and fall back to USB 3.x. | Continue reading
Pentheus pours scorn on the cult of the new god Bacchus, son of Semele. When interrupts revels, he is torn apart by his own mother and aunts, as foretold by Tiresias. | Continue reading
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 250. Here are my solutions to them. 1: Roman […] | Continue reading
What's in an APFS snapshot, and how the stages in its life-cycle work, from creation, through mounting and unmounting, to deletion and cleanup. | Continue reading
Concluded with paintings from Willard Metcalf, Pierre Bonnard, JW Waterhouse, Nikolai Astrup, Paul Nash and others. | Continue reading
SwiftUI is almost five years old. Following experience porting an AppKit app for macOS to SwiftUI, it still has a long way to go. Here's the current state of play. | Continue reading
This is the time to get out and admire the blossom on the trees, with the aid of Samuel Palmer, Millais, Millet, Sisley, and above all Vincent van Gogh. | Continue reading
Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation. 1: Roman CCL […] | Continue reading
Where would you find a 7C3457EF-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC? How UUIDs have taken over to identify so much, and how to generate your own. | Continue reading
First in a new series to celebrate the bicentenary of one of the major French painters of the second half of the 19th century. Early career as a Neo-Greek. | Continue reading
Thumbnails viewed in the Finder, and previews now supporting Live Text and more. But what if it runs into problems? Here's how to diagnose and solve them. | Continue reading
Associated with the countryside of northern Europe, hedges are the product of enclosures made in the 18th century. | Continue reading
Introduced in OS X 10.7 Lion in 2011, this feature has undergone considerable change. Although it stored versions in iCloud Drive at one time, it doesn't now. | Continue reading
After training in Copenhagen, he joined Friedrich in Dresden in 1818, and together they dominated German Romantic painting. | Continue reading
Recent oddities with FileVault Recovery Keys, and a new exploit GoFetch, raise concerns over how secure FileVault protection is. | Continue reading
Apple has just released an update to XProtect Remediator security software for Catalina or later, bringing it to […] | Continue reading
The humble garden snail, seldom painted with associated with death and Vanitas, evil, whiling time away, and the sensation of touch. | Continue reading
From the GPT division of storage space, through APFS containers, down to individual volumes, an account of how APFS works. | Continue reading
Linked stories of Tiresias, the trans-gender soothsayer, Narcissus who fell in love with himself, and Echo who could only repeat what others said. | Continue reading
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 249. Here are my solutions to them. 1: Brown […] | Continue reading
Sometimes Apple silicon Macs refuse to boot from a bootable system. How to use bputil to check LocalPolicy and work out what's gone wrong. | Continue reading
Two themes now largely forgotten: Christ's descent into Limbo and Harrowing of Hell, and his supper at Emmaus. | Continue reading
How one of the serious bugs in macOS Sonoma 14.4 came about, why it was so serious, and how Apple released a fix in 7 days of it being reported. | Continue reading
One of few painters of the Barbizon School outside France, he painted portraits of the Boston Brahmins, an early baseball game, and Niagara Falls. | Continue reading
Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation. 1: Brown beverage […] | Continue reading
A collection of zero-width characters, including the joiner used to create compound emoji, and others to control ligatures and line breaks. | Continue reading
Paintings by Jan van Eyck, Masaccio, Tintoretto and Delacroix with detailed explanations of their reading and background. | Continue reading
Signs of thermal strain in a Mac, including what kernel_task is doing, how to encourage heat dissipation and reduce it production. | Continue reading
Essential pigments for the landscape artist: green earths, malachite, verdigris, copper resinate, Prussian green, viridian, and emerald green. | Continue reading
You've just updated to 14.4 or 14.4.1 and are prompted to set up a new Recovery Key for FileVault. What do you do next, and how should you check the key? | Continue reading
The fairy tale of the Frog Prince, the fable of The Frogs who Demand a King, frogs at the Fall of Man, and dangling from a kite tail above Strasbourg. | Continue reading
Introduced in iOS 10.3 on 27 March 2017, then in macOS 10.13 six months later. It ups and downs, and where it still has further to go. | Continue reading
Apple has just released the now-regular weekly update to XProtect for all versions of macOS from El Capitan […] | Continue reading
The Lycians turned into frogs when they refused the goddess Latona a drink of water, and the sorceress Medea accompanied by toads. | Continue reading
With the heat of summer drawing near, it's time to consider keeping our Macs and their peripherals cool. Covers thermal paste, heat sinks, fans and more. | Continue reading
Apple has released updates to bring macOS Sonoma to version 14.4.1, build 23E224, and that for Ventura 13.6.6. […] | Continue reading
One of Ovid's weirdest tales, in which Juno convinces the pregnant Semele to demand her lover Jupiter reveals himself, resulting in her death, caesarian section and his surrogate pregnancy. | Continue reading
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 248. Here are my solutions to them. 1: With […] | Continue reading
B+trees, directory records, directory and file names and Unicode normalisation, and whatever happened to the promise of fast directory sizing? | Continue reading
Repoussoir through windows, doors, then invading the middle of the painting with Corot and Pissarro, before Cézanne inverted it altogether. | Continue reading