osx

Slow downloads for Apple App Store updates? Try this.

I discovered a nifty trick for those excruciatingly slow Apple Update downloads. My friend left his broken 2008 Mac Pro with me last week. It turned out that he just neglected to plug in the display power supply. The computer has been down for a year(!) because of that. Since the machine hadn’t run since

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SMB+SSH: Ubuntu server and OSX client

The title above is pretty close to the Google search query I used in vain to find a recipe for tunneling an OSX Samba client to an Ubuntu 14.04 server. Hopefully this post will save someone the hours I spent trying to set this up. In the end, like so many Unix projects, the answer turned out

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Remote SSH Filesystems on OSX

Developers, particularly web developers, have a need to work on external computers, often not within their local networks.  Over the years I’ve employed everything from FTP to SFTP/SCP to Samba to NFS to VPNs to cranky Novell networks.  All have their downsides, particularly with regard to security. I have a MacPro and originally ran NFS to connect to machines on my LAN.  But as

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Did your wallpaper suddenly turn grey?

This can occasionally happen when OSX recovers from a deep sleep, particularly on dual-monitor systems where there already issues with the cabling. The fix: Open up Terminal and type the following: sudo killall Dock That should restore the wallpaper for both terminals. I ran into another problem with my Viewsonic secondary monitor related to recovering

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