Posts

Getting 10.11 to work on older macs

I had an older mac and needed to have a Mac OS X 10.11 installed on it, it would not run anything newer. For the purposes of this explanation I am assuming you have access to a slightly newer Mac as well, e.g. 2-5 years newer than the target machine. Step 1.   get the installer DMG.   Open it when it is finished downloading. Step 2 . Install on your own  internal hard drive (run the installer and choose your own machine as the target). This creates the installer application in / Applications (even if your OS is newer). This part is not obvious, and surprisingly it doesn't tell you that your machine is too new. Step 3 . Get Etcher from  https://etcher.io Step 4 . Attach an external hard drive. Make sure it's empty and formatted HFS+ (use Disk Utility  which is in the Utilities folder in your Applications folder ) . You click on the hardware drive shown on the left panel, NOT the partition. Important: tell it to use a GUID partition scheme  (popup menu in the centre of the

iPhone jiggling camera / unstable camera

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On some (older) models of iPhone I have noticed that sometimes the camera goes haywire and jiggles. Apparently this is a result of the gyroscope going haywire. This then affects things like StarWalk and anything else that needs the gyro. The fix is relatively simple: glue a tiny strong magnet to the case where the gyro is. Experiment with a magnet to see where the gyro is. On an iPhone 6 it is the top right corner.

Making an iPhone record video WHILE playing music

I've found it annoying that I can't record video AND play music as a backing track on my iphone. The default behaviour is to halt music as soon as you hit the video recording button. This is how you get past it. 1. Go into the camera, choose PHOTO 2. Go to Music, play the music 3. Go back to the camera and hold down the white photo-taking button... and drag it towards the circular arrows on the right. Release. 4. You are now recording a video with music in the background.

Migrating from Windows to Mac

  If you have decided to migrate from Windows to Mac, you will find that there are a few confusing differences. I note the ones that I can think of, below: 1. There are ALTERNATIVE packages to microsoft office installed, namely Apple Pages, Apple Numbers, and Apple Keynote . These replace Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and if you use them you can use the " save as " command to create a word, excel or powerpoint document. 2. I recommend AVG antivirus be installed . This is mostly so that if you accidentally go onto a bad website with bad software on it, or a fake website, e.g. a "phishing" site, which is trying to trick you into giving your banking credentials, it will warn you. There are almost no viruses or malware for the machine. HOWEVER , there is ONE piece of malware which pretends to be good software, available, and it calls itself MacKeeper. Do NOT install it. 3. To scroll up and down, you can use the scrollbars, like in Windows, or, you can use two finger

soagent, calendaragent, accountsd and callservicesd hogging the CPU

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If your Mac is running hot it might be the addressbook and calendar syncing services. This usually happens when Google or Apple aren't responding or aren't accepting the authentication for cloud sync. The easiest thing to do is turn them off under "Internet Accounts" under System Preferences. However, if you want the details to sync between iCloud and Google to your Mac, you have to rebuild these things or re-authenticate. If that is too much of a pain you can use the UNIX command line to pause them. You can verify this by sorting by CPU usage load in the Activity Monitor as follows. The illustration below shows the CPU load drop when you pause these programs. Above, you see the CPU load sitting at around 86% until I run the script. You can either put this script into Crontab or the /etc/rc file or just do a manual run. Please note that if you run this script it will pause synchronising contacts and addressbook, as well as the icloud system preference/control panel, a

Mail says it can't find the mail folder even though the path is right

 Sometimes you might get an error saying it can't find the Library/Mail folder which is at /VolumeName/Users/Yourname/Library/Mail And you will notice that if you go into that folder (Library), you do indeed see a folder there called Mail. So In short it's lying. To fix this, just type the following into Terminal (where " yourname " is your login name): rm -rf /Users/yourname/Library/Mail/Containers/com.apple.mail*

Apple Power Supply fraying

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It's well-known that all apple power supplies and cables for the last 10 or more years fray and break after a few years of folding. This post shows you a simple way to fix them rather than buy a new power supply. 1. Trim off the excess plastic around the frayed cable 2. Join the frayed wires again with either new wire or tin foil 3. Take a straw; cut off a piece about 5cm, and cut it lengthwise. 4. Fill it with silicone sealant. 5. Open it and clip it around the frayed section. 6. Let it set before using it, e.g. for a day.