28 Tuesday Nov 2017
Hard to believe … but the latest High Sierra bug lets a user authenticate as root without a password. Oops. Glad I took this OS off my iMac this weekend.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/28/root_access_bypass_macos_high_sierra/
20 Monday Nov 2017
Posted in apple mac, digital photography
I took a risk and updated my iMac from 10.12 Sierra to 10.13.1 High Sierra. I encountered 1 serious problem. My Datacolor Spyder 3 monitor calibration tool failed to calibrate the iMac’s display color profile. Serious photographers and other graphic arts folks understand how important it is to properly calibrate your displays so that the color is consistent with prints and other displays.
I contacted Datacolor support and was told that my Spyder 3 was obsolete and no longer supported 😦 I had to buy a Spyder 5 which is compatible with High Sierra. They offered my a 25% discount and a digital coupon to extend my Adobe CC subscription by 90 days at no cost.
I really did not want to re-buy a device that we use a few times each year, but all in all this is fair.
18 Monday Jul 2016
A while back I was forced to go from OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) to 10.11 (El Capitan) in order to install Photoshop CC 2016.5 I didn’t want to do this as El Capitan a.k.a. El Crap is loaded with bugs. Against my gut feeling I did it.
Today I found a new El Crap bug. I shut down my iMac when the electrical power failed due to a storm and the iMac was running on my CyberPower UPS. The power came back on shortly so I restarted, and I did not see the icons for my two external drives. They were powered up (lights on). Finder did not list them either.
I started terminal and entered:
cd /volumes ls
and there they were! I went to one of them and was able to navigate directories, see files, etc using terminal. So the volumes existed and were intact.
OK, how to get Finder to see them? Go to the Apple icon on the left edge of the menu bar, click it, pick “force quit”, select Finder. The Force Quit button changes to Relaunch. Press it and Finder relaunches (btw it’s not possible to kill Finder). The volumes mounted and seem OK.
23 Friday Jan 2015
Posted in apple mac
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We recently fixed the connection from Gary’s iMac (OS X 10.10) to a network connected photo printer, a Canon iPFS 5100 which uses 17 inch wide roll paper. Gary tried to print several times which failed but left the print job “stuck” in the print queue on his computer. When we finally got the connection working, and that printer is an SOB to use but it prints really well, the old stuck print jobs came spewing out of the printer. If you have ever bought photo paper and ink, you know these items are very expensive and it’s maddening to watch them being consumed on unwanted prints.
OS X, as you likely know, has a full fledged Unix system at its core. The Unix/Linux printing system is called CUPS, and it’s pretty well hidden from the OS X user interface. But with a bit of command line magic you can recover access to it. Here’s how.
1) open Terminal, the command line interface to your iMac.
2) type in exactly the following line (or cut and paste from here) and then press return
sudo cupsctl WebInterface=yes
it will ask for an administrative password
3) close Terminal
4) open a new Safari window or tab, enter http://localhost:631
5) you now have the CUPS web interface. bookmark it.
6) click the Administration tab, then manage printers, select the one you want. You can then see and cancel print jobs.
07 Friday Nov 2014
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Here’s the link:Â http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/07/mac-achieves-highest-u-s-pc-market-share-ever-in-q3-2014-according-to-idc/
Apple’s Mac market share hit record highs during the third calendar quarter of 2014, according to research firm IDC.
Apple’s share grew 20.5 percent between Q3 2013 and Q3 2014 on the global stage …
Of course competing with abomination called Windows 8 is a joke. I heard the next version of Windows will be called 10 to distance it from the current mess. Since Mac OS X updates are all free, even major updates, will Microsoft step up and give Windows 10 to its user base for free?
Dagny's Desk 