21 Tuesday Oct 2014
Posted in apple mac
Shame on you, Apple!
Yosemite’s enhanced Spotlight search can spy on your searches unless you disable a few features in System Preferences and Safari preferences. Instructions in the link. Come on Apple, are you taking a bad behavior lesson from Google? Very disappointing!!
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/how-to-fix-os-x-yosemite-search/
20 Monday Oct 2014
Posted in apple mac
I updated my Apple OS’s to OS X Yosemite (10.10) and iOS 8.02. I’m downloading iOS 8.1 but it looks like Apple’s servers are busy/slow at the moment.
Initial impressions are positive (except for iTunes 12, which once again hid the sidebar. Here’s how to sort of fix it: http://www.mcelhearn.com/itunes-12-how-to-display-the-sidebar/) A new feature I like is AirDrop now works with OS X and iOS, formerly it was iOS only. Yosemite seems to be faster on start up, notably the interval from logging in to running is shorter.
19 Friday Sep 2014
Posted in apple mac
For Apple OS X users only:
Yesterday I got 3 OS X updates, they were labeled as Thunderbolt updates/fixes as I recall. Along the way I think Safari (OS X default browser for any non-apple folks reading this far) got an update. I found that many of my Safari extensions “magically” got deactivated with no warning. Not Good! AdBlock, Ghostery (a great anti-spyware/tracking extension, recommended!), Readability, Google Disconnect, Facebook Disconnect, Twitter Disconnect (the last 3 block much of the spying/tracking activities of these companies) were deactivated without my consent. And my default search engine was switched from GoDuckGo (a non-tracking search engine, works well most of the time) to Google.
If you recently got some OS X updates, check your Safari extensions.
11 Friday Apr 2014
Tags
Too geeky? Nah. I needed to flush or empty the DNS cache on my iMac. DNS means Domain Name System, it is the internet’s tool that maps a human friendly URL such as dagnygromer.wordpress.com to a numeric IP address like 66.155.11.238 The DNS is a distributed system where many domain name registrars maintain these mappings. I needed to change the web host that one of the domains I own maps to, so I logged into my domain account at 1and1.com and made the change. When I went to the URL, it still went to the old web host. The domain change takes some time to work its way through the distributed DNS so I waited a while – it can take from a few minutes to a few days. Gary was able to get to the new web host OK, I was not. The problem was the out of date domain mapping was being cached by OS X. This is normal and speeds things up, but I had outdated info in my DNS cache so I needed to flush or empty it which forces my computer to get new DNS information from the internet.
Long story I know. Anyway to flush or empty the DNS cache on OS X Mavericks open the terminal application and type or copy and paste in the following line. Then press return or enter.
dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder
You’ll be asked to enter an administrative password. sudo means “run this command as a system administrator”.
DNS info comes from specialized servers. To see how your mac accesses the DNS system: Run System Preferences (click the Apply icon at the top left of your screen for a menu to get to this) then click on Network, then Advanced, then the DNS tab and you will see a list of IP addresses. Each is a DNS server, you generally have a few of these listed. If one is busy or not available OS X tries another one. Don’t alter this list unless you are confident in what you are doing.
24 Friday Jan 2014
Posted in apple mac
