Category: Tech Tails

Between work, band practice, recording, and going on those gorgeous autumn hikes, I’ve been spending a solid chunk of time familiarizing myself and delving into the science and application behind the digital currency craze known as Cryptocurrency. Unless you haven’t been on the internet in the last 5 years, you’ve no doubt heard of Bitcoin,…

Terminal and application tracking We have previously covered trace, dynamic trace scripting, in Terminal and the higher powered logging and tracking it provided with the iosnoop command. Dtrace though offers realtime IO tracking of everything from read and write functions of the HD, system calls and application launch and exit. Do you want to see…

A long time ago while working for Radio Shack, a co-worker gave me a series of motivational tapes by Joel Weldon. One of the more important passages began with “Elephants don’t bite”–the big things usually aren’t what get you. Typically it’s the gnats, the horse flies, the bees, the mosquitoes–tiny as they are, they can…

Simple steps for resolving and diagnosing simple (non) boot issues. In the past week we have, in the Waitsfield service area, received no less than three machines that after completion of software updates, units that would not restart. The failure in these three machines, one updating to 10.4.11 and two to 10.5.8, was signified by…

AirPlay v. Bluetooth Audio: Which one is for you? AirPlay – AirPlay is a technology invented by and used by Apple to let users broadcast audio and video to WiFi-connected devices. (about.com) Bluetooth – A wireless technology which allows ‘personal area networking’ – connection up to 100m between mobile phones, PCs and accessories such as…

We all need to send enormous files now and again, and email is not the best way to go. Most all email providers cap the size of files sent and received messages to conserve bandwidth and to help manage the sizes of users’ mailboxes. iChat is a great way to get around that. If you…

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In the days of the classic MacOS, all downloaded files automatically had the web address entered into the comments field of their Info window. Of course, we had to regularly rebuild our desktop back then, and this often meant losing the contents of info windows. Thankfully, the days of rebuilding the desktop are long gone,…

In last week’s article I mentioned a special command that requires a password to perform certain tasks. This week I’d like to talk about that command a little. It is called “sudo”. It is both an acronym for the expression Super User DO and also the “su” and “do” commands put together. The first part,…