Dear Brain Trust ( Read more... )

Dear brain trust,

I finally have a new Mac, but it came with OS 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion). I'd like to update to El Capitan. No problem, I figured; my older Mac was practically begging me to do this for a couple months, but I wasn't going to risk it on an older machine ( Read more... )

Day 0: Receive newer machine (yay!), discover it needs a video connector I don't have. Oops; should have noticed that in the specs.

Day 1: Get cable, start Migration Assistant. It announces this will take 16+ hours because, despite being plugged into the LAN and wireless being turned off on the other machine, it's using wifi. Oh well ( Read more... )

There is an old joke that goes something like this:
A man in a helicopter has become lost in a heavy fog. He finds an office building and pulls up alongside a window. He leans out and asks the person inside "where am I?" (Yeah I know; office-building windows usually can't be opened. Work with me here.) The person inside says "you're in a ( Read more... )

For the past couple weeks -- but not before then -- both Firefox and Chrome have been randomly seizing up on me on my Mac at home (running Snow Leopard). When this happens, first that application and then (about 10-15 seconds later) the entire machine become unresponsive, presenting the spinning beachball of doom. After a minute or so, but ( Read more... )

So there I was on my Mac (Mini), typing something in Chrome, when I suddenly got a pop-up that said "you need to restart" in about six different languages. The keyboard and mouse were unresponsive. That sure smelled like malware, except that I'm pretty careful about that, haven't installed anything lately, and haven't visited any new or suspect ( Read more... )

Tonight I popped a DVD into my Mac Mini (Trope Trainer, because I needed to print something from it) and the machine declined to read it. On several tries with multiple discs I got either "can't read this; wanna eject?" or "hey, you gave me a blank disc" (um, no). Dani's iMac could read the original DVD just fine. Rebooting didn't change ( Read more... )

Dear Brain Trust,

I have a Mac (Snow Leopard) and a Unix shell account out there on the net, and occasionally I want to move files between them. I can run sftp from the command line, but when dealing with larger directory structures I'd sometimes like something a little more, err, visual. (I know; some of you are calling for me to turn in my ( Read more... )

Bad news: the furnace's pump is dead. Good news: it's under warranty. (Questionable news: it was that young and died anyway...) Bad news: the repair guy didn't have a replacement; try again tomorrow. Good news: we found this out now, so with luck it'll be fixed before the predicted lows in the lower 30s mid-week ( Read more... )

Naturally, network problems (of the "can't stay connected for more than a few minutes" variety) would arise on a long weekend. Verizon can have someone look at it on Tuesday, so long as I don't mind that it'll be during work hours ( Read more... )