Using my Mac remotely

I needed to go looking for something I lost on my Mac using my w10 laptop, and have forgotten how I did it before. I wanted to get RDP working and failed. Here are my notes on what I tried to do and eventually did; it involved using 3rd party apps.

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El Capitan

The time has come..it would seem. Is it easy? It all depends. It wasn’t seamless but we are working again, sort of. Also it seems Apple consider /var to be a system directory and not for use by user installed code but I have only found one program (written by me) impacted, which I initially…

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Shellshock & Apple Macs

For various reasons they’re slow to act, rumour has it that bash is now GPL 3.0 and Apple won’t use that, for various reasons. This shows how to get and compile and install bash I needed to run a sudo xcodebuild -license. NB Unlike COBOL, there’s no British spelling option. This article from askunbuntu also…

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Mac Appstore won’t upgrade

I hit the problem with my Mac Book Mavericks build that the App Store wouldn’t run an Xcode Upgrade. It offers me the terms and conditions but there’s no continue button. A, now disappeared thread on the Mac support forums offers a very complex diagnostic process or proposes that you download a free application to…

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Job Control

It seems that Mac have begun to decrement cron and recommend the use of launchd for job control. I have found the following links to help me write the job control parameter file. man launchd a manual page on launchctl Mac launchd and launchctl — the OSX alternative to cron a blog by arunxjacob Scheduling Timed…

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Log Rotate and *NIX

This has changed since my days at Pyramid. There has been quite a lot of thinking and engineering about dealing with daemon logs. The places to look are via the syslogd, newsyslog project, you can see a the newsyslog man pages and using the keyword “rotate log”. The idea is that logs are rotated, although…

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Scripting on the Mac

It’s UNIX, how hard can it be? I want to run some Macports uodate scripts regularly. To me the obvious programming language is bash, but I got excited and decided I want to notify that the script had run, and run OK. There are two schemes, Growl and OSX Notification system. These both have language…

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Mavericks

a.k.a. MacOS X.9 I said in my article on upgrading MacOS that this was easy to do, it was, but the resultant performance rendered it unusable. This article discusses what I did to resolve this. Concluding that another 4Gb of RAM is all it needs. This article is now marked deprecated. Re-install in situ As…

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Upgrading MacOS X

And on to 10.9 There was a rumour that it was best to stop at 10.8, Mountain Lion but by the time I got round to it this wasn’t an option. The Appstore only permitted an upgrade to Mavericks; is this a cat?  The Appstore upgrade works fine. And now onto Macports which is a…

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EXIF and MacOS X

I have listened to Stop 43, and the British Journal of Photography I have read what Tim Bray has to say and decided I may need to ensure that my picture’s EXIF data is accurate. You can’t give away what you don’t own, and it seems you need to assert ownership of pictures. The way…

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Mac OS, about upgrades

I need to upgrade the Mac. The O/S version is getting a bit long in the tooth. I have V10.5, Leopard, I need to get to 10.6 Snow Leopard. Here are my, now deprecated, notes and links.

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Ripping BBC iplayer

For some reason, I wanted to capture a BBC iplayer stream onto my hard disk; it looks like I was planning to use my MAC, and so didn’t because I would have needed to upgrade the MAC OS version to 10.6 or better. Please note I am a BBC license fee payer, although of course…

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My 1st Apple Mac

I bought a Mac Book Pro last week. 10th August 2009. I wrote up some notes about how to get it to do a job of work. This page is deprecated. The first set of notes were about an HTML editor. …

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Virtual Box

This page has been live for a long time. Sun Microsystems bought Innotek the authors of Virtual Box, an opensource virtualisation product in 2008. It permits Windows/Linux/Solaris guests on the same operating system. I probably started this page slightly later, my first oracle blog on it was dated May 2008. It mainly describes any guest…

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