Mac tips

What? Greg, I thought you were a dyed-in-the-wool Windows user.

Yes, but someone has to care for the poor misguided individuals sitll using this equipment, it's only Christian, ha ha!.

OK, I worked were some people insist on using Mac computers, and have had to pick up some knowledge along the way.

Nice page of MAC keystroke sequences: http://www.jacsoft.co.nz/Tech_Notes/Mac_Keys.shtml

Maintenance:

What, Macs need maintenance? They sure do.

Unbeknownst to most users, there are automatic maintenance scripst (cron jobs) that run daily, weekly and monthly.

It also seems that these run between 3 and 5:30 am, so they may not run if the computer is off, I need to verify this, but it was certainly true on older operating systems.

The first thing to do on a regular basis is repair disk permissions. Recommended by Apple themselves. Go to Utilities, and the Disk Utility and select "Repair Disk Permissions"...

Periodic cleaning of caches.

- to verify permissions:

diskutil verifyPermissions /

- to repair permissions:

sudo diskutil repairPermissions /

- to check disk:

diskutil verifyVolume

- to repair disk, first boot from another volume (external drive, USB stick, DVD, … ), then display a list of all your mounted volumes in a terminal type:

diskutil list

- search for the identifier of the disk you want to repair in this list (could be disk1 but depends on how many disk you have attached to the server) and type:

sudo diskutil repairVolume disk_your_number_here  //e.g. disk1

- to learn all other options available with diskutil:

man diskutil

Hope this helps

Links and articles:

http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html#6

http://lifehacker.com/5814440/what-kind-of-maintenance-do-i-need-to-do-on-my-mac

Taking apart a 20" iMac

I have a friend whose iMac went blewy, and the "experts" could not recover her data. Luckily I stopped them before they obliterated the data. I found a utility that would mount the drive as an NTFS drive on my PC and then was able to recover 90% of the files, although with a bunch of duplicates (because of how the Mac treats deleted files)

Pulling the iMac apart was fun, but not intuitive if you are a first timer, so here is a video: