a technology blog by Jon Stacey
The end of an era: Goodbye, Backblaze. I don’t trust you. For years, I’ve used Backblaze to back up my computer and files. Just about 5 terabytes. The app has always performed pretty badly, so I typically turned off continuous scanning and used a launchd script to run a backup once per night. For years,...
Let s talk about how I stay at peak productivity by using rituals. Not the superstitious kind of rituals, but think of rituals as recurring reminders. I use rituals because the word is short and takes up less space on the screen of my computer. This is my Supreme Productivity System. The supreme productivity system is...
I do not understand people when they complain to me about how many emails they have in their inbox. Day after day I hear moaning and complaining about how there are those 50, 100, whatever emails from last week that someone still hasn t gotten to since vacation last week. Ridiculous! Here s how I managed to...
Here s how I manage my Receipts and Documents. Time to shed a tear 😢 because my long-time Mac application companion Mariner Paperless (and formerly ReceiptWallet) are no more. This year (2023) it looks like Mariner software has gone belly. Their Web site has been down for several months. And there have been no meaningful updates to the Paperless software...
Have buffer or stream interrupts with video on your AppleTV but your Internet connections seems to be working just fine? The cause might be the Smart Connect feature of your Netgear router. This feature switches devices between 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands automatically for you. This feature is great in theory, but less so for applications...
Thinking about using your router with dd-wrt to run all of your home connections through a VPN such as OpenVPN? Don t bother unless your router has an insanely powerful CPU. I learned this lesson the hard way when I decided to flash my TP-LINK WDR3600 (N600) with dd-wrt. 10-14mbps is all that the device seems...
Run the following command in Terminal to stop OS X Yosemite 10.10 from rearming Gatekeeper. Normally, Gatekeeper will rearm itself after 30 days. sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.security GKAutoRearm -bool NO
Want a way to change your screen resolution and screen brightness from the OS X menu bar? I did, so I pulled together several separate solutions to scratch the itch. Here s my setup and what you ll need to implement it yourself. ## Background I typically login to my iMac at home multiple times a day...
I discovered a critical bug in Apple s implementation of Time Machine in OS X Mavericks 10.9.4 that causes the dissapearance of some data from backup snapshots. I highly suggest that you check the integrity of your backups to see if you are affected by this bug. If you are affected then I suggest that you...
The bug bit me this afternoon in the desire to convert some comic book CBR files to PDF so that I could put them in iBooks and have everything in one place. I turned to trusty Calibre to do this, but could not find a combination of settings that wouldn t mess with aspect ratios and...