Painted stories of the Decameron: The pot of basil

Three brothers discover their unmarried sister's secret lover. They take him to the country, kill him and bury his body. She exhumes him, and takes his head away to hide in a pot of basil. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 3 hours ago

Solutions to Saturday Mac riddles 337

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 337. Here are my solutions to them. 1: Passing […] | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 7 hours ago

Who decides to quarantine files?

By default, quarantine xattrs aren't attached to new files created by an app. That behaviour is controlled by a setting in their Info.plist, and can be overridden in an Exceptions property list. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 8 hours ago

Fog on the Thames 1900-1926

Some of Claude Monet's series from 1903-04, Le Sidaner, Émile Claus, and ending with Lesser Ury from 1926. But there was a more sinister side to the fog and smog. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 day ago

Last Week on My Mac: Making better use of security extended attributes

In a typical ~/Documents folder, 14% of all files have a provenance xattr attached to them, that could enable the app that last modified them to be identified. Could we make use of that? | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 day ago

Fog on the Thames 1844-1899

Paintings starting with JMW Turner in 1844, through Monet in 1871, Winslow Homer, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Tom Roberts, Pissarro, and Childe Hassam. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 2 days ago

Saturday Mac riddles 337

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation. 1: Passing time […] | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 2 days ago

Explainer: Numbers

Integers of different sizes and endianness, floating point numbers with a radix of 2 that can result in rounding and cancellation errors and NaNs, and bfloat16 for AI. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 2 days ago

More than a Nabi 2: Félix Vallotton 1900-1906

More mysterious interiors and cupboard views, a group portrait of the Nabis, and two of his models taking a break. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 3 days ago

Quarantine, MACL and provenance: what are they up to?

Why do so many files now have quarantine and other extended attributes, although they're not apps, and may never have left that Mac? | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 3 days ago

Reading Visual Art: 237 Blacksmith

Hephaistos or Vulcan in classical myth, cheated on by Aphrodite/Venus, and as creator of Pandora. In Bosch's Last Judgement, and elsewhere. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 4 days ago

The Anatomy of a macOS App

How Mac applications evolved from a multitude of resources to a bundle formed from a standard layout of directories, and how they have come to be largely self-contained in macOS 26. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 4 days ago

The Dutch Golden Age: Jan Miense Molenaer

A dentist draws a tooth outside a church, a man reckons he holds the winning card, and the five most humorous interpretations of the senses. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 5 days ago

Manage Login and Background items

How to control Login and Background items in System Settings, how to identify those you might not recognise, and how to use sfltool for advanced diagnostics and reset. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 5 days ago

Medium and Message: On a cigar-box

The Macchiaioli of Tuscany, James Whistler, Georges Seurat and the Australian Impressionists all like to sketch in oil on cigar boxes. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 6 days ago

How to restart Spotlight, and why you might want to

Instead of logging out and back in, it's possible to relaunch Spotlight from the Finder, as demonstrated here with the aid of the log. And it might be useful too. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 6 days ago

Painted stories of the Decameron: A father’s revenge

A gruesome tale of a daughter's lover killed by her father, and his heart cut out. Also of one of Hogarth's few failed paintings. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 7 days ago

Solutions to Saturday Mac riddles 336

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 336. Here are my solutions to them. 1: Interchange […] | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 7 days ago

Textovert 1.1 can now convert PDF files to other formats

Now additionally offers conversion of PDF files to plain text, RTF, HTML, Word doc and docx, Safari Web Archive and other formats. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 7 days ago

The earthly delights of Hieronymus Bosch 2

Adam and Eve during a happy moment before the Fall. Countless naked men and women cavorting with giant fruit. Gambling and music seen as sure ways to hell. Delving into Bosch's details. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 8 days ago

Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence

What was the key to successfully learning to drive, ride a bike, or speak a foreign language? Confidence, and it's every bit as important in computing, and in macOS. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 8 days ago

The earthly delights of Hieronymus Bosch 1

Inside its restrained and modest grisaille cover there are three panels showing the Garden of Eden, a pleasure garden, and the garden of Hell. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 9 days ago

Saturday Mac riddles 336

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation. 1: Interchange of […] | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 9 days ago

Explainer: PDF format

How PDF is different from PostScript, how to identify key parts of PDF source code, layout problems, verbosity, flattening and mojibake. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 9 days ago

More than a Nabi 1: Félix Vallotton 1885-99

Eclectic and mysterious paintings first in academic style, then Naturalist, a few years as the 'foreign Nabi' before painting unusual landscapes. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 10 days ago

Explainer: Text formats

All about plain text, rich text, RTFD, .doc, .docx, HTML, webarchive, WordML, ODT and Pages formats, and how much space they take. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 10 days ago

The Dutch Golden Age: Aelbert Cuyp 2

More rich and lucent skies light cavalry troopers, migrating peasants, the baptism of an Ethiopian eunuch, and a river scene. Then he suddenly stopped painting. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 11 days ago

Podofyllin 1.5 beta can export PDF to RTF

Test version can now export PDF to Rich Text Format. For evaluation, please, to see if this would be worth adding to Textovert. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 11 days ago

The Dutch Golden Age: Aelbert Cuyp 1

Trained as a landscape painter, he used his landscapes for genre scenes, animal and human portraits, even myths and a religious work, and was influenced by Claude Lorrain. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 12 days ago

Inside the Unified Log 8: Find the error

Log entries mentioning errors are common and can mislead. Those marking the consequences of errors may not mention the word error. Turn detective to work out where the error really is with these tips. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 12 days ago

Medium and Message: En plein air

How painting in oils in front of the motif became popular fifty years before paint became available in tubes, and how it was done by the experts. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 13 days ago

Textovert 1.0: a convenient wrapper for text conversion

Drag and drop files you want to convert to a different format, and Textovert will call textutil to do that for you. Quick, simple and convenient. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 13 days ago

Painted stories of the Decameron: Nastagio degli Onesti’s breakfast

A bizarre story of a ghost who repeatedly kills the ghost of the woman who spurned his love, and how it leads to a successful marriage. Illustrated by Botticelli. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 14 days ago

Solutions to Saturday Mac riddles 335

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 335. Here are my solutions to them. 1: Xeon […] | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 14 days ago

Convert text between file formats, including webarchives

Convert between text, HTML, RTF, RTFD, Word .doc and .docx, WordML, ODT and Safari Web Archives using this command tool. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 14 days ago

Painting along the Loing: Moret

A few miles down river from Grez was the town of Moret, where Sisley lived and painted for 19 years, in poverty and isolation. Here are some examples of his Impressionist landscapes from there. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 15 days ago

Last Week on My Mac: The mystery of Safari’s Web Archives

When someone reports the most recent version of Safari that will open their webarchives is 18.6, and that's the only version that you find can't open some webarchives. You'll be only too familiar with the culprit. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 15 days ago

Painting along the Loing: Grez

By 1880, an artist's colony was forming in this village on the southern edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, and attracted painters from all over the world. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 16 days ago

Saturday Mac riddles 335

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation. 1: Xeon and […] | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 16 days ago

Explainer: Data and metadata

Information about the data in a file can be found in different places: in the file's attributes, in extended attributes that tend to be Mac-only, and embedded with the data, as in EXIF. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 16 days ago

Reading Visual Art: 236 Carpenter

In a myth invented by Piero, a radical annunciation, Pre-Raphaelite religious paintings, William Blake and others who allude to Joseph, the most famous of all. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 17 days ago

Does Preview write PDF/A?

Preview offers PDF/A as an export option, intended for PDFs that are to be relied on long into the future, for archives. Do they comply with one of the PDF/A standards, though? | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 17 days ago

The 400th anniversary of the birth of Paulus Potter

One of the founding fathers of animal painting, his Young Bull is almost life-sized and ranked alongside Rembrandt's work, but he died at the age of only 28. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 18 days ago

Diagnose Spotlight local search problems

When Spotlight can't find the files you expect it to, it could be that they weren't indexed, or that Spotlight's search has failed to find their index entries. Here's how to tell those apart and work out what went wrong. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 18 days ago

The Dutch Golden Age: Winter

A period in which the winters were exceptionally cold, landscapes showing folk skating on frozen canals and rivers, promenading, and playing kolf, and ancestor of modern golf. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 19 days ago

Viewing metadata in the Finder

The Preview pane in Finder windows can show a comprehensive list of metadata, or a shortened list you can customise in Preview Options. Here's how to use it and how it can provide further information. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 19 days ago

Medium and Message: Glazes and optical effects

Applying thinner layers of paint, or glazes, developed optical effects that were widely used into the late 19th century, but have now fallen from favour. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 20 days ago

Which local file systems does macOS 26 support?

A survey of support for APFS, HFS+, FAT and ExFAT, NTFS, ZFS, Linux file systems, and MacFUSE with its potential for file systems running in user-space. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 20 days ago