Apple has released an update to XProtect for all macOS

Apple has just released an additional out-of-cycle update to XProtect, bringing it to version 5321. As usual, it […] | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 18 days ago

The Dutch Golden Age: Johannes Vermeer 1

Finding form with his famous compositions of figures lit by daylight from windows on the left. His use of maps, curtains, and his unique depth of field effects. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 19 days ago

Gain access to a locked Mac with Recovery Assistant

You've tried entering your password, but it doesn't work. Should you try guessing? As that imposes increasing waiting times of up to 8 hours, maybe not. Try this instead. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 19 days ago

Apple has released an update to XProtect for all macOS

Apple has just released its weekly update to XProtect, bringing it to version 5320. As usual, it doesn’t […] | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 20 days ago

Medium and Message: Sticks and crayons

Modern and mixed media such as wax crayons, pencils, oil pastels, oil sticks and oil bars have become increasingly popular, although many age poorly and most have to be kept under glass. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 20 days ago

Rewriting a file’s history

How to create a new file with a creation date 4 months ago and versions dating back to 3 months before that Mac even existed. All without changing any clocks. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 20 days ago

Paintings of Dante’s Inferno: 13 Treachery

Fraudsters, the incestuous Myrrha, mother of Adonis, a counterfeiter, Potiphar's wife, then the treacherous who betrayed their kin. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 21 days ago

Solutions to Saturday Mac riddles 330

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 330. Here are my solutions to them. 1: Sounds […] | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 21 days ago

LogUI build 77 improves readability of log entries

Displays emoji to indicate the type of each log entry, improves export as Rich Text, and augments fields when copying entries. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 21 days ago

A painterly family: the Alma-Tademas 1884-1943

Lawrence and his second wife Laura were successful painters, and taught their older daughter Anna to paint. He was knighted, and after his death was interred with great honour in St Paul's Cathedral. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 22 days ago

Last Week on My Mac: The quiet firmware revolution

Ten years ago, a firmware worm that could have inserted malware into Mac boot flash storage was demonstrated, and shortly afterwards many Macs were found to be running outdated firmware. We've come a long way since. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 22 days ago

A painterly family: the Alma-Tademas 1836-81

1869 was a disastrous year for Lawrence: his wife died suddenly, leaving him to care for their daughters, and he also had a medical problem that defied diagnosis. He went to London and fell in love at first sight. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 23 days ago

Saturday Mac riddles 330

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


@eclecticlight.co | 23 days ago

Explainer: FileVault

The T2 chip was designed for FileVault, and it comes at no cost to that and in Apple silicon Macs. Here's how it works, and why everyone should enable it. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 23 days ago

Reading Visual Art: 231 Tiger

Drawing the chariot of Bacchus/Dionysus, fighting with Christian martyrs, in a Paris zoo, or torrential rain in a tropical storm, or being hunted to be turned into a skin. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 24 days ago

Inside the Unified Log 6: Difficult times

Apparently based on Mach absolute time, log entry times are converted to wallclock times. This exposes them to the vagaries of time zones, seasonal adjustments, and periodic wallclock adjustments. Here's how all that works, and can confuse. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 24 days ago

Commemorating the centenary of Christian Krohg’s death

Trained in Germany because there was no academy in Norway, he soon developed themes of poverty, social injustice, and Norway's independence. A major influence on Edvard Munch. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 25 days ago

Check if an app is stuck in translocation

Why is that app slow to launch, unable to update itself, generally behaving erratically, and often crashes? Could it be stuck in app translocation? Here's how to tell, and how to fix it. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 25 days ago

Apple has released an update to XProtect for all macOS

Apple has just released its weekly update to XProtect, bringing it to version 5319. As usual, it doesn’t […] | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 26 days ago

The Dutch Golden Age: Ordinary people

Washerwoman below stairs, a kitchen maid, haggling in the market, selling fish door-to-door, pouring milk, farming families, and drinking. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 26 days ago

Check your Mac is secure

How to check secure boot, SIP, Gatekeeper/XProtect, its SSV, FileVault, macOS and its firmware, and XProtect Remediator scans. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 26 days ago

Medium and Message: Surface texture

Tiny jewels fashioned from blobs of white paint, Rembrandt's textured paint layers. Turner's scratchings, and van Gogh's textured Wheat Field with Cypresses, seen in fine detail. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 27 days ago

Inside the Unified Log 5: Navigation

How to combine the time of interest with waypoints to reduce 100,000 log entries to just a handful, and discover what you're looking for in the log. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 27 days ago

Paintings of Dante’s Inferno: 12 Fraud and inciting division

First a centaur killed by Hercules, then souls being tormented by reptiles, those with fraudulent lives burning in hell, and dismembered parts of those who inflamed dissent. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 28 days ago

Solutions to Saturday Mac riddles 329

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 329. Here are my solutions to them. 1: Two […] | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 28 days ago

Is Tahoe quicker to launch apps first time?

Whether a quarantined and notarized app undergoes translocation, Tahoe doesn't run XProtect checks to determine if it's malicious. And how to tell when an app is running from translocation. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 28 days ago

In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Impressionism

In 1865, Bazille, Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Cézanne started painting outdoors in front of the motif in the forest, and so Impressionism began. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 29 days ago

Last Week on My Mac: Tahoe’s elephant

All of us rely on tone (brightness, lightness) to interpret what we see. Visual artists have gone to great lengths in tonal modelling, but macOS Tahoe offers only bleached-out white or blacked-out black. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 29 days ago

In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Barbizon

After some early visits, young landscape painters started to visit the forest in 1829, and became the Barbizon School. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

Saturday Mac riddles 329

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


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

Explainer: How is XProtect’s data updated?

Until Sequoia, it was simply downloaded and installed as any other software update. Since then it has changed frequently and its behaviour can now confuse. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

Reading Visual Art: 230 Wolf

Lycaon transformed into a wolf, the origin of later werewolves, the she-wolf who fed Romulus and Remus, a shepherd defending his flock, the wolf of Agubbio, the fable of the wolf and the lamb, and others. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

How to migrate macOS virtual machines

If your virtualiser allows you to run 2 macOS VMs at the same time, and to give them different MAC addresses, it's easy to migrate from one to the other as explained here. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

Christian Krohg painting social reality 4: 1898-1924

Series showing the sailing of smaller vessels, and ship, then a further series of a model getting dressed and leaving the studio, and one last painting. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

What to do when your Mac can’t get to the login window

If you're lucky, it should restart into Recovery Assistant. Otherwise advice on how to manage a boot loop or freeze, and how to disable 3rd party kernel extensions. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

Apple has released an update to XProtect for all macOS

Apple has released its weekly update to XProtect, bringing it to version 5318. As usual, it doesn’t release […] | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

The Dutch Golden Age: Nocturnes

Unusual paintings to add novelty to a collection, with maritimes, river views, cloudscapes, Amsterdam burning, and a couple of distinctive 'negatives'. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

Resolve a file’s path from its inode number

First Aid in Disk Utility, or fsck_apfs in Terminal, have given warnings or errors with id numbers. How do you work out which file or folder that refers to? | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

Medium and Message: Knives, fingers and long brushes

Painting using a palette knife, by Courbet, Renoir and Anna Althea Hills. fingerpainting by Leonardi, and ling brushes in the hands of Whistler and Sorolla. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

What to do when APFS has problems

First Aid in Disk Utility, or running fsck_apfs in Terminal, return warnings or errors on one of your Mac's volumes. Here's what to do next. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

Paintings of Dante’s Inferno: 11 Bribery, hypocrisy, theft

Barrators, who traded in public office and bribed courts, hypocrites whose clothes are weighted with lead, and thieves who are stuck in a pit of snakes. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

Solutions to Saturday Mac riddles 328

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 328. Here are my solutions to them. 1: Click […] | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

Inside the Unified Log 4: Log entries

The four types of log entry, all the fields they can contain, and those they are likely to include, shown in the order and colour scheme used in LogUI. Censorship and how to disable it, with a signed profile to do so. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

The Journey of Life 2

More paintings from Louis Janmot's epic Poem of the Soul, Walter Crane's concise Bridge of Life, and a selection from Edvard Munch's second Frieze of Life, exhibited in 1902. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

Last Week on My Mac: Has macOS virtualisation ground to a halt?

macOS VMs can have iCloud, iCloud Drive, Messages, FaceTime, FileVault and many shared folders, but still can't sign into Apple service like the App Store. But you can resize their VMs. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

The Journey of Life 1

Series of paintings showing the journey of life are unusual. Here are excerpts from Poussin's Seven Sacraments, Thomas Cole's Voyage of Life, and the start of Louis Janmot's 34-image epic. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

Saturday Mac riddles 328

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation. 1: 2: 3: […] | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago

Explainer: inodes and inode numbers

How APFS is the first Mac native file system to have true inodes and inode numbers. What they are, and how you can use them in volume groups and different types of file link. | Continue reading


@eclecticlight.co | 1 month ago