Portraits by Lovis Corinth, Thomas Eakins' widow Susan, a great Estonian pastellist, and others, and insights into Pierre Bonnard's conflicted personal life. | Continue reading
Why can't some files be seen in thumbnails, or previews, but almost everything else can be seen thanks to QuickLook? And is this connected to Spotlight indexing? | Continue reading
A faithful wife is being pestered by another man. She sets him an impossible task, of creating an enchanted Spring garden in the January snow. | Continue reading
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 339. Here are my solutions to them. 1: The […] | Continue reading
Add another volume to your Mac's internal SSD and try to eject it. All hell breaks loose as the Finder wants to eject the whole disk, it seems. Probably a 6-year old bug. | Continue reading
Innovative interpretations from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Vittorio Corcos, Oleksandr Murashko, JW Waterhouse, and Jacek Malczewski. | Continue reading
Standard users aren't allowed to chang other users' settings, but they've long been able to update macOS, and for the last 3 years to install full upgrades. Should this change? | Continue reading
Fine paintings from Jan van Eyck, Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Bartolomeo, Gerard David, Beccafumi, Lavinia Fontana, Tintoretto, El Greco and Murillo. | Continue reading
Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation. 1: The favourite […] | Continue reading
It was notorious for its crashes and reporting discrepancies, but now it's incorporated in System Settings it's more reliable and helpful. But there's still the problem of System Data. | Continue reading
A field deserted during the harvest, crosses packing the war cemetery at Châlons, Susanne being blackmailed, the château above Les Andelys, and more. | Continue reading
Before macOS 12.3, upgrades and updates were different, and only admin users could authenticate the installation of an upgrade to macOS. Now even standard users can, as explained here. | Continue reading
A man furtively making off with two loaves, Vermeer's Milkmaid, baking bread in rural Sweden, a traditional baking oven, and glistening alongside mackerel and glassware. | Continue reading
Authentication dialogs for Macs with and without support for Touch ID, in recent versions of macOS including Tahoe, and how to tell whether a request in Terminal is genuine. | Continue reading
An eclectic range from LA Ring's fine realism, Paul Signac's Pointillism and watercolours, Pierre Bonnard in Le Midi, to Marsden Hartley and Lesser Ury. | Continue reading
A complex set of rules with optional flags determines whether any given xattr is preserved when copying, saving, syncing with a cloud service, backing up, and more. Here they are. | Continue reading
Apple has just released an update to XProtect, bringing it to version 5325. As usual, it doesn’t release […] | Continue reading
Five paintings of women in trouble: Ariadne on Naxos, Mary Magdalen, an allegory of logic, the disillusioned Medea, and Cydippe with the apple of Acontius. | Continue reading
Some who updated to 26.2 reported their downloads were over 10 GB in size, rather than the expected 3.78 GB for Apple silicon Macs. Why was that, and why didn't Apple release an earlier BSI? | Continue reading
Cimon is a problem child until he sees Iphigenia. He reforms, but her parents refuse his proposal. When he abducts her as she is being taken to be married off, everything goes wrong. | Continue reading
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 338. Here are my solutions to them. 1: The […] | Continue reading
Several utilities access the log. When there are problems getting entries, they each report details. Here's what each error report means, and what you can do to fix it. | Continue reading
Paintings by David Teniers the Younger, Domenicus van Wijnen, Tiepolo, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Félicien Rops and Lovis Corinth. | Continue reading
Five test questions put to Google's AI-enhanced search. Answers analysed to understand its weaknesses rather than strengths. And why every answer is a bit random. | Continue reading
Paintings by Michelangelo, Hieronymus Bosch, Grünewald, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Paolo Veronese, Jan Brueghel the Elder and others. | Continue reading
Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation. 1: The first […] | Continue reading
It's the master compositor, laying all windows out to generate the image to be displayed. It also handles input and other event routing, as it knows where each app's windows are, and which are at the front. | Continue reading
A largely routine update, with a few interesting new features such as Edge Light, a security enhancement to AirDrop, and two important security fixes that have already been exploited in iOS. | Continue reading
Apple has just released the update to bring macOS Tahoe to version 26.2, and security updates to Sequoia […] | Continue reading
Stories retold differently from Perseus and Andromeda, the Rape of Europa, and some atmospheric landscapes of Honfleur in snow and fog. | Continue reading
Where are all those photos and videos that are shared in Messages being stored? Where to find the Syndication Photos Library, and some of its puzzles. | Continue reading
The goddess Ceres, The Last Supper, and the supper at Emmaus, Easter Sunday bread in Ukraine, bread as charity and the daily bread. | Continue reading
I asked Google how I could clear disk space on macOS, and it couldn't have been more helpful. But what I was told to do downloaded malware to my Mac. How come? | Continue reading
Apple has just released an update to XProtect, bringing it to version 5324. As usual, it doesn’t release […] | Continue reading
The Annunciation, and myth of Vertumnus and Pomona, a tale from Roman history, a favourite fable, stories of schools and a concert of the birds. | Continue reading
Fixes a crashing bug when using its Crawler feature. Analysis of provenance xattrs confirms they can be useful in providing more information about files. | Continue reading
Artists who sketched in front of the motif using oil paints to gather image libraries often kept those on paper, rather than wood panel or stretched canvas. | Continue reading
Apple silicon Macs were designed to boot almost as securely from external disks as from their internal SSD. That makes macOS installation a little more complicated. Here's how to do that. | Continue reading
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
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 337. Here are my solutions to them. 1: Passing […] | Continue reading
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
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
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
Paintings starting with JMW Turner in 1844, through Monet in 1871, Winslow Homer, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Tom Roberts, Pissarro, and Childe Hassam. | Continue reading
Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation. 1: Passing time […] | Continue reading
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
More mysterious interiors and cupboard views, a group portrait of the Nabis, and two of his models taking a break. | Continue reading
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