Adventures in Tech

Over the weekend, I dusted off my old Macbook Air to search for some old family photos. I have not used the laptop for a long time, and it was completely out of charge. I plugged it in, and it quickly booted. Shortly after, I got bombarded with notifications that many of the applications needed updating, and that a new version of the OS was available.   I waited till I found the photos I was looking for, before attempting to upgrade anything. I also wanted to install OneDrive to get my old files to the cloud, so that I can access them from any of my devices, instead of dusting off old computers to get to them. The MacOS upgrade experience has always been fantastic, and this one was no different. The OS upgrade files downloaded quickly and after a restart and a quick install, the Macbook Air was ready to go.   Upgrading the installed applications was also a breeze, however in the process I discovered that a large majority of the applications installed were not compatible ...

Taking backups with Time Machine on Mac OS X is a breeze: you plug in the backup drive, and wait for the magic to happen. Restoring the backup to a misbehaving laptop though appears to be a different story. I had to go through multiple iterations before I finally got the data back on the laptop. Since my backup setup is not atypical with the exception of an encrypted drive and backups, I was surprised it took that many times to successfully restore the data. Initially I tried restoring the backups by booting the Mac in recovery mode, and using the restore from Time Machine option. The restore started, but after roughly 12 hours it silently failed. For my second attempt I decided to install Yosemite from scratch and use the user migration assistant to recover my data. After progressing for a long time, the restore silently failed as well. My third attempt was a bit more drastic: I wiped out the drive, and attempted to restore the backup from Time Machine. That too failed after pr...

There is something to be said about using computers before going to sleep, and the effects they have on how well we sleep at night.  The authors of the free software  F.lux  believe that one of the reasons for the sleep disruption after using a computer is the color temperature of the screen. They postulate that computer screens are designed to feel like sunlight during the hours of the day, which is great, but they don't change how they look at night, which is not so great. They designed and implemented the F.lux software to warm up the screen as the sun goes down. And to make things easier, the software can automatically read the location of the computer, and adjust the warming schedule accordingly. The software is free, and works on Windows, Mac, and the jailbroken iPads/iPhones. I have only tried it on the Mac, and while I cannot attest to any changes in my sleep patterns, I admit that the screen looks a lot more pleasing at night: warm and soft, unlike how it lo...

Out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at the Firefox codebase, and compile it on my Mac. Mozilla's developer pages are great, with elaborate instructions on how to get the source code from the mercurial repository, to compiling and running the codebase on various platforms. You can find the details at: the Mozilla developer guide , and on Mac OS X they are as simple as: Get the source code from mercurial repository hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central Install a specific version of autoconf (2.13) brew tap homebrew/versions brew install autoconf213 Build Firefox cd mozilla-central ./mach ./mach build The build took roughly 2 hours to finish on my MacBook Air. Run ./mach run The resulting build is similar to Firefox nightly, and includes all the bleeding edge features and instabilities, but is great for tinkering.

I have been using Chrome as my primary browser ever since it first came out, and have been pretty pleased with it. At the time I switched from Firefox because Chrome was the faster browser, and arguably had fewer memory leaks, and with its growing ecosystem of extensions and applications, I never felt the need to use any other browser. However, lately I started having problems accessing some legacy sites that I needed for work, that employ Java for some of the content, and starting or joining WebEx meetings. Both problems are due to the fact that Chrome is a 32-bit browser, and the available Java and WebEx plugins are 64-bit for the Mac. Since Safari is a 64-bit browser, I used it for a bit as my backup browser to launch WebEx meetings, and access the legacy websites, but it was a minor inconvenience to use two browsers. A friend sold me back on Firefox, with the cross-device sync feature--one that I heavily love on Chrome, the tab groups feature, and the recent memory leak fixes....