Reading Time: 10 minutesWhat we leave behind Over the last two-or-so years, I’ve had more reasons to think about memory than I ever expected. I lost my mother. I lost my father. I lost one of my closest friends. And in other ways, I lost people who were still alive. I don’t mention that because I want sympathy. I’m mentioning it because it changed the way I look at things. Photographs that I once barely noticed became important. Old files I’d forgotten existed…
Reading Time: 3 minutesI’m always on the lookout for alternative methods to accomplish tasks, and I particularly enjoy challenges. Listening to radio is something I’ve enjoyed all my life, and even though I have many terabytes of music and subscribe to many different podcasts, I still enjoy radio to discover new music. Internet radio is nice and all, but I wanted a way to listen to radio on my Mac even when there is no internet available. Unable to find anything that could…
Reading Time: 2 minutesWell, it’s been two years since my last post. Time flies! The past few years have been quite busy and interesting for me. Writing on this site, creating content on YouTube, and participating in the Mac community were not among my top priorities. Details are irrelevant, but I thought some of the regular visitors might appreciate an update on what I have in store for the future. While I’m still not entirely sure about the direction of The House of…
Reading Time: 4 minutesThis is a post in the Project Maya series. To see all related posts go to the index page here. As the 2023 PPC Challenge is well underway, it was time for Maya to make an appearance again. As we’re used to from these machines (once the power supply has been fixed), it fired right up. This year I want to play with some of the cool projects out there such as Arctic Fox, Message Bridge, Discord Lite, and others….
Reading Time: 7 minutesThis is a question I receive daily now, and it’s not for the reason you may think. The Mac Pro (4,1-5,1), when properly specced out, is more than capable to hold its own even next to an M1 Mac Studio. In some regards, it even beats the Studio (yes, Apple’s performance exaggerations were quickly debunked). So why do Mac Pro owners want to consider trading their beast for something else? They’re expensive to run. One area the Mac Pro has…
Reading Time: 11 minutesEarlier this year (2022), Karen Haslam wrote an article for MacWorld UK, titled “Why you shouldn’t buy a second hand Mac“. I don’t follow Karen’s writings or MacWorld so this article did not pop up on my radar until just two days ago (mid-March 2022 at the time of writing). When this article was linked on Facebook, I read it and obviously disagreed with its contents. It wasn’t until I scrolled back up I saw the author’s name. That name…
Reading Time: 4 minutes“Coming this fall” is what the macOS Monterey product page states. Well, fall is here, and Monterey is expected to be released soon. Once it is released, you do not want to be caught off guard like Karen Haslam did last year. This MacWorld editor “lives and breathes Apple” yet has no clue how to prepare for a macOS upgrade. Don’t be like Karen, be adequately prepared. This article aims to help you be just that! macOS Monterey system requirements…
Reading Time: 5 minutesThis is a project, one of many, that I have been working on. As this project has now ended, I thought it would be fun to recap the journey. July 3rd, Steve from Mac84 receives an email. The email asks him for help to track down version 9 of outSPOKEN, a screen reader for Mac OS 9 that lets visually impaired or blind use the system. Version 8 is available on Macintosh Garden but does not work on Mac OS…
Reading Time: 9 minutesOpenCore is, for lack of a better word, amazing. If you don’t know what OpenCore is, read about some of its benefits here. I have no experience (yet) with other versions of OpenCore, such as the Legacy patcher, but I fully intend to explore that as well at some point. This post is the quick and easy guide that should have anyone up and running with OpenCore on the cMac Pros in minutes. This guide may have steps in it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesLast year I wrote the piece “Check your backups” which focused on optical media backups. Backing up and checking those backups is an ever-evolving process, we always look for faster, easier and more reliable ways to backup our data but checking backups has always been pretty much the same tedious, time-consuming process. Today I want to tell you about a little utility that I’ve had for years but never used; IntegrityChecker by diglloydTools. Part of a suite that I’ve been…