We’ve received a fair share of comments and emails about Mac OS X Lion making some Macs seem sluggish, running hotter than usual, and causing the machines fans to run at full speed. This sounded concerning, but after I went about installing Lion DP4 myself and looked into this a bit further I’m here to … Read More
One of our readers sent in this screenshot with a funny looking error code they got when trying to redeem a promo code on the App Store. It’s a sloppy error, spilling over the allocated space and dumping some object name or something onto the user. The error seen is “MZFreeProductCode.ClientCannotRedeemIosApp_explanation” and the assumption is … Read More
While some web ads are unobtrusive, others are really annoying. If you’re tired of seeing web ads, you can install adblock extensions in every major web browser and never see another ad again. Obligatory notice: blocking ads prevents web publishers from supporting themselves, ad revenue is what pays the bills for websites like this one … Read More
If you have recently upgraded your Mac RAM, or if you are experiencing strange system crashes, it’s a good idea to test your memory modules integrity using a free tool called memtest. Essentially, memtest is a utility designed to stress test RAM for errors. Without getting overly technical in the explanation, memtest works by writing … Read More
Much like you can monitor Mac OS X filesystem usage through the command line, you can also discover what apps and individual processes are currently using your Macs internet connection. This is a really handy trick if you know your bandwidth is being used by something, or if you’re just trying to track down what … Read More
If you’re in IT, or just fixing Grandmas Mac, it’s not too uncommon to get a machine where you don’t have the admin users password. If you find yourself in this situation, you can easily change the Admin password, or any other users, simply by booting into Mac OS X‘s command line Single User Mode. … Read More
If you’re troubleshooting some of the more difficult problems that you can have on a Mac, a good place to look are the System & Kernel Logs contained within Console app. But you can access the same OS X logs from the Terminal too.
After a bit of use, my MacBook Air 11.6″ started to exhibit a strange behavior, it refused to wake from sleep. I’d open the MacBook Air, hit every key imaginable, and the Mac just stayed asleep, nothing would get it to turn on. If you’re interested in this you’re probably affected too so before I … Read More
If you’re trying to access the Mac App Store and you are getting the “Cannot Connect to App Store” error, you can typically resolve the issue with a few simple troubleshooting steps. This article will walk through some simple solutions to reconnect to the Mac App Store.
Booting a Mac with Verbose Mode can be a helpful troubleshooting trick for some obscure situations where users are trying to determine what is going wrong with a Mac during the system boot process. Just as it sounds, verbose mode is verbose, meaning it lists everything going on behind the scenes, and you’ll watch as … Read More
LetterBox is a very popular plugin for Mac OS X Mail.app that gives you a nice widescreen interface. Unfortunately it seems like every other Mac OS X system update screws up LetterBox compatibility, and 10.6.7 is no different. Thankfully the LetterBox developer is quick to react, and a fixed version for Mac OS X 10.6.7 … Read More
Want to erase and reformat an iPad? If you recently upgraded to a new iPad and you’re either selling or passing along your old iPad, you’ll want to reformat the iPad before sending it off to live with it’s new owner so that none of your personal stuff is on the device. There are two … Read More
Some of us who have downloaded iOS 4.3 and updated their iPhones and iPads have run into a strange syncing error that vaguely states “The required file cannot be found.” If this has happened to you, you’re not alone, and thankfully there’s a fix of sorts. Fix “required file cannot be found” iOS 4.3 syncing … Read More
If your iPhone or iPod has been acting strangely or not working, it’s worth checking the “Liquid Contact Indicator” locations as shown in the image above from Apple, this may give you a hint of what’s wrong with your hardware. If the sensors shown in the pictures are red, you may have water damage. I … Read More
If you’ve ever accidentally used cat on a binary file, you’ll have seen the gibberish that results and how it can totally screw up your Terminal window with loads of weird characters. Of course there are many other ways to bork up your command line prompt which seems to become unrecoverable through the typical clear … Read More
I launched the Mac App Store today and when trying to download an app I was hit with a strange error saying my request could not be completed, here’s the exact message: “We could not complete your request. There was an error in the App Store. Please try again later. (@@errorNum@@)” The “@@errorNum@@” looks a … Read More
Want to remove and uninstall Flash Player from a Mac? Some users install Flash but later decide they do not want the app and plugin on their Mac, thus will want to remove it. Adobe Flash Player is known to cause a slew of issues, slowdowns, battery drain, crashes, and other problems for Mac OS … Read More
Sometimes things go wrong and you need to put your iPhone into Recovery Mode to restore it and get it working again. It turns out that Recovery Mode is what your iPhone goes into when you are doing a standard iOS upgrade or restore anyway, but you may want to put your iPhone into recovery … Read More
