So thin, so light, so…easy to fill with cruft.
Saving space on your Mac’s hard drive is more important than ever, especially if you use one with a faster but smaller solid state drive in it, like my Macbook Air. Being able to manage your space wisely is the key here, and once you’ve done the obvious things, like pare down your Applications folder [Read More...]
Warning – this tip is fairly advanced. Use it at your own risk.
There’s a feature that debuted back in 2005, called SafeSleep. Basically, it’s a hibernation mode designed to save the current state of your running Mac, so that it can start up exactly the same way you left it when you put the Mac to sleep, even if the battery runs out and it shuts down completely.
Our Macs contain an extremely significant amount of our livelihood, so we’re always willing to protect that. This Cult of Mac Deals offer is for a simple and powerful application that backs up all of our applications and files so we don’t have to worry about the ‘what ifs?”.
Knowing our Mac’s hard drive is backed up, secure, and protected gives us the confidence to continue to do what we [Read More...]
Hard drive space is at a premium these days, with files getting larger and solid state drives (SSD) becoming more affordable and ubiquitous. I’m typing on a Macbook Air right now, and making sure I don’t clutter up the drive with unnecessary files is important to me.
One way to do this is to get rid of the voices that Mac OS X uses for text-to-speech. These files can take up [Read More...]
Saving space on your Mac hard drive is a key strategy, especially when you’re using a Macbook Air, with it’s strictly solid state drive (SSD). Even if you’re using a desktop Mac with a hard drive that seemed like “plenty of space” when you bought it, there will come a time when you’ll be looking to save some of it for more data. Why not get rid of the [Read More...]
Having regular backups of your Mac is a necessity, and there is really no easier way to consistently back up your Mac than by using the excellent Time Machine feature of OS X. But with the enormous size of external hard drives and their prices becoming cheaper and cheaper, it’s not always necessary to dedicate an entire gigantic hard disk just for Time Machine backups, particularly if your Mac has [Read More...]
The newest Macs ship with a Recovery partition rather than a separate external reinstall disk, and if you’ve ever rebooted a newer Mac, iMac, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro with an SSD from the Recovery partition to reformat the drive, you may have noticed that by default the “Security Options” button is greyed out in the Disk Utility options, seemingly preventing a standard “secure” erase procedure. The precise [Read More...]
Apple has been rumored to release a Spotify-like music streaming service for quite some time, but complicated licensing negations with the record labels have kept the product at bay. Multiple reports from this year alone have suggested that Apple is finally starting to gain momentum; it seems clear that some kind of ‘iRadio’ is in the pipeline.
Previous speculation has said that Apple wants to release its upcoming music service sometime in [Read More...]
A while back, we wrote up a tip on reindexing the hard drive on your Mac using Terminal. Recently, a Cult of Mac reader emailed us to let us know it wasn’t quite working on his end.
Rob, I read your post on using terminal to reindex the hard drive on a mac. Any idea why when the command is executed the terminal displays “Indexing disabled.”?
Thanks, Mike S
Here’s what he had to do [Read More...]
There’s a problem I often run into with my mobile devices, and that’s not enough storage space. I insist on purchasing devices with just 16GB of memory, and then I have to find ways to manage that storage the best I can. Some devices will take microSD cards that will allow you to bump their storage as and when you need it, but others — like Apple’s iOS devices — don’t come [Read More...]
