Digital matters

Category: Apple Pie

  • I've now had an introduction to the SBOD

    Now I’ve been uber-charitable about Apple and their MacOS, but yesterday and today I was introduced to the Spinning Beachball of Death which froze me out of doing anything on my iMac whilst I trawled the internet (on another machine) trying to find out what could be wrong.
    I’d not left the machine on, in sleep mode, and yet it just crawled through boot and sign-in until it basically gave up the ghost when it got to the Desktop. What could it be?
    Obviously it was probably a hardware problem … wasn’t it? Well a bit of Cmd + R work, running disk utility showed everything was in fine fettle, many re-boots later things seemed to be improving, but not all was right. What could it be? Try logging-in to another account on the same machine I thought. Well I had one, but it wasn’t an Admin account, but it was worth a try. This seemed to be much better so I was now thinking about Corruption of the User Profile and the need to Restore from a Time Machine backup … maybe. But then, out of the blue, all seemed to be well again … until this morning, when the SBOD returned.
    This time I knew it was likely to be something to do with my User Profile, so I setup a new Admin account once I managed to get to the screen that allowed me to do that. Logged out, and then logged into the new account and, as I hoped, the login screamed through. I set up the machine and right at the end I was told that my Paragon NTFS for Mac (which allows me to read Windows files) needed to be updated as it was not optimal for my version of MacOS (High Sierra, 10.13.6). The penny dropped! This software wasn’t installed on my MacBook Pro. This piece of software was interfering with Finder on the iMac in some way to slow everything down. Quickly into System Preferences then, disable the NTFS for Mac driver, and re-boot. All seems to be well. Some hard lessons learnt and a lot of time wasted.
    The lessons learnt?

    1. Have a spare Admin account on your machine so that you can check your user profile
    2. Disable, or Uninstall any software that you’re not using because inevitably it will go out of sync with something else
    3. Make sure that you know how to start your machine in a number of different ways to check for faults – I had to print out a cheat sheet to do this
    4. Make sure you have an up-to-date backup … just in case; I did, so that was my last option, and I’d have been OK … I think!

     

  • Problems with Two-factor authentication on a Mac during a recent upgrade

    John raised the problem he’d had with implementing Two-factor authentication on his Mac during a recent upgrade (to High Sierra, I think). Now Two-factor authentication is generally a good thing when you’re talking about access to cloud based services, eg OneDrive, eMail, Google Drive, iCloud – but it seems a bit OTT when you’re talking about an operating system as protection to prevent access to services running on the hardware. But Apple doesn’t make this clear.

    When I was doing my High Sierra and iOS upgrades the other day I was prompted to ask whether I wanted to implement Two-factor authentication, but was also advised that some of my devices wouldn’t support it and I would lose access to services if I chose to implement it. That was enough to warn me off, so I didn’t. John was not scared off – possibly because he didn’t get the warning that I got – and has had to make a trip to the Apple Store to try and get it sorted.

    Two-factor authentication is a “good idea”, don’t get me wrong, but Apple’s implementation is a bit clunky it would appear.

    https://www.macworld.com/article/3130566/security/the-apple-two-step-my-disastrous-attempt-to-use-apple-s-two-factor-authentication.html

  • Here's one for the Mac users, but it's not a problem unique to Mac users.

    Fed-up with selecting the wrong contact from you address book? Time for some tidy-up. This article also shows how you can sort out duplicates held on your iOS (iPhone/iPad) device by using iCloud, Apple’s cloud storage, where you can hold your contacts, so that means that if you’re an iOS/PC user you should be able to clean your iPhone contacts as well.

    https://9to5mac.com/2017/02/09/how-to-remove-merge-duplicate-contacts-macos-ios/amp/