Apple's MacBook laptops have become increasingly desirable and successful, making them a prime target for thieves. Now that Mac OS X includes integrated and efficient full disk encryption, I recommend that everyone with a MacBook enable it. It's easy, nonintrusive, and a potential lifesaver if your machine is stolen! Why Encrypt Your MacBook? Like so many features in Mac OS … [Read more...] about MacBook Users: Encrypt Your Drive with OS X FileVault! It’s Easy and Free!
Lion
Why You Should Never Again Utter The Word, “CIFS”
Let me put on my “grumpy old storage guy” hat for a moment: CIFS is not the network storage protocol used by Microsoft Windows, and many other clients. CIFS is dead, and has been for many years. The protocol used to share files over a LAN by the majority of personal computers is called SMB. I wish everyone in the industry would get that through their heads. Dear marketers: If … [Read more...] about Why You Should Never Again Utter The Word, “CIFS”
The Case of the Missing Letters: Another Obnoxious Bug in Dragon Dictate
What's a love-hate relationship without the love? Whatever that is, that's what I've got going with my copy of Dragon Dictate. I've long been a fan of dictation software, but the bugs and usability flubs in this product continually annoy me. Now it appears that the automatic spell checker in Mac OS X Lion causes Dragon to lose its mind and continually drop a random character … [Read more...] about The Case of the Missing Letters: Another Obnoxious Bug in Dragon Dictate
Undocumented CoreStorage Commands
Yesterday I noted that Apple included a full logical volume manager in Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" without so much as a word. Today I am pleased to say that CoreStorage is much more functional than I had guessed, including a number of undocumented but seemingly functional commands for on-the-fly resizing of logical volumes as well as manipulation of physical volumes. Read on for the … [Read more...] about Undocumented CoreStorage Commands
Mac OS X Lion Adds CoreStorage, a Volume Manager (Finally!)
Apple fan boys won't like to hear this, but Mac OS X was majorly deficient in an area near and dear to my heart. You see, unlike every other modern operating system, Mac OS X lacked a volume manager. This wouldn't seem like a big deal to the average user, but it held back the operating system in many ways. A volume manager brings storage virtualization to an operating system, … [Read more...] about Mac OS X Lion Adds CoreStorage, a Volume Manager (Finally!)