Category Archives: MacOS X

Snow Leopard Mac won’t boot – startup disk full

or: what to do when your son tells you 10 minutes before he needs to go to school that the old family iMac is broken and he can’t get his work off that needs handing in like right now. Symptom: … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, MacOS X | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Flotilla hacking with a Mac

Inspired by http://www.sniff.org.uk/2015/12/hacking-pimoroni-flotillla.html I plugged Flotilla into my Mac. I browsed my /dev/ folder and took a guess that the Flotilla dock was ‘tty.usbmodem1421′ – which proved correct. Then I typed screen /dev/tty.usbmodem1421 9600 at the Terminal prompt, and wiggled … Continue reading

Posted in MacOS X | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Python CoolPlay for OS X

Update – a new version of PyPlay is now on GitHub. It has pretty colours and gives you the out time and everything. CoolPlay is a very useful Windows program that plays audio files. So what? Lots of programs do … Continue reading

Posted in MacOS X, radio | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Using an old Wacom Graphire tablet in OS X 10.10 Yosemite

I love it when I make things work that shouldn’t and I also love saving money. This does both. I have an old Wacom Graphire graphics tablet model ET-0405-U. It’s not supported by recent versions of OS X, but graphics … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, computers, lowendmac, MacOS X | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

How to get Word to paste unformatted text by default

This is something that drives me mad. Why (oh why) do word processors (Word, Open Office) paste formatted text by default? Almost always what you want to do is to paste unformatted text, so that it matches the font of … Continue reading

Posted in computers, MacOS X | Tagged , , , | 19 Comments