Been looking at how to deal with refreshing macOS on my older macs I found some useful links on how to get old versions of macOS available
Tools to do Process Mapping Diagrams in the cloud
With various parts of my work roles we’ve been looking at quality improvement methodologies including PDSA Cycles which usually require a degree of process mapping in advance to see how you can improve your business processes.
I’ve found a couple of tools that are useful to do this online (for those that don’t already have diagramming tools in their office suite).
- Draw.io – free integrates with many cloud storage services for sharing, but you need paid tier to access some shape types.
- Gliffy – has 14day Free trial option and option for teams
- LucidChart – has Free tier with access to all drawing tools, and competitively priced tier for 3 members of a team to collaborate.
Re-use your router as an Access Point
Been having some fun trying to improve wi-fi around my house due to the location of the incoming master socket at one end of the building rather in the middle of it. In the end I’ve had to use a wired option to move internet through the house; so having got fibre broadband I thought I could re-use my old tp-link router as an access point which turns out to be quite easy to set up. However I kept having problems until I realised that you don’t plug the wire into the WAN port on the router you use one of the LAN ports otherwise it starts messing around with NAT and the network doesn’t work. Also it turns out you can use the same SSID and password to make it easy for your wireless devices to hop from one access point to another; my tp-link device automatically picked a clear channel so I didn’t need to worry about same channel interference, but I did turn down the power so that devices would in preference find the fibre router access point directly.
Relocating your ADSL or Fibre broadband
Having been used to having a nice faceplate fitted to my NTE5 masterbox to filter off the internal phone extensions and let me have my broadband router elsewhere in the house I was pleased to find this guide on how to do it for fibre.
Switch off shared Calendar Alerts in iOS
The nirvana of being able to share calendars with my family but not have my iOS device pop up with alerts when they have a visit to the dentist or another meeting that I’m not going to has eluded me for some time. I suspect it would be a feature in a release of iOS as I had previously noted that it was an issue for Apple’s employees. I was pleased to eventually find that it is now possible in iOS 7 and 8 when on a recent repeat google search I found How to Turn Off Shared Calendar Alerts on iPhone or iPad in iOS 7 or iOS 8 unfortunately this only seems to work for share iCloud calenders and not if you use Google calenders.
using CUPS under Yosemite Mac OS X 10.10
Since upgrading to Yosemite I found that my CUPS based printer was not working. Looking at the console logs it appears that this is due to an issue with sandboxing in Ysomite. I eventually found one site with a solution which fixed my problem – i.e. relax sand-boxing for CUPS so that it works again http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/forums/viewthread/86495/#652649. This works much better than any of the other methods of dealing with sand-boxing (e.g. moving the ghostscript files or editing the .ppd definition). It does however bypass the point of sand-boxing, thus introducing the risk of s security hole in the system, but until someone comes up with a version of CUPS that supports sand-boxing, relaxing the requirement seems the easiest solution.
Change Time machine backup frequnecy
I’ve recently had problems with the main supply locally tripping over and wiping out my NAS based Time Machine backup. Looking around to try and see if I could resolve this I found a useful article on how to change the frequency of your backups from the default of 1 hour to whatever time interval you like.
Mail.app folders not sorting alphabetically
I managed to accidentally change the order of my folders for an Exchange Server in Mail.app and found it impossible to get them to return to alphabetical order by dragging folders around. I found the following solution on Apple Forums
https://discussions.apple.com/message/11157240#11157240
Basically you need to delete/rename (depending on your back strategy or paranoia level) .mboxCache.plist for the relevant account whilst Mail is not running then start it up again.
Gannt Charts in Excel
I found a really neat way to do Gannt Project charts with Excel and thought it was worth sharing.
Inclusive and Accessible Web Design
Watching BCS Health Scotland webcast with David Sloan “Web accessibility for the public health sector” who has described a very useful resource in terms of the principles of accessibility: Ten Principles of Inclusive Web design.