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
Category: System Adminstration
Computer System Administration tidbits and tools
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.
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.
Thunderbird Addon features in Mac Mail
Just found a way around not having the virtual identity plugin to Thunderbird on Mac Mail.app, A post on macrumors shows how to set up multiple e-mail addresses with the same account.
Fixing firefox after upgrade
Firefox recently upgraded to 3.6.15 and in the process appeared to mangle all of my add-ons – really very frustrating when they make a significant difference to how I interact with firefox. Fortunately I found that there were a couple of useful fixes available; firstly to clear out the extensions cache and ini files as described by David Moore IT service blog in the article How to Fix Firefox Break Down Add-ons. The second thing was to do a bit of updating manually – some of the add-ons have updated that you can get from the mozdev.org site that haven’t yet made it onto the firefox repository.
Geotagging and EXIF manipulation for photos in Mac OS X and iPhoto
Early Innovations have a great programme for Geo-tagging your photos GPS Photolinker, however because iPhoto store the EXIF data in a separate database that it updates at import time it makes Geo-tagging your photos a challenge; though it may be possible using other tools listed in a thread on Apple’s support Discussions Forum suggests. Another alternative for manipulating EXIF data on your photos is a PERL script by Tom Gidden.
Changing save as PDF locations in Mac OS X
I came across this a while ago and thought it was cool (then when I next needed it I forgot where I read it – so this time I thought I’d post it here to make it easy to get at) you can change the locations you might have added for saving PDF’s in to read something meaningful; also you can create system wide save locations.
Booklet Printing on Mac In Snow Leopard
I was keen to save some paper by printing some stuff as 2-up back to back booklet; fortunately I found an automator printing plugin that does just what I need. CreateBooklet
Mac Pro Audio output switches back to Internal Speakers on reboot rather than staying with Line Out at back of computer
I was having problems with the sound on my mac reverting to internal speakers and not using the line out on the back. Fortunately it seems that this is a problem have had before http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10141072#10141072 and that deleting some config files and restarting has fixed the issue.