As of around September of 2016, the “It’s Gotta Be PC”/anti-Mac guy Eric went to the Dark Side. Yes, it was time to go to the Mac side of the computing world. Was this particularly easy? To go against YEARS of experience and an initial complete dislike for the Mac platform going back to the mid-90s Nortel days? LOL – it was a whole lot easier than you might have thought. As much as I railed against the Mac in my younger days, ongoing experiences with Mac/Windows boxes led me to a lot of interesting insights over the years.
The final straw for the PC Eric was the 2 hour boot time on the PC after a forced update decided to shut it down and slam an update on when *I* planned on being working. After sitting and watching it do nothing for about a half hour, I personally decided that was the end of PC for me. Add this to spending too many weekends doing virus scanning, too many dollars spent on antivirus products, a lot of ongoing worry about infection, cleaning up registry entries, deciding what updates really WERE needed or not needed, wondering why the HELL the thing was so slow in spite of an i7 smoking processor and 16 GB of RAM running Windows 7.
For so many reasons, the time of the Windows PC had passed for me. Had I not been supporting users on the Windows platform for so long, I very well may have already been on the Mac platform – OR the Linux platform. I had worked on the Linux platform in the early 2000’s and been rather enjoying it. It’s difficult though to walk a user through an MS Outlook configuration issue though when you don’t / can’t have a live Windows version of Outlook in front of you. Dual boot scenarios were too much to have to deal with – so I just stuck with the Windows for then.
Knowing that the Windows 10 update was GOING to be forced on me (and having seen it in operation on a laptop), learning yet another iteration of Windows… You know, the Mac OS has NOT really changed that much ever since I saw it way back in the late 90s I don’t believe. They don’t have the virus problems that Windows machines do. We don’t get stories about forced updates. Don’t get a whole LOT of problems that Windows users do. While I used to get service requests for Mac, I knew a LOT of Mac users that really never needed much of anything – unlike almost every PC user I knew who seemed to call me on a semi-annual basis for some repair. This, to ME, indicates that the Mac platform might be at LEAST a bit superior for usability. Add that to my machine shutting down at a whim at least once a week at the worst possible time. And I now run a Mac OS. Now it IS a hackintosh – a Mac built on my OLD PC hardware – that firebreathing i7 with 16 GB of RAM – and it cooks.
I’d been saying for the last couple years though, when my WIndows machine went belly-up, I was going to Mac. And there it was – on a sunny day in October – I ended up in the Best Buy buying a Mac. I’ll leave that whole adventure and how I ended up with a Hackintosh for another day.
This may end up being an ongoing small clip area. But at the moment, this is a couple of tidbits!
Flush Mac DNS cache
Handy when you’re moving websites around! Enter this in a term window and enter…
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache;sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder; say cache flushed
Change default screen capture format
You can change it to almost anything but I don’t want it to be PNG anymore – if I am going to use it in web, it’s likely going to be JPG format. This will save me a step! Here’s the original – https://www.lifewire.com/change-location-and-file-format-for-mac-screenshots-2260844 – Again, for this fix, go to a terminal window.
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
Just a Terminal Window
How neat – the concept of not having to poke in the Regedit app, terminal window, .ini files or other stuff like that. And, knock on wood, installing an app thus far has not been a “Sorry you have the wrong version of <fill in the DLL or .NET file>. You need to update.” pile of BS. All the weird little fixes I’ve seen so far live in a terminal window – period.
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