Stop Spotlight Stalling & Beachballs When Searched in Mac OS X with External Drives

Spotlight is the lightning fast search engine built into the Mac, but some users may have noticed that once Spotlight has been summoned and a file search query is beginning to be typed, OS X freezes up, stalls, and beachballs for anywhere from 10-30 seconds for seemingly no apparent reason. If you’re in a quiet room, you may even hear a little spin up sound as this happens as well.

Source: Stop Spotlight Stalling & Beachballs When Searched in Mac OS X with External Drives

How to Restore a Mac from a Time Machine Backup

While Macs have a great reputation for being stable and rarely experiencing major issues, the reality is that sometimes things can go wrong. Typically this happens when either a hard drive fails or an OS X system update goes completely awry, but if you have set up Time Machine backups on the Mac like all users should, then you will discover that restoring an entire systems hard drive from that Time Machine backup is really quite easy.

Source: How to Restore a Mac from a Time Machine Backup (OS X Daily)

Link: How to Adjust Volume Settings for Individual Audio Devices and Sound Effects in OS X

If you’ve ever been showing a presentation or a video, you know how embarrassing it can be when system sounds such as alerts, errors, and notifications interrupt your audio, especially when you’re projecting to a PA system or loudspeakers.

In OS X, there’s a couple of cool little options that you can apply to your audio settings so that, if you are say, listening to your music while you clean, or showing a movie on your big TV, then you won’t be interrupted by Frog, Funk, Bottle, or any of the other system alerts.

Full article here:
How to Adjust Volume Settings for Individual Audio Devices and Sound Effects in OS X (How-To Geek)

Link: Creating SD Card Images For Raspberry Pi in Mac

The Raspberry Pi is a new breed of cheap, single use computers that were just made for making projects. People routinely build them into standalone devices or use them to control other devices. They are almost like a disposable computer.

In fact, Pi is a small but capable Linux computer, making it an easy transition from the Mac’s UNIX from a programming and command line stance. Running software is mostly a simple matter of obtaining SD card images from around the web and burning them to SD cards.

The biggest problem you face is that the SD cards need to be in a specific format, a boot sector that is visible in FAT32 and the body of the disk which is in the Linux format. This is not something which is easy to do on the Mac without specific knowledge software to do the low level image burn that we need.

In this article, we show you what software to use for this job on the Mac and how to burn SD card images.

Full article here:
Creating SD Card Images For Raspberry Pi in Mac (Make Tech Easier)

Link: Create a TimeMachine Backup Storage on the Raspberry Pi

TimeMachine is the way to backup your data on Mac systems. The backup and restore procedure work nicely out of the box with very little hassle involved. I used to backup my data on a local USB disk for some years. However, backups to a USB disk require you to connect the disk, otherwise no backups will be performed.

Apple will sell you the Airport Time Capsulate, which allows for remote backups. But it is also possible to configure your Raspberry Pi to offer remote backup capabilities for the TimeMachine. Turning your Raspberry into a backup target for the TimeMachine is as simple as installing an AFP server on it. In this blog post, I’ll walk through the process of configuring your raspberry to be a remote target for TimeMachine backups.

Full article here:
Create a TimeMachine Backup Storage on the Raspberry Pi (blog.lobraun.de)

Link: DD Utility – Easily Backup and Restore Disk Image Files In Ubuntu

The legacy DD is a command line utility for UNIX like operating systems. DD stands for Data Description and the utility empowers the user to copy and convert files but it is a command line utility without any Graphical User Interface (GUI). DD utility can copy and convert simple files, device drivers (e.g for CD ROM, LAN, Speakers, HDD etc) and can access boot sector information that is why it can be used to prepare bootable backup and restore images. It performs the conversions to and from ASCII to EBCDIC, furthermore, it performs the byte order swapping as well. The name of the utility i.e DD seems to have been extracted from IBM’s Job Control Language (JCL) where it appears in a number of command statements.

This article is about a variant of DD command line utility with Graphical User Interface (GUI) i.e dd Utility. It is partially cross platform that is it works on UNIX like operating  Linux Ubuntu and Apple’s Mac OS X.

Full article here:
DD Utility – Easily Backup and Restore Disk Image Files In Ubuntu (LinOxide)