Tagged macOS

How to Troubleshoot Steam Stuck at “Reserving Space”

This is one of the odd balls I found with Steam client. As the client hasn’t seen major improvement since release, apparently it’s a common knowledge Steam has marginal support of exFAT, unreliable even at the best of times. Back in the good ol’ days when I used HDD as the one and only drive…

How to Setup Expanded Storage for Steam

Recently I moved the m.2 SSD from a NAS to a Mac. A NAS running on Linux was better served with expanded memory, so I thought to use the SSD to expand the internal storage of my workstation. Upgrading process was straightforward, but there was a problem moving games from Steam Library to the newly…

PCalc Spiel

Have you read any iOS, iPadOS, or watchOS rumors for this year? Behind all the ‘throw the pasta on the wall’ schtick, there was one I couldn’t laugh about. It’s the calculator app. Calculator apps on any Apple devices were either too old it was a place holder item for announcement of App Store, or…

Native Support, Bootcamp, and GPTK

As much as I appreciate native Mac supports in PC gaming, there is something to be said about the overall quality of the support. Some games are simply not optimized. Its performance is either subpar or some advanced settings are simply unavailable for native versions. Some games run into glitches that are unique only to…

How to Connect to Network Drive on Boot

This one belongs in the “there is an app for that” department. If you are an avid NAS user, chances are most of your drives are already connected via network. And that means, on every boot up, you will need to manually login to the NAS on Finder to mount the drives. One might call…

Intel Mac, DirectX 12, and GPTK

Apple Silicon is more than a mere brand name for Apple branded chips. It’s now a platform that is synonymous with every tools that come with it. This, in turns, has a side effect of “killing off” Windows compatibility softwares, for the lack of more broader term, on Intel Macs. Not that it doesn’t have…

Popular App Bartender Buy-out Raises Security Concerns

Probably the most unwanted surprise for many macOS users. The popular macOS app, Bartender, is indeed sold to an unknown third-party. Speculations seem to lead that the new owner is an iOS app publisher, but that is the least of our —or mine— concern. Not only Bartender already needed critical permissions to run, if you…

How to Set Time Machine Quota on NAS

I don’t recall Time Machine having a quota feature when it was originally announced back in OS X Leopard. Most users would use any hard drive lying around, and if needed, can set up a pseudo-quota by creating a volume in Disk Utility. Preface This method requires to setup a new destination. When I was…

How to Band-Aid Fix SteamAPI Initialization Issue on macOS

I do want to make it clear that this isn’t the usual ‘how to fix’ tips post. Instead, I’m hoping to log what I’ve learned for indexing purposes. I do have a band-aid solution for the time being, but I wouldn’t call this an ideal fix. Perhaps someone will pick up where I left off,…

How to Fix Greyed Out Files and Folders on macOS Finder

This happens more often with network drives than physically attached ones, and I, for one, had this issues happening with Synology NAS. A file or a folder that is most likely not damaged and most likely was accessible previously, is now inaccessible on macOS Finder. The real odd ball is that other devices and apps…

How to Connect MTP Devices on macOS

Media Transfer Protocol, or MTP, is something Microsoft came up with in the days of PMPs and PMCs. If the history teaches us anything, it is that most of the remnants from MP3 eras were fragmented and chaotic patchwork of technologies to make that one proof of concept to just barely work. The significance of…

How to Fix Time Machine Error 45, 5999 or SMB Connecting Error

One of my benignly controversial piece on how to fix Time Machine authentication error, while the drive is hosted on NAS, always gathers wrong kind of attention. Network problems are bound to be difficulty to troubleshoot; with at least 2 computers in the mix, just the very number of suspects double. But with added October…

How to Boot in Recovery Mode without Apple Keyboard

Mac has quirky keyboards policies. Until the operating system is fully loaded, the machine will not take inputs from Bluetooth keyboards, again unless it’s been cleared —meaning, Apple Keyboard. Now the most obvious solution is to use a wired keyboard. But if you are on a wireless keyboard via USB dongle, it might strike as odd why the keystrokes would not register. This is a short band-aid solution for users like myself.