Our thinking

October 4, 2011

Quick Tip: Boot your Mac in 64 bit mode

I've been tuning Photoshop performance on some decently specced Mac Pro workstations. They're older machines than the current model and by default don't boot in 64-bit mode. Whilst Photoshop runs in 64-bit mode under a 32-bit kernel, you will get...
Read More
September 10, 2011

Picocom 1.6 binary package for Mac OS X 10.6

I'm finding I need to do more stuff talking to a serial port, and picocom seems to be the best terminal emulator I've found for Mac OS X. I was previously using screen, which is shipped with Mac OS X and...
Read More
July 9, 2011

Putting my money where my mouth is…

I've always thought that there is a place and a time to use the cloud, and to be honest, Automatica has been using Google Apps for the past two years to host email and calendars. Overall the experience hasn't been...
Read More
June 7, 2011

Set up a transparent Apple Software Update Server

Update - Jan 2013 - this is quickly going to become obsolete, with Apple's release of Server.app version 2.2 for Mountain Lion, this enables a transparent caching service. If you network clients are running Mountain Lion (maybe Lion as well,...
Read More
May 30, 2011

How to get a real IP address on Telstra Next G

The Telstra Next G 3G internet service is fast, works well in a lot of areas around Australia and can be sorted out fairly cheaply these days. One big downside to the service however is that by default you receive...
Read More
May 26, 2011

Console not updating or asl manager taking 100% CPU

Here's how to restart the Mac OS X 10.6 log managers after removing asl data. Corrupt asl data will either cause the logs in Console.app to not update or the aslmanager process to consume 100% CPU. Open the Terminal application...
Read More
April 29, 2011

Bad Sectors on a hard drive

I was recently discussing hard drive errors with someone and they came up with the idea of zeroing out a hard drive to fix the bad sectors. Zeroing out the disk may appear to fix the issues for a while, but...
Read More

Our Blog