Mac OS X 10.10.4, which is released on June 30, 2015 and the upcoming 10.11 “El Capitan”‎ will allow the user to enable TRIM on third party SSDs. They include a command trimforce to make this happen. If you don’t want to upgrade and still want to stick with 10.10.3. There is still a way to do it. I found a guide that showed me how to enable TRIM to on 10.10.3 to support TRIM without disabling kext signing or patching the system file IOAHCIFamily.kext by just adding one Apple signed system file AppleDataSetManagement.kext from El Capitan.
Continue reading Yosemite SSD TRIM Support on 10.10.3+ Without Patching System Files →
Mac OS X’s PDF encryption still uses 128-bit RC4 which is compatible with Adobe 5.0 and later. 128-bit RC4 is a weak encryption algorithm and people generally don’t recommend it. I use Adobe Acrobat X to encrypt my PDF files instead and choose the strongest AES256 algorithm compatible with Adobe Reader X or later. Note that there is AES256 encryption in Acrobat 9, but it has security flaw which makes it easier to brute force passwords than Acrobat 8.
Continue reading OS X Is Still Using an Old Encryption Method for PDF Files →
Sometimes after you connects a usb external hard drive to Mac, you notice that the hard drive keeps on spinning yet nothing shows up. It could be because of the hard drive was not ejected properly last time it was plugged in and the system is running fsck(File System Check) on the background. This can take a while especially when the hard drive has lots of data. Unfortunately, there is no indications of this happening except in Activity Monitor showing a running fsck process. This can make people believe that something broke. This has happened to me and my friends before and we all thought that we had broken hard drives. It wasn’t until I plugged my hard disk to a Windows computer and found out the disk was all right. I then started to troubleshoot the issue and found out a running fsck process in Activity Monitor when the disk is uncleanly ejected. After a while when that process finished running, the disk finally showed up in Finder.
Apple should improve the UX of this by making some sort of progress indicator for the File System Check running on the background so that people won’t get confused and thinks that they have a broken hard drive.
It seemed like Apple is attention to details nowadays compared to before. Here is how system info look like after the last Mac OS X 10.10.3 update. The columns on the rightmost side is too narrow and I have to make the window very wide for it to be readable. I tested in another computer and it is the same.
Continue reading OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 UI Bug After Update →
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