Answers...

to commonly asked questions.

November 2017

Which iMac should I get?

I need a new iMac. Which one should I get?

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Your choices are 21 or 27”. I prefer the 27” personally. Plus you can add ram later in life with a 27. With the 21, you can only add ram at time of purchase although most people never add ram to their machines these days. I would recommend the 27” lower speed of the 3 configurations. I think it’s listed at $1799. May be too big for your space. I think you are on a 21” if I’m not mistaken. So really comes down to personal preference. You won’t go wrong either way. Next, you’ll want to consider hard drive type and space. (capacity.) Go to the black apple in the top left corner/about this mac/storage. That will tell your the capacity of your current drive. You’ll want as larger or maybe larger than that. Probably 1Terabyte.

Three types of hard drives:
1. Flash (solid state)
2. spinning (old school mechanical)
3. hybrid (combination of 1 and 2)

Pros/Cons
Flash is fastest and most expensive. Spinning drives are cheaper, slower, and more prone to failure. Hybrids are obviously a good compromise. They aren’t crazy expensive. You still get capacity and a modest speed advance.

How to open 2 VLC windows at the same time on a Mac.

I want to run 2 instances of VLC. How do I do it?
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Use apple script editor and save the following command as a script:


on run
do shell script "open -n /Applications/VLC.app"
tell application "VLC" to activate
end run

on open theFiles
repeat with theFile in theFiles
do shell script "open -na /Applications/VLC.app " & quote & (POSIX path of theFile) & quote
end repeat
tell application "VLC" to activate
end open

Backup drive says it's full.

Scotty I got a pop up message that my seagate back up hard drive says FULL.

What do it do now? Last backup will be this morning
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In a backup scenerio, there are two size factors. The source and the target. Your internal computer drive is the source. Your external backup drive is the target. The source should ALWAYS be equal to or greater than the target. If the target is smaller then you can sometimes see that message. If there is other data on the drive in addition to the backups.backupdb folder (like some stuff someone drug over to that drive) then this could also not leave room for the full contents of the internal to backup.

Time machine's job is to fill the drive so this is normal for the external to be full. I would check the backup.backupsdb folder and scroll down to the bottom of the long list. Make a note of the date of the last backup. Go back tomorrow and do it again. If you have a new folder at the bottom of the list with a newer date, you're fine. If the dates of folders stopped several days ago or so, then it may be time to move to a larger drive. We could always also wipe that drive and just start the process over again but it's just nicer to just move to a newer, larger drive.

Apple says the same thing here.
This image is a theme.plist hack