Cloud storage is hot. Large numbers of GB’s for free, many providers, many security breaches. Ever tried running a powerful server 24×7 on a high speed internet connection for free? Not possible. So the new and independent providers will either disappear or ask more money. What about Google, Microsoft and Dropbox? With Google it’s the same storage as used for Gmail, with the same conditions: “you’re the product”. The Google business model is clear and I’m okay with that. For Gmail there aren’t many alternatives, but for cloud storage there are. Microsoft’s OneDrive gives you currently 15GB for free. That’s a lot. Since Microsoft wasRead More →

Many blogs are like parrots. Copied content and lots of advertisement. Fair enough, that’s the Internet in 2015. However, this gets annoying when some alledged smart solution is presented and copied all over the place, effectively hiding the way the product owner meant it. For example, doing a clean upgrade of OS X. Googling around might lead you to believe that you need an USB stick for this, make it bootable, copy the right files into it etc. etc. Do you seriously think that this is what Apple had in mind? A clean OS X upgrade via Recovery Partition or Internet Recovery is not possible.Read More →

Only the Windows 8.1 Pro and Enterprise versions support the Remote Desktop service aka Microsoft Terminal Services. So, nice title but misleading? Well no, I only didn’t mention the additional software component to make this work. It’s called VirtualBox, it’s free and it’s multi platform. It’s virtualization software that you can for example use to run Windows on an Apple laptop, one of the the most used scenarios I guess. Virtualization software emulates a standard set of hardware such as USB and network interfaces, harddisk, cd-rom and display. What-if the display emulation would support the remote desktop protocol and is independent from screen size? And don’t botherRead More →

I recently followed a discussion on booting from a Time Machine volume. One participant was 100% sure that when the Time Machine volume did not contain a separate, bootable partition, booting from the volume was not possible. This is wrong. Misunderstanding this might have big consequences, after all we are talking about backups here. The OSX bootloader supports booting from files, when the file is stored in a known filesystem, i.e. the bootloader must understand the filesystem.  This file is then handled as a partition containing a filesystem. Time Machine stores OSX’s hidden recovery partition as a file on the Time Machine volume. When running Time Machine for the first time, aRead More →