The Eclectic Light Company

There are many species of pine tree found across Europe, and even in the flesh they can extremely hard to tell apart.

APFS volumes can be protected by encryption in several different ways, which can lead to confusion.

Apple has released yet another update to XProtect, bringing it to version 5363, for all Macs.

Once Heracles was able to wear his lion-skin and wield his club again, when he had expiated his sins in servitude to Queen Omphale, he resumed his adventurous lifestyle.

Apple has overnight released last week’s update to XProtect, bringing it to version 5362, for all Macs.

Apple silicon Macs are designed to boot almost as securely from external disks as they do from the internal SSD, and that makes setting up a bootable external disk a little more complicated.

Apple has just released security updates bringing Golden Gate to 27.0.1, Tahoe to 26.7.1, and Sequoia to 15.8.1.

One hundred years ago today, on 28 September 1926, the major watercolour artist and illustrator Helen Allingham died.

I hope you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 379.

Each of the main security services in macOS such as XProtect relies on data normally stored in separate files on the Data volume so they can be updated directly outside full macOS system updates.

It seems extraordinary that the paintings of John Singer Sargent were all but forgotten after he died in 1925, and weren’t revived until the late twentieth century.

Plate spinning is one of the most thrilling juggling acts.

This weekend I’m heading into the dark side of visual art, that makes or breaks painters and determines history, the unseen influence of critics.

Susan Watkins (1875–1913) had such a tragically brief career that her art was soon forgotten.

XProtect Remediator version 163, released on 18 September, has changed its behaviour, and can’t be run manually any more.

A multiplex narrative painting contains representations of two or more moments in time from a story, merged together in a single image.

In my initial exploration of Apple Intelligence Reports (AIR), I pointed out that the bulk of most AIRs are privateCloudComputeRequests, metadata for requests processed by PCC, whose main contents are attestation bundles.

Until the nineteenth century, most oil paintings intended to be seen by the public concealed the brushstrokes and other marks made by the artist during their creation.

If you’ve used LogUI in macOS Golden Gate, you might have noticed that something was missing: for reasons known only to itself, macOS 27 wouldn’t show the Search menu contents, although the menu itself worked fine.

Trimming is important in SSDs as it ensures they can erase unused memory blocks ready for re-use.

Willows are a number of subtly different species with long, narrow leaves that most commonly grow close to water and thrive in wet land.

Apple Intelligence now supports three modes of AI: entirely on-device, using Apple Foundation Models (AFM), in which data doesn’t leave the Mac; off-device, using cloud models running on Private Cloud Compute (PCC), either on Apple servers or Google Cloud;

With his twelve labours for King Eurystheus completed, Heracles was absolved of his sin of killing his wife Megara and their children, and was granted immortality by Hera and Zeus.

I hope you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 378.

There’s more to storage management than freeing up space.

This weekend’s journey along the north French coast started yesterday at the ferry port of Calais, and had almost reached another major port of le Havre, where we resume in the company of some of Europe’s finest landscape painters.

Before reading any further, glance up at the subtitles below the name of this blog, where you’ll see my policy about AI content here.

Almost a month ago I took a trip along England’s Channel coast in paintings.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation. 1: Hunting party came in 2003 and has travelled solo for the last 21 years. 2: After the dog died, this scout was the only Microsoft app bundled in Mac OS.…

Since macOS Catalina in 2019, macOS has started up from two volumes in its boot volume group.

Apple has released an update to XProtect Remediator for all macOS from Catalina onwards, to version 163.

Today the best-known artist to die in the Franco-Prussian War is the French Impressionist Frédéric Bazille, but he wasn’t the only promising young painter to fall victim to that brief conflict: also killed was Alexandre-Georges-Henri or just plain Henri R…

It has been well over five weeks since I started tracking changes in free disk space of my Mac mini M4 Pro using DeltaFree.

Apple has just released its regular update to XProtect, bringing it to version 5360, for all versions of macOS.

A multiplex narrative painting contains representations of two or more moments in time from a story, merged together in a single image.

Spotlight search has been unreliable for several years because of a bug that misidentifies the type of some plain text files, so failing to index their contents.

One of the many revolutions brought by the nineteenth century was the development of psychology, and the insights it and the early neurosciences started to give into perception.

The first public release of macOS 27.0 Golden Gate has brought changes in security data such as XProtect.

Like all living organisms, trees are designed to reproduce and propagate their species.

These brief notes are intended to guide those who are pondering whether to upgrade to Golden Gate, or have just done so.

Apple has now released the first public version of macOS 27.0 Golden Gate, together with security updates taking Tahoe to 26.7, starting its first two years of security-only support, and Sequoia 15.8 starting its final year.

When Heracles returned to King Eurystheus with the mares of Diomedes, he should have had just two remaining labours to complete, making a total of ten.

I hope you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 377.

Since Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in 2009, Macs have supported two different types of keychain.

Although Camille Pissarro had been forced to return to mainstream Impressionist style by 1890, to support his family financially, the remaining Neo-Impressionists were a close and thoroughly anarchist group.

For the novelist, surprise is a matter of verbal engineering and timing, to ensure the reader turns to the last page still locked in suspense.

The late nineteenth century was a period of great turmoil in European politics.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation. 1: Alpine water with excessive transparency rounded the corners. 2: The last of the 32 is the low point, but converted Fusion Drives. 3: The last to AIM, de…

Next week, with the first public release of macOS Golden Gate 27.0, we will see how our apps fare with the features and changes it brings.

Several of the American Impressionists are now little-known, but one of the most promising of them, Dennis Miller Bunker (1861-1890), has become almost completely forgotten.