crashplan backup for mac has always been a poor performer with bloated options. now they have discontinued the "home" cloud backup service and move to a totally business platform. It's still a crummy service in my opinion. Uninstall it with this little app. a few clicks and it's gone. You're welcome. 

Here's a quick one. 

The Situation: you have a million screenshots on your desktop. You curse mess and want to take control. Great! Set a folder to keep all the screenshots automatically, rather than turning your desktop into unwieldy monster.

The Fix: 

• make a folder on your mac where you want to save your screenshots. Name it whatever you want. 
• open the terminal.
• paste in this command: defaults write com.apple.screencapture location
• don't hit enter yet. after the the word "location" enter a space then drag and drop the new folder you created for the screenshots into the terminal window. That will auto fill the path to the folder, and should look something like this (if the folder is on the desktop titled "Screenshots"): 

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/yourusername/Desktop/Screenshots​

• now hit enter!
• next, enter this command and hit enter to reset the system to activate it: killall SystemUIServer

That's it! Now when you take a screenshot it will be saved to the folder you created rather than the desktop. You've tamed the beast. Pat yourself on the back. You're welcome. 

The MacOS setup assistant will only run once. If you've created a user and you're unhappy with it, or you want to migrate another user over you might want to reset the OS so the SetupAssistant runs again on next boot. The setup assistant differs from the Migration Assistant by allowing you to choose a specific restore point from a time machine, rather than just the last backup. This is great if you need to go back to a stable OS before you had problems. Here's how:

• Launch Terminal from the Utilities folder
• copy in: sudo rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
• Enter your password.
  
• Restart your mac.
  

On next reboot the system will start the Setup Assistant again. You're welcome. 

I'll keep this short and sweet. Malwarebytes has for many years been the go to tool for Mac users to easily find and remove malware from you Mac, FOR FREE. Recently they released version 3.0 which is now a subscription based model and only runs in a trial mode. They clearly went the route of building a user base with a free tool then switched it on us. 

Welp, here's the last FREE version of Malwarebytes for Mac that will remove malware for FREE! Of course, don't accept the upgrade if prompted to do so. Enjoy. You're welcome. 

This is going to be a quick fix. I've encountered a few clients that have a rare problem where they try to log into their iCloud (via system preferences) or log into the App Store and they are greeted with an error stating "This action cannot be completed. Try again." 

You have bad system permissions. Why? Looks like it's associated with an OS update. 

Fix:
Open terminal and paste in each line separately (3 lines), hit enter after each one, then enter your password. Line two and three wont prompt for your password after you've entered it into the first line. 

1. sudo mkdir -p /Users/Shared
2. sudo chown root:wheel /Users/Shared
3. sudo chmod -R 1777 /Users/Shared

Restart your mac. iCloud and App Store will work. You're welcome. 

I've run into some problems with Apple Photos, the new photo app that replaced iPhoto. I had a need to run an older version of iPhoto on my MacOS system. This copy is downloaded directly from the App Store. ENJOY.

Update 10/9/18 - verified to run on Sierra 10.12 and High Sierra 10.13. 

Background: Recently, Apple released the replacement app to iPhoto called Apple photos. When you opened photos for the first time your entire iPhoto Library was "migrated" (converted) into a second library called "Photos Library." First, let me say that although it looks like your library has been duplicated, it hasn't. The new library is a hard link to the old library, so the data is not doubled. You can delete the old library and the link is broken, so delete, or don't delete, it doesn't matter.  BUT more importantly, many people wanted to run the migration again and couldn't, they got a message that looked like this:

What is this? "Cannot open migrated library The content of the iPhoto Library "iPhoto Library" has already been migrated to Photos. Open Photos to view your library or use a compatible version of iPhoto to open this iPhoto Library."  I'm not going to show you how to open this library in iPhoto, there are many other guides online, I'm going to show you how to run the migration to Photos again. Why?

• Your initial migration was halted, stalled, failed. (Power outage, liquid spill, OS crash, cat drama, whatever).
• Photos has missing photos, empty photos, videos that don't play. 
• You want to move the library to another mac and convert to Photos again.

If for any reason you're trying to rerun the migration here's what you do:

• Right click the iPhoto Library you want to re-migrate.
• Click "get info." 
• Open the arrow for "Name & Extension."
• Remove the word "migrated" from the file name.
• Close the window.
• Open the library again and Photos will start the migration over again. 

Why didn't these simple instruction exist on the internet? IDK. You're welcome. 

Today I launched my plex media server running on my 2007 MacMini running MacOS Lion 10.7.5 and a big orange button said "UPDATE AVAILABLE." Seeing that, I decided to stop using my brain and click it in excitement for all the potential new greatness that awaited (even tho my server ran rock solid already). What happened after the upgrade terrified me; a finder error stared at me saying this version of Plex Media Server is not capable of running on Lion, you must now have Mountain Lion. Shit, aaaand now my daughter is screaming at me to play her Little Einstein videos.

Good news, I DO use my brain from time to time to cover my ass. Here's a the last version of Plex Media Server that runs on MacOS Lion 10.7.5 system. 

​You're welcome.