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mashby

The personal blog of Michael Ashby

Category / software

macOS High Sierra Promo

Upgrading To macOS High Sierra

It’s been awhile since I did a post regarding a macOS upgrade. In fact, it’s been GASP 4-years, so I thought it might be fun to take stock and do a deep dive on how I did the upgrade. So let’s get to it!

The Boot Disk

For starters, I downloaded the new OS and created a bootable install disk on a thumb drive. This way I didn’t have to perform multiple downloads for each machine and I could have a boot disk handy in my “jump bag” when I travel.

On the day that the new macOS was available, I downloaded it to my laptop and then followed the guide on 9to5Mac.com to create the disk on a new 8GB thumb drive I bought from Amazon. The 9to5 guide was great for people who aren’t that comfortable with the Terminal due to the fact that they had a drag-and-drop style that saved a ton of typing.

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Couleurs logo by Laurent Baumann

Colors Is Dead… Long Live Couleurs!

You know how you come across those little utilites that do one thing and do it well? These little gems that you find you can’t live without? Well, there was an app called Colors that was a must have for me and I’m thrilled to learn that it has a successor! happy dance

Colors was a color picker for Mac OS that was designed by Matt Patenaude. What made it unqique was that it lived outside of any graphics utility. It was a standalone app that allowed you to capture colors from anything you saw on the screen. Anyone who uses Photoshop, or Pixelmator is probably familar with the concept, but being able to grab a color from a web page, e-mail, etc., reduces a great deal of friction in your workflow. Continue Reading

Upgrading to Mavericks

Like most Mac users, I was very excited to upgrade to Apple’s latest version of their desktop operating system (OS), Mavericks and chose to immediately upgrade. Well, at least on my laptop. Making the move to the new OS on my production machine was not something that I took lightly, so I waited to see if there were any issues before making the move. After using it for over a month on my Macbook Air without issue, I decided to take the plunge and do a clean install today.

Since my blog has become a mental resource to remind me of things that have happened in my past, I figured I’d put together a walkthrough of the process I went through.

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An Itch I Can’t Scratch

The other day I came across a new app in my daily news feeds that caught my attention. It’s a notes app called Mochi that has one standout feature that my other notes apps are “missing” – tasks. The Bees Are On The What Now? [1] Yeah, I know, it sounds weird, but I think it’ll make sense if I explain my notes workflow.
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Something To Look Forward To

For the past two years, I’ve been lucky enough to make it down to my home town of Baton Rouge, Louisiana for a guys weekend. The RedStick Brewmasters have their annual crawfish boil in April and it’s made for the perfect anchor to getting my buddies together and hanging out. Fresh homemade beer and all […]

Well, It’s Official – I’m Obsolete

Today was the Steve Jobs keynote at the Apple Developer’s Conference and as expected there as a ton of new stuff announced. Unfortunately, now that some of the dust is settling, it looks like a some of my gear is now obsolete. This is a first for me since switching to the Mac back in […]

Momento for iPhone

I have never been particularly good at keeping a journal. Every now and then I get on a kick where I do it somewhat regularly, but more often than not, weeks or even months go by between an entry. As a result, most of my entries are guilt-ridden diatribes attempting to catch up on everything […]

CalendarBar

I love the design of this app. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really fit into my workflow. I’m currently using GeekTool and iCalBuddy to display my calendar directly on my desktop, so this app is a bit redundant for me. I do wish I could figure out a way to style the iCalBuddy display to mimic this […]

SizeUp – The Handiest Little Utility

Today I was knuckling down to get a couple of irritating tasks done and I was struck by how easy it was to manhandle my apps to do by bidding. I grabbed mail.app and with a simple keyboard shortcut threw it to the right side of my screen and then I threw a browser window […]