Another heinous Flash problem? Update Flash on your Mac now!

Today brings word of an important update to Adobe Flash that fixes “critical vulnerabilities” that could let hackers take control of your system. The new version is 21.0.0.182, and it’s available for immediate download from Adobe’s web site.

Flash, and fake Flash installers, have become major ways that malware developers introduce corrupted payloads onto personal computers. So you need to be very careful when you use Flash, when you update it, or when you respond to pop-up messages that tell you to update Flash right away. 

If you already have Adobe Flash installed and you want to make sure you’re using the latest version, follow these simple steps.

  1. Click on the  menu and select System Preferences.

Sys pref

  1. Click on Flash Player.

Flash player

  1. Click on the Updates tab.

Updates

  1. Click on the Check Now button.

Check now

 

If an update exists, the Flash Player system preference will begin to prompt you to download and install the latest Flash update. If no update exists, the Flash Player will tell you Flash is up to date.

Overload game is coming, for fans of Descent

More exciting news for old-school gamers: Overload is coming from Revival Productions. What’s more, it’s coming to Mac too.

Overload is from the original talent behind one of the most legendary 6DOF (six degree of freedom) shooters ever made: Descent. Originally developed by Parallax Software and published by Interplay (published for the Mac by Interplay’s Mac brand, MacPlay), the game put you in maze-like tunnels inside asteroids where you had to combat killer robots. The immersive graphics and quick action gameplay thrilled fans when it first came out in the mid-90s, and it spawned numerous sequels and countless imitators.

Overload follows the same basic design and gameplay principles as the original Descent, updated for modern game tastes and, of course, thoroughly updated to accommodate modern gaming systems.

Overload is currently being crowfunded through a Kickstarter campaign which is already off to a rousing start — $61,000 (of $300,000) pledged in less than a week. The initial flurry of support has caused the developers to change their minds about their first stretch goal: Support for Mac and Linux. They’re supporting Mac straight out of the gate, now.

KS noFooter 02

Obviously there are risks with crowdfunding — you’re not guaranteed the product is going to be finished when it’s promised, nor are you guaranteed the product is going to be released at all. But if the idea of playing an updated Descent gives you some joy, check it out.

Endless Sky: Old-school Mac gaming fun

Back in the 1990s I started my own gaming site — a web site dedicated specifically to Mac games. For the most part, I’d play games, post reviews, and move on to the next one. But a few of them were really addictive. Ones that I’d come back to again, and again, and again. Games that never seemed to get deleted off my hard drive.

At the top of my personal addiction heap was a series of games from Ambrosia Software called Escape Velocity. The game series launched 20 years ago this year.

Escape Velocity is a role-playing game that puts you in the pilot’s seat of a starbound vessel. You travel to different star systems, buying and selling cargo, ferrying passengers and special cargo. You could become a pirate, plundering other vessels for their cargo and goods, which you could then sell the next time you docked at a trading post.

The game combined a detailed story line with a huge world map to explore, the ability to upgrade your ship with new capabilities and a lot more besides, which made it terrific fun to play and replay over and over again.

Now Escape Velocity as back. This time it’s an open source project you can download straightaway from Github (or Steam, if you prefer, where it’s still free).

Fight

Endless Sky isn’t an exact copy of Escape Velocity, but uses the same gameplay mechanics and design, right down to the 2D sprite engine for the game’s core graphics.

As an open source project there’s still a lot of work to do on it, including refinements to game scripts and more. But it’s fantastic fun. I’ve already spent more than a dozen hours playing it and am having a hoot.

So if you miss Escape Velocity or if anything I’ve said sounds interesting, check it out.

Getting a .bzvol error with Backblaze? Creative Cloud may be to blame

Some time in the past day Backblaze customers started seeing a peculiar error message pop up on their computers:

Screen Shot 2016 02 12 at 11 07 11 AM

 

Turns out the problem is related to Adobe Creative Cloud, according to this support document from Backblaze. Adobe Creative Cloud appears to be removing the contents of the first hidden folder it finds on the root directory of the hard drive. And unfortunately for most Backblaze users, the first folder is .bzvol. What does the .bzvol directory do? According to Backblaze:

Inside this hidden directory is a tiny file that identifies this hard drive for the rest of time.

Directions are included on that link to fix the problem – you simply have to tweak Backblaze’s backup preferences and everything should be cool. At least until Adobe FUBARs things again:

In some cases, the issue will reoccur if you update Adobe Creative Cloud or sign in and out of their app. 

2013 Mac Pro with video issues? Call Apple

If you’re using a “trashcan” Mac Pro — one of the new turbine-shaped models released since December 2013 — you should be aware of a new “Repair Extension Program.” MacRumors has the scoop.

Graphics cards in some of the Mac Pros made between February and April 2015 have exhibited problems with distorted video, no video, freezing and other issues.

Because it’s a Repair Extension Program, you’re covered even if you don’t have AppleCare on the Mac Pro.

An SSD can make your old Mac feel new again

If you have an older Mac that still uses a hard disk drive and you’re looking to keep it alive for a while longer, I strongly recommend considering replacing that drive with a Solid State Drive (SSD) instead. It’s one of the best instant performance improvements you can make to your Mac, and it’ll keep it going for a while longer.

Merc electra pro 3g gall2

Hard drives are squarely 20th century technology. They work a bit like record players: There’s a disc inside that spins around a central spindle, like the record spinning around, but instead of needle playing a groove on the record, an arm with a device at the end of it can read and write to the disk magnetically. They’re slow, noisy, use lots of energy (and generate heat), they’re heavy, and mechanical.

SSDs have become standard issue across the Mac laptop line since the introduction of the Retina MacBook Pro in 2012. They store data similarly to how information is stored on your phone — by writing data to chips which remember the data even when they’re turned off. By using silicon to store the information instead of a physical disk, you can read and write information much, much faster. 

SSDs are a popular upgrade option for do it yourselfers — a number of companies make their own mechanisms, including many which are designed to fit into the same space made for a laptop hard drive (commonly a 2.5-inch drive). These third-party SSDs use the same Serial ATA (SATA) connections as a hard drive, so it’s just like replacing a hard drive. Only soo much faster.

There’s a downside to SSDs: They’re more expensive per gigabyte of storage than a hard drive. You can buy a 1 terabyte hard drive for less than $100. An SSD with that capacity will start at about $250, if you shop around and find a good sale. Having said that, the price on SSDs has come way, way down in recent months, so you can find some good values if you look. Even a year ago, a 1 TB SSD was well outside the budget range of many of us.

I’ve recently replaced the hard drive on a mid-2009 MacBook Pro with a 128 GB SSD, and the difference in performance is nothing short of amazing. Even with its small RAM footprint, this MacBook runs well enough to be a daily driver. What’s more, Macs of this age are pretty serviceable, too: Putting it in involved a single tool (a Philips #00 screwdriver) and required about ten minutes.

Check web sites like iFixit.com and Macsales.com for more info on installing SSDs. OWC (macsales.com) is also a good place for Mac users to buy them.

Should I upgrade my MacBook to El Capitan?

RR writes:

I have a 2009 Mac Book.  Will I get left behind if I don’t upgrade to El Capitan before the next upgrade comes out? All works well now.

Yeah, you’re going to be left behind. But you’re working with a six year old Mac – you should probably expect to be left behind. 

A lot of it depends on how your Mac is configured. Let me speak frankly: Your Mac isn’t getting any faster, and Apple’s moving the goalposts. Things like Metal in El Capitan won’t work on your older Mac. It uses Bluetooth 2.1, which makes it incompatible with some of the Handoff technology introduced in Yosemite that requires Bluetooth 4.0. 

Those are things that you’re not going to be able to patch around; those are just hard limits to what your Mac can do and where Apple’s moved OS X in the years since your Mac was released.

Bluetooth and graphics aren’t the only thing that’s changed. Today’s Macs (except for some iMacs and Mac minis) are almost all using solid state (PCIe-based SSD) storage, which makes a huge difference in overall performance.  What’s more, even the base-model MacBook Air comes with more RAM than your Mac did back in the day – your Mac probably equipped with 2GB RAM unless you ordered it with more or have upgraded it since then.
 
I have an 09 MacBook – a white polycarbonate model – that runs Mavericks great. I’ve upgraded it to 8GB RAM and replaced the internal hard drive with a 240 GB SSD from OWC (macsales.com). I have no intention of upgrading it to Yosemite or to El Capitan, because it works fine with its current configuration. I’ll probably run it into the ground this way and retire it when it stops working or when it’s no longer usable.
 
Your Mac was about $1000 new. You can spend a few hundred dollars, open it up and upgrade the RAM and replace the HD with an SSD — something you can’t do with today’s Macs — and kick the can down the road a bit. But you’re still not going to end up with a Mac that’s as fast or as well-equipped to manage the future as today’s models. A $999 MacBook Air is going to run circles around that thing in many ways, thanks to much faster storage and better integration with modern OS X technology. Plus you’ll get a full factory warranty and eligibility for AppleCare too.
 
El Capitan offers a host of improvements that make it a worthwhile upgrade, but only if your hardware is able to keep up. Reliability, interface adjustments and improvements to Handoff alone make it worth considering, but Apple’s plowed a lot of effort into making El Cap more productive than ever by streamlining how apps work and improving end-to-end connectivity.
 
It’s a good reason to replace your Mac with a newer model as the budgets allow. I fully understand that not all of us are in the position to buy a new Mac whenever the need suits, so as in all things your mileage may vary.
 

2009 10 21macbookreview 7

Ten things to do with a new Mac

If you’ve never owned a Mac before, you’ve probably heard a lot about how much easier they are to use than PCs. But that doesn’t mean that everything is going to come naturally.

In my latest piece for Macworld, I break down ten of the things new Mac owners should start to do as soon as they can — everything from backing up your Mac using OS X’s built in Time Machine software to learning keyboard shortcuts to help make yourself more productive.

Ten things to do with your new Mac

 

Mac family stock 100635113 large

Why Apple hasn’t refreshed the Thunderbolt Display

Apple’s 27-inch Thunderbolt Display is its only external monitor. It’s compatible with all Macs, but it’s increasingly long in the tooth, and it’s due for a refresh. It’s been due for a while, and it’s creating frustration for some Mac owners.

The Thunderbolt Display offers up a finely-calibrated 27-inch IPS screen mated to a single cable that connects it to your Mac’s Thunderbolt port. It also sports four built-in powered USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire 800 port, Gigabit Ethernet and a Thunderbolt port for you to daisy-chain another Thunderbolt device, like an external hard disk drive (or even another display).

 

71LICZ5s9IL SL1500

A single, thin, Thunderbolt cable connects the display to your Mac, and if you use a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro, a MagSafe cable lets you power your laptop up directly from the display.

So there’s a lot to recommend the Thunderbolt Display to Mac users, outside of the premium $999 price tag.

Unfortunately, the Thunderbolt Display is also showing its age. Apple’s design language for the device is antiquated – it looks a lot like an iMac of the same vintage — 2011 — but iMacs were revamped in 2012 to be dramatically skinnier and lighter. 

In the four years since the Thunderbolt Display was introduced, Apple’s incorporated Thunderbolt 2 across the product line. It’s also upgraded USB 2.0 to USB 3.0 (and, most recently, to USB 3.1), and it’s replaced MagSafe with MagSafe 2. (A MagSafe 2 adapter is included with the Thunderbolt Display).

Thunderbolt 2 allows for 4K resolution (3840 x 2160 or 4096 x 2160), but the Thunderbolt Display is still stuck with WQHD resolution – 2560 x 1440 pixels.

Making the Thunderbolt Display higher-resolution would sacrifice compatibility with older devices, but my experience is that most people who are buying these things are getting them for the newest Macs — Macs where legacy connectivity isn’t an issue.

Of course, the new hotness in Apple’s product line is 5K resolution, now a standard feature of the 27-inch iMac. 5K resolution over Thunderbolt will have to wait until Thunderbolt 3 makes its debut, but that will narrow the list of compatible Macs even further.

I’m hoping that Apple will release a 4K Thunderbolt 2 display without waiting for the world to get to Thunderbolt 3 — that’d be a nice refresh, and would surely provide a bit more peace of mind to Mac users dropping a thousand bucks on a new display.

Upgrading iMac RAM

Reader BW is planning to upgrade the RAM in his 2013 27-inch iMac and asks:

Can I use an uneven number of RAM slots or should I just buy 2 4GB RAM boards?”

Outside of a few early Mac Pro models, no Mac requires you to upgrade RAM in pairs. Each of the four SO-DIMM sockets on your 27-inch iMac’s motherboard can support either a 4 GB or 8 GB SO-DIMM, for maximum of 32 GB.

Matched pairs of memory can work faster than uneven SO-DIMMs, but you will gain more performance from a larger memory configuration than you will from a smaller, paired configuration.

So if you’d like to keep that other slot open for future upgrades, my recommendation is to go with an 8 GB SO-DIMM to boost your iMac to 16 GB total, leaving the four slot open for a possible upgrade to 24 GB at some point in the future, if necessary.


366696 apple imac 27 inch late 2012

Further down the road, the best bang for your buck for future upgrades may not be adding more memory. Unless you ordered this model with a Fusion drive, I’d recommend replacing internal hard drive with an SSD. SSDs cost a lot more per gigabyte but a ton of perfor