Apple

iCloud Photo Sync stuck - how to force resume

Sometimes it seems that Apples iCloud sync seems to do not exactly the right thing. During initial upload of my photos I multiple times had the issue, that it was not possible at all to upload the photos. When looking at the sync pane of the Photos app, it was something like “18 hours remaining…” but nothing happened, even after two days. The system process responsible for managing the photo upload is called cloudphotosd.

Linux on the 13-inch MacBook Pro Retina

So it’s already been a month ago when I got my new 13-inch MacBook Pro w/ Retina Display. So everyone who knows me could already promise what would happen next: I’d install Linux on it. For this one I once again chose to use my favorite Linux distribution Fedora, which is currently available in version 20. Meanwhile I tried to install Ubuntu but this lead to problems with ACPI, the disk controller and last but not least the hi-res display featuring a pixel density from 227 ppi.

There are some things to have an eye on during the installation process but generally most things are working now so that the system is more or less ready for production usage.

USB issues on the MacBook Pro 2008-2011? The solution!

Yesterday I recognized that the latter USB port doesn’t seems to be broken. I tried to sync my iPad, but it got no connection the the MacBook. Even the dmesg log showed no activity after connecting any device to the USB port. The front USB port worked without any issues. What first seemed to be an hardware issues turned out to be a interesting foible of the MacBook family. To cut a long story short, the port isn’t broken. I found the solution somewhere on the internet but don’t know exactly where by now, so thanks to the original author on this way.

Resolve AppleTV and iTunes Home Sharing visibility issues

There’s at least one case where I can’t confirm Apples motto “It just works!”. Since I’m using my AppleTV (2nd generation), I’m permanently experiencing problems while transmitting data between my Mac running iTunes Home Sharing and the AppleTV itself. Most of the time the Home Sharing resources are simply not visible in the AppleTV’s’ user interface. According to various Apple support items it seems I’m not the only one experiencing those problems, so here’s my solution…