My simple fix was to restart my Mac. Googling this issue, it seems like fast forward playback of any videos on the Mac has been an on-again-off-again issue for years. The “most unfortunate” solution offered was hosted on YouTube where I couldn’t see the solution in 2 seconds of fast forwarded playback. But the offered solution is accurate – force quit the coreaudiod service using Activity Monitor.

Here’s the solution described in text and augmented with video.

The biggest gotcha is joining the correct wifi network name. For me, my reset AirPort Express was advertising a network of “Apple Network”. But if you follow steps 6 and 7, you have to change the name to “Apple Network” and append the last 6 characters of the AirPortID to “Apple Network” so it looks something like “Apple Network 1a2b3c”. Once that’s done, your Mac should be talking with the AirPort Express.

Now fire up the AirPort Utility 5.6.1 Launcher (skip the update notification) and you should see your AirPort Express available for configuration. Made a mistake? Reset the AirPort Express and start over.

On a related note, the original 802.11g version of the AirPort Express does not support bridge (aka client) mode according to Apple.

The saga started in January when I received my MacBook Pro charger and charging cable. A few days later, another USB-C dongle showed up. Now in April, my USB-C dongle life is full with the ThunderBolt and Ethernet adapters.

This past week, our receiving department informed me that I had a package. I went to pick up my new MacBook Pro and found this.

Yup, that’s it. Whenever I order a laptop, I always buy a spare power adapter, and that’s what arrived, not the actual MacBook Pro. No word when that’s arriving…

But then you end up with this Purgeable space that isn’t living up to its name. See that cross hatched section? That’s the purgeable space weighing in at 104 GB. The actual free space is that blank section at 32 GB.

I’m trying to restore a Time Machine backup of a virtual machine, and that single file is roughly 55 GB. But when I start the restore, my Mac complains that 23 GB of space is needed to complete the restoral. Doing the math, 32+23=55 GB makes sense, but there’s all that purgeable space that can easily cover the additionally needed space. So what’s up with that?

I’m trying to see if I can deactive Sierra’s Optimized Storage which I’m hoping deactivates the Purgeable space, immediately making it free space.

According to this Microsoft Office for Mac blog post, the database has been replaced with SQLite that runs its own maintenance as needed. When fixes are needed, SQLite takes care of them silently says the post.

Canon Office Products LiDE220 Document Scanner

HooToo 7 Port USB 3.0 Hub with 2 Smart Charging Ports

Wow, that USB 3.0 hub is originally priced at $180?!?!

I can say that the GM version runs adequately on a mid-2007 iMac with 6 GB of memory. I won’t be taking advantage of all the El Capitan features on this aged iMac, but performance is okay for an eight-year old machine.

I always felt BackBlaze was involved with the slowdown but hey, offsite backups are worth a speed penalty right? But it never really made sense. Even with online backups complete, things were still slow as BackBlaze sat idle. Looking at the activity monitor, all the RAM was consumed and sometimes, the bztransmit process would utilize 100% of the CPU.

Finally, a Google search lead me to the answer. BackBlaze and Mac OS X’s Spotlight were essentially nagging each other to no end, making my Mac Mini crawl along. As backups occurred, BackBlaze would log the changes, and that would then trigger a resource-intensive Spotlight index process. As more files were backed up (and logged), the Spotlight index would launch again and again and again, overwhelming the Mini’s resources.

So the answer (that wasn’t already configured in my BackBlaze setup)? Exclude BackBlaze from Spotlight. That’s it. Immediately after making the Spotlight exclusion, my Mini came to life, much faster than ever before. What a loser! I should have researched this previously instead of waiting all this time.

Here’s a few more Spotlight exclusions that may help out even more.

Yes, I’ve gotten rid of music files, transitioning to the cloud via iTunes Music Match. I’ve pruned through my Downloads folder. Every quarter I offload my photo library to an external drive and start anew. But still available drive space got smaller and smaller. Even with 5 gigs of space at the start of a day, I would inevitably get a low space warning by the end of the day. What and why I’m not sure, but there has to be a better way.

Replacing my stock SSD with a bigger one is one option, but hardware surgery on an Air is not something I want to attempt. Instead, check out CleanMyMac 3. This Mac OS X app does exactly that – it cleans your Mac painlessly and thoughtfully. Start with the default Smart Cleanup and let the app scan your drive. The first run may take awhile, but trust me, you’ll be pleasantly pleased with the findings.

CleanMyMac categorizes its cleanup into six sections:

1. System Junk
2. iPhoto Junk
3. Mail Attachments
4. iTunes Junk
5. Trash Bins
6. Large & Old Files

After the scan is complete, you can simply click on the Clean button to recover much needed space. Or you can investigate the individual sections to get more comfortable with what’s getting cleaned.

I started with cleaning the System Junk that includes caches, log files, language files, and other miscellaneous app data. Then I cleaned out iTunes Junk that included things I didn’t realize. A partial iTunes movie download was taking up 2 GB of space and those old iPhone and iPad backups, wow. I had several of these that were over a year old – 8 GB right there! Poking through the Large & Old Files, I discovered I had an old Mac OS X update installer sitting on my drive taking up 1.2 GB.

While I haven’t cleaned through everything yet, I’ve already recovered 20 GB of space, and I’m simply amazed. And even better, while the app is not free, it’s currently 50% off at $19.97 for use on a single machine. Definitely well worth it, and CleanMyMac 3 also includes additional utilities like an uninstaller and routines to run through maintenance, privacy, and extensions. Yes, there are other apps that do similar tasks, but by far, CleanMyMac 3 is the most comprehensive and the most elegant.

You’re still not convinced? Download the free trial version and decide for yourself. The trial version allows full scanning of your Mac but will only delete 500 MB of cruft. If you want to be free of the gigs of junk, you’ll need the full version. Just say yes, simply yes to CleanMyMac 3.

And there I was in that familiar position, not seeing my external Western Digital drive power up. Minor problem I thought, just a failed power supply or drive case, I’ll just get a replacement. So I went for the Icy Dock Blizzard that’s highly rated but “ugly as sin.” After extracting the WD drive and enclosing it in the Icy Dock, my Mac wanted to format the supposedly uninitialized drive.

Uh oh. That drive was my photos drive. It contained my master set of iPhoto libraries over the years. Gigs of stuff. Gone.

But there was Time Machine (on a separate Seagate external drive), retaining a full copy of those gigs of photos. Overnight, I restored a replica of the data onto another Seagate drive. Whew!

On a related note, I also checked my off-site storage with BackBlaze. I couldn’t find a backup of this particular external drive. Then it dawned upon me. About a month ago, the BackBlaze software kept warning me that one file on my photos drive couldn’t finish the backup process. In a move of pure dumbness, I removed the drive from BackBlaze’s service to silence the error message. By doing so, I also (inadvertently) told BackBlaze to remove all previous backups of the drive. I’ve since corrected this configuration mistake.

Now, I’m highly considering a third arm of my backup strategy to include cloning with Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner. Normally, I’d use this type of cloning software to make bootable drives, but now, I’m considering scheduling the cloning of my photos drive to another external drive. So then, I’d have a local Time Machine backup, an offsite backup with BackBlaze, and a clone of my photos. Oh wait, Amazon Prime is now offering unlimited cloud-based photo storage. Hmmm, four backups should be enough, right?

Remember times past when the sales of iPods led to Windows users switching to Macs? I wonder if a similar situation will occur with the Apple Watch and the iPhone. Because you need an iPhone to link with an Apple Watch, will this spur more iPhone converts as the Apple Watch gains momentum?

And before you pooh pooh the starting price tag of $350 for the Apple Watch, just remember how much iPods used to cost.

• March 2002 – Original (non-touch) Wheel 10GB $499
• September 2003 – 20GB and 40GB for $399 and $499
• September 2006 – iPod Video 30GB, 80GB for $249 and $349

iPod purchases led to purchases of $1000+ Macs, so could a $350 Apple Watch lead buyers to a $650 (unsubsidized) iPhone 6?