A Geek Goes Flying

Want to back up my MacBook Air to the NAS, which is running NFS and Samba. The existing guides I found weren’t complete. I ham-fisted my way to a solution that seems to be working. This is on High Sierra, the most recent operating system this old laptop will officially run. (Since verified to also work as far back as Lion.) I skipped using the graphical Disk Utility to setup the sparsebundle, and created it from the command line (in this case, 300GB to back up a 240GB internal SSD): $ sudo hdiutil create -size 300g -type SPARSEBUNDLE \ -nospotlight -volname " MBA2012TM " -fs "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" \ -verbose /Volumes/ nas / Time\ Machine / MacBook-Air-2012_TM .sparsebundle Then I mounted the disk image: $ open  /Volumes/ nas / Time\ Machine / MacBook-Air-2012_TM .sparsebundle Then I tagged it as a Time Machine eligible drive: $ sudo tmutil setdestination -a /Volumes/ MBA2012TM / # Under 10.7, omit the '-a' And then went into the Time Machine cont...

Okay, so, I have this working - not 100% seamlessly and not quite as it should, but it does work. I had do download Bluetooth Explorer for Mac OS 10.7 (linked from the Hideez documentation ), and go into Utilities → HCI Controller Selection and manually specify the Cambridge Radio device: Once that was done, I could go into the Bluetooth Setup Assistant and pair the Air 75 with the MacBook as normal (hold down Fn-1, Fn-2, or Fn-3 to select a Bluetooth profile; the left side light will blink blue when the keyboard is ready to connect, and the blinking will be faster when it’s ready to pair). A stumbling block: I’ve punched in the below terminal command multiple times and the switch to the USB Bluetooth adapter never “sticks” across reboots. Option-clicking the Bluetooth menu item shows the address 00-1B-63-47-6A-4D, which comes up as an Apple device when I search . After I switch using Bluetooth Explorer, it lists 00-1A-7D-DA-71-03, which shows up as “cyber-blue(HK)Ltd.” $ sudo nvram bl...

Building on my experience getting a reasonably usable Lion install going , and finally getting Linux up and running ... I wiped the 120GB SanDisk drive and installed Lion first, partitioning the drive in two and setting the second partition up to be “free space.” I had kinda borked the install the first time around, and could not figure out why the USB installer was booting straight into the “Installing” screen and then throwing an error: “There was a problem installing ‘Mac OS X’. Try reinstalling. Rebuilding the USB installation media, and zeroing and repartitioning the hard drive, had no effect. Turns out I needed to zap the PRAM (start up the machine holding down Command-Option-R-P). I then installed Lubuntu in the unused space, with a 200MB /boot/efi FAT32 partition (with the “boot” flag set), and a 1GB swap partition. Everything seems to work great, I can boot between the operating systems by holding down the “Option” key at startup. Best of both worlds. I get the...