Its always something… Our Bosch SHU8805 is usually meticulous at cleaning dishes, but suddenly we noticed that the upper rack wasn’t getting as clean as the lower rack. I love solving a crime that involves broken things. Upon opening the dishwasher, I removed the top rack and noticed the back wall of the dishwasher had a sort of halo about a foot across around the location where water is suppose to enter tubing for the top and lower spray arms, as shown below:

I figured the gasket must be worn, as the spray arm is constantly removed and inserted into the fittings on the back wall. Being the exceptionally cheap bastard that I am, I could have replaced the upper spray arm (00359976) and tube (00350321) with these parts, as described by the nice woman at e-Spares:

http://www.bosch-home.com/us/store/product/SprayArmAssembly/00359976

http://www.bosch-home.com/us/store/product/Tube/00350321

But, no, I’m too cheap to spend $80. Instead, I entered my hellhole, unkempt shop area in the basement and proudly emerged with some bits that were suddenly useful, including two standard garden hose gaskets and two rain barrel gaskets that were just barely bigger than the hose gaskets (you might be able to pull this hack off with 2-4 total garden hose gaskets). To do the repair, I popped the rain barrel gaskets on to the Tube fittings first, as shown in the picture above, and then slipped the garden hose gaskets on. After popping these gaskets on to the tube fittings of the dishwasher, the top rack is now getting clean again – woohoo – cheap bastard wins! And I spent more time writing this useless entry for some schlep as cheap as me.

Ok, and I probably wrote this so that when the hose gaskets fail miserably due to the hot water and strong detergents, I’ll know which parts to quickly order.

Thanks to Bosch for making all their parts readily available and to e-Spares for the slick video.

My macbookpro7,1 has had an RAM issue manifest a couple times since 2015. It is now rocking 16 GB of RAM and the lower RAM slot has stopped working twice now. This behavior was usually foreshadowed by the Mac not waking from sleep and running slower.

Both times, I seemed to be able to resuscitate the lower RAM slot by using a white eraser and rubbing it on the socket pins on the board and the RAM card itself. I’m pretty sure this issue has occurred, because I expose my macbookpro7,1 to temperatures below zero F daily during the winter for about 3 hours per day during my daily bike commute. I don’t give the Mac much time to equilibrate to room temperature when I arrive at my destinations, so I’m assuming some moisture may be condensing on the RAM connector pins. Seems I shouldn’t be so rough on my gear, but the eraser trick has brought it back.

Suddenly when I was visiting my own website (to edit my blog), Safari was being forced to a secure website on my own domain. I had been editing my blog a couple days ago on the plane and didn’t finish an edit – my connection with gogo dropped and left the update in limbo.

Figuring this might have something to do with it, within Safari I went to Safari->Clear History… I tried deleting one day of history, but the problem wasn’t resolved. Knowing the issue happened a little over 2 days ago, I then tried to delete “Today and Yesterday” and bam! Problem solved and I was now able to see all content when I visited my own website.

The Calendars.app on my Mac hasn’t worked correctly in a few weeks, the calendaragent process would run wild and sap my battery. Lucky for me, the temporary workaround was to not use Calendars.app on my Mac and my iPhone’s calendar worked fine.

After reading Apple’s Forums (follow the tip from “ST Munees”) and an older Chris Breen Macworld article I was able to fix Calendars.app on my Mac. I can elaborate more later, but following those tips got mine running again and calendaragent is behaving again.

If you enjoy using older Apple AirPort routers and use more than a couple in your house, this post may be for you. Ridiculously enough, I’ve got an old AirPort Extreme and three AirPort Express (AE) routers in the house all sharing out the same SSID, “SchwieNation”. The multiple AE routers aren’t so much to extend the massive network, but to give the occupants AirPlay for streaming music.

The AirPort Extreme router nestled away in the wiring closet in the basement is creating a 5 Ghz N-only network and the lowly AE routers scattered throughout the house are set to non-bridging mode and sharing out the same network SSID over 2.4 Ghz. Lately though, I noticed that just about all of the devices in our house were joining the same AE router in the back room and it was causing significant network congestion on our location network and reducing internet download bandwidth.

Devices in our house are running macOS Sierra, which Apple deprecated the ‘airport’ command line’s ability to join a specific BSSID on your network (this means, the ability to join a specific wi-fi router on your network). In Sierra, it seems a Mac just joins the router with the strongest signal.

All reports on the web indicated that the workaround is to create separate SSID’s or network names, one name for your 5 Ghz network and a separate name for your 2.4 Ghz network. I didn’t want to do this, as I have several older 2.4 Ghz wi-fi internet of things devices like security cameras, garage door openers, etc. and I didn’t want to have to tell all of them to join a separate network SSID.

The workaround I came up with was to use open the AirPort Utility and connect to the AE router that had all the wi-fi clients in the house. After connecting to it, I hit the Network tab and then placed a check in the box for “Network Access Control”. Then I clicked “Timed Access Control…” and entered in the IoT devices that I wanted to have access and blocked all other users – doing this allowed the legacy devices to connect, but rejected the newer 5 Ghz devices:

Now all the newer devices automatically connect to the AirPort Extreme on 5 Ghz with improved bandwidth (about 10x better throughput in our unscientific testing) and the legacy devices are still happily connected to the older AE router at 2.4 Ghz.

Problem solved!

If you’re a TMO user, you might already know that you can get an hour of free inflight wifi, but you can get a little more time if you know another TMO phone number and you have another device available, like a laptop or tablet. Even non-TMO customers with a wifi capable device can get access as long as they know a valid TMO phone number.

Test it out:

1. Fire up Safari on a Mac (or another fine browser on another device)
2. Change your User Agent to  “Safari – iOS 10 – iPhone” (“Safari – iOS 10 – iPad” might work too)
3. Point your wifi to join “gogoinflight”
4. Paste the following address in your address/goto bar, but do not press “return” just yet: http://airborne.gogoinflight.com/gbp/tmoValidate.do?flightNumber/DAL884/flightOrigin/SAN/flightDestination/MSP/tailNumber/N917DN/macAddress/g3:2k:ad:bc:16:63/clang/en_US/client/tmo
5. Replace the red text with information from the device you wish to activate and information from the flight you are on. The correct tail number and destination/arrival codes don’t seem to matter, but I’m assuming the MAC wifi address does so transfer it carefully from your wifi (PC users you’re on your own, but Mac users go to the Apple Menu->System Preferences…->Network->Wi-Fi->Advanced… and copy the Wi-Fi Address at the bottom of the window)
6. After updating the link, load the address by pressing “Return”.
7. Follow the website prompts and enter a valid TMO phone number and the CAPTCHA, as shown below:

*7-27-2017 UPDATE* Worked on Delta flight 1876 from PVD to DTW. For step 2, used the following link:

http://airborne.gogoinflight.com/gbp/tmoValidate.do?flightNumber/DL1786/flightOrigin/PVD/flightDestination/DTW/tailNumber/N917DN/macAddress/F8:1E:DF:EB:05:33/clang/en_US/client/tmo

My father-in-law might be proud to hear me recommend: considering recording the tail number of the next plane you board, in case it has Gogo Wifi available.

Just noticed that syncthing on my work computer was no longer syncing with my Macs. I used the brew package manager to install syncthing and syncthing-inotify on my Mac, but it appears that automatic upgrades are disabled and must be initiated through brew – may follow up on this later to see if it can be automated.

To upgrade syncthing and syncthing-inotify through Terminal.app and brew, the following commands worked:

brew upgrade syncthing

brew services restart syncthing

brew upgrade syncthing-inotify

brew services restart syncthing-inotify

We happened across a macbook6,1 that only had 2 GB of RAM and an old spinning hard drive. Knowing the machine just needed a faster internal drive and more memory to be completely usable, we quickly focused on potential upgrades.

For cost purposes, a 240 GB Kingston SSDNow (SUV400S37/240G) replaced the old hard drive and  the RAM was upgraded to 8 GB, but it took some research on the RAM to figure out what would work best.

Others have reported that 8 GB Crucial RAM kits will work in the macbook6,1, including:

• CT2KIT51264BC1067
• CT2C4G3S1067M
• CT2K4G3S1067M

We purchased this listing on Amazon and at the time we purchased it the last two part numbers, above, were part of the listing; however, the present Amazon listing only seems to include part number “CT2K4G3S1067M” and when our package arrived, the label on the RAM was “CT2K4G3S1067M”. We installed the 8 GB kit on October 2016 and it has been working fine ever since, leaving our macbook6,1 much faster and without kernel panics.

The only slow down my son whines about is the machine not sleeping and waking as fast as it use to, but I told him if this is true, it makes sense. The machine now has to write 8 GB of RAM to the SSD whenever it goes to sleep and it reads this same amount from the SSD when it wakes up. I don’t notice any slow down after the upgrade, but if you believe my 11 year old has noticed this, then the reason above may be in play…

The App Store seems to handle several apps and keeping them updated, but other apps I just don’t want the App Store to bothering me about.

If you have a similar issue, open up Terminal.app, paste in the following command, and press enter:

softwareupdate –list

It will take a while to churn out a list, it will churn out something like this:

BCS-MBP-2:~ brad$ softwareupdate –list

Software Update Tool

Copyright 2002-2015 Apple Inc.

Finding available software

Software Update found the following new or updated software:

* macOS Sierra Update-10.12.3

macOS Sierra Update (10.12.3), 1024181K [recommended] [restart]

* iTunesXPatch-12.5.5

iTunes (12.5.5), 113476K [recommended]

If you notice the title of the software app you no longer want to be bothered with, copy it and insert its name into the following Terminal command:

softwareupdate –ignore iTunesXPatch-12.5.5

Unfortunately, softwareupdate –list doesn’t seem to be showing third party software apps at the moment – I’ll report back if I figure this out, otherwise, dear readers, please drop a comment below.

No secret, I help friends update the performance of their old Macs. Aside from bumping RAM or upgrade operating systems, I will often recommend the replacement of a spinning hard drive with a modern solid state drive (SSD). Using apps like SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner, its easy to back up their data and then install a fresh system on a new SSD, which helps to recreate the recovery partition.

After migrating user accounts and data back to the new drive, I like to enable TRIM, if the SSD supports it and most do. To do so, open Terminal.app and paste in the following line:

sudo trimforce enable

You’ll be warned that data loss could occur, but I have yet to find an issue with dataloss on any SSDs I’ve done this with. Press y to continue. That’s it.

If you want to see the TRIM status for your boot drive, execute the following Terminal command:

system_profiler SPSerialATADataType | grep 'TRIM'

Hopefully yours says “TRIM Support: Yes”. Or, if you’d prefer to view the status in a Mac application, you could select the Apple icon in the upper left corner of your screen, choose About This Mac->System Report…, and then choose SATA/SATA Express and scroll down until you see TRIM Support on the right hand pane (note: you also might need to select the drive you’re curious about in the upper right hand pane).

** Update 11-9-2020 **

For those running NVMe drives, this Terminal command should show if TRIM support exists:

system_profiler SPNVMeDataType | grep 'TRIM'

And responding to first comment, below, if your drive responds to this code with “TRIM Support: Yes”, we know trim force worked based on an Apple engineer’s response.