Ever found yourself in a situation where you desperately need a Wi-Fi password that you’ve used before on your Mac, but can’t seem to remember? Worry no more! In this blog post, we’ll show you an easy trick to retrieve any wi-fi password stored on your Mac using the Terminal.
Your Mac discreetly stores all Wi-Fi passwords you’ve ever used, and with a quick command in the Terminal, you can access those passwords in a matter of seconds. Here’s how to do it:
Open Terminal on your Mac (you can find it in the Utilities folder or by using Spotlight Search).
A file system is the component that allows an OS (operating system) read from and write to files on your devices storage. Every OS has its own file system, some of which are more compatible across platforms than others. For example, Mac computers used exclusively HFS+, while the current versions of Windows uses NTFS (New Technology File System). When you connect a storage device formatted in NTFS to a Mac, it is recognized and read alright, but you can’t modify it by any CRUD operation i.e. Create, Read, Update, Delete any files on it – unless you have some 3rd party add-ons installed and configured, and you can learn about them in this article to ultimately enable Mac to write onto NTFS drives.
Although the inability to write to NTFS on the Mac might become quite an issue for Mac newbies, be them first-time computer users or switchers from PC, the solution which is was invented as early 2000s, has evolved over the years as macOS (X) has been updated. The Mac operating system formerly called OS X – last year renamed macOS – can always read & write to PC disks and hard drive volumes formatted in FAT32 – a format which is not quite used any more due to its limitations of 4 GB maximum file size and 2 TB for maximum storage volume, whereas NTFS, free of these limitations, is readable not just by Macs since day 1, but by almost all non Windows-PC systems as well. However NTFS is not writable by default outside Windows due to a restriction brought on by Microsoft. As mentioned, there already are a few 3rd party solutions and workarounds to remove this restriction.
With the release of macOS High Sierra which introduced Apple’s new file system called APFS to be used by newer SSD-based Macs replacing the legacy HFS+, bringing on the ability to write to NTFS formatted volumes has become a little more complicated. Since my article titled Ability to write to NTFS volumes on the Mac published back in 2008 has become fairly obsolete so that the suggested workaround(s) in it are now very difficult if not impossible to apply, in this new, 2018 article, I’ll be explaining some of the best solutions for the need to write to PC volumes a.k.a. NTFS drives as an assertive old-timer. I’ve been using Apple computers since 1985 and have been doing computing cross-platform computing since 1993, and have been using Bootcamp since the year it came out and cross-platform working is at the heart of most of my digital activity.
Read on to find out about free and paid solutions to be able to write to NTFS disks and other storage devices mounted on the Mac.[Read more]
If you are like me, you might be working on the Mac with dozens of windows open at the same time, yet trying to use the computer’s memory in the most economical way given the needs. As an application developer and a WordPress techie who spends most of his time working in and switching between the web browser windows, my IDE, database tools (especially Navicat), and the command line. Also I occasionally use a few applications from the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of products.
Once any Adobe application from the Creative Cloud suite is installed on a computer, Adobe first sets up a set of its mixture (or a hybrid) of ‘agent’ and ‘installation manager’ applications on the system, whose resources they could be consuming extravagantly. These little Adobe CC agent apps are always running and strutting around behind the scenes with GUI-less interfaces, even when you are not using a single Adobe application. And they are only noticeable from the list of background tasks and software daemons. To make things worse, they can be wasting a lot of your CPU time if not also a considerable amount of RAM.
In the first times, I personally did not care much about it, as I thought just hitting the Adobe CC icon (which resembles an infinity symbol) in the menu bar, and then quitting Adobe Creative Cloud from there would just shut it up, and reclaim all the memory and CPU it had been consuming.
Secret Agents also known as UNIX daemons Working in the Background
Adobe Creative Cloud software has a number of undercover agents always running in the background, apparently doing certain deeds of Adobe, even after quitting the application from the menu bar, or even when there is no single Adobe application that is active(ly running in the foreground) or one that you have ever launched. In fact, I have recently come to the realization that quitting Adobe Creative Cloud from the macOS menu bar does not really quit anything except removing its icon from where you last clicked it (in this case, the menu bar).
This can be clearly observed by watching them under-the-hood with the Mac’s Activity Monitor, or more conveniently with the command line bash utility from within the Terminal application.
