The Eclectic Light Company

The French Impressionist who was most influenced by Camille Corot’s paintings of trees was Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), who had been born and brought up on the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas, in a mixed Portuguese Jewish and Creole family, of Danish nationality. When at boarding school in France he showed himself to be an able artist, and at the age of 21 he travelled with...

Now a major part of Apple’s services, iCloud was born out of the near-disaster of its predecessor MobileMe in October 2011. MobileMe had become known for its unreliability and poor syncing since its introduction in 2008. Within a week of its launch, Apple claimed that iCloud had 20 million users, although many of those would have been iPhone rather than Mac users, and most wo...

Greatest of all classical Greek heroes was Heracles, also adopted by the Romans under the Latinised name of Hercules. While lesser heroes like Jason had short series of labours or tests of their mettle, Heracles was challenged by no less than a dozen, and had additional adventures before he was taken up to Olympus as a god.

As with all the best classical heroes, Heracl...

I hope you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 374. Here are my solutions to them.

Five flavours (1999 iMac in five colours), a balanced arm worthy of George Carwardine (iMac Flat Panel of 2002, featuring a balanced arm similar to that inve...

Long before APFS, Mac OS X introduced the concept of purgeable space in storage, that currently occupied by files that could, when necessary, be deleted and used as free space. The bulk of this used to be caches and other files that were a convenience not a necessity. When APFS introduced snapshots that are used in Time Machine and other backups, they too were added to purgea...