For Speed, Reliability and Security, Wi-Fi is Good. Ethernet is MUCH Better.

When we built our house in 1996 I took the opportunity to install all the “low-voltage” wiring myself. Before the insulation and sheetrock went up on the walls, I ran speaker wire for the living room surround sound and five other audio zones, additional phone cable for IR pickups in each zone and Cat5 Ethernet cabling everywhere I thought I might need it. Of course, now there’s wiring in the walls I’ll never use and I’ve had to run a couple of others to places my original plan didn’t include. Cloudy crystal ball aside, I’m glad I spent the money and made the effort. Especially on the Ethernet cabling. Wi-Fi technology has progressed geometrically over the past twenty years with theoretical speeds exceeding gigabit levels, but even the latest and greatest Wi-Fi gear can’t approach the real-world performance of a good, old copper wire.

So, why spend the time and effort to point this out? Because this concept has been lost on today’s PC consumers. Wi-Fi has gotten so much faster and so easy to set up that it’s good enough for most users. It has effectively replaced Ethernet as the default networking method. So much so that Apple no longer includes built-in Ethernet on any portable machine it sells

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How to Verify/Repair Disk Permissions in El Capitan

The new GUI for the long-time Mac staple Disk Utility in El Capitan no longer includes buttons for Verify or Repair disk permissions. Apple obviously believes that since El Capitan includes the new System Integrity Protection (SIP)* (that prevents changes to critical system files and apps) that giving users the capability to check and/or fix disk permissions is no longer necessary. Well, that may be true for the vast majority of Mac users, but you and I don’t quite fall into that category, do we? People like us who install OS X on non-Apple hardware or add non-Apple cards and drives to our machines often need to turn off SIP to do the low-level monkeying we are apt to do. Never fear. It seems all Apple has done is remove the buttons from Disk Utility’s GUI. The functionality remains, albeit only via the command line. These two commands get the job done just fine:

diskutil verifyvolume [your drive designation]

diskutil repairvolume [your drive designation] 

For [your drive designation] use the OS X mount point ( ie. /Volumes/Macintosh HD ) or device designator ( ie. /dev/disk0s1 ). This information is available via the Disk Utility app. Simply open Disk Utility and click on the volume/partition you want to work on.

That’s all there is to it. Verify and repair disks ‘til your heart’s content and enjoy all the ascii goodness of the Terminal!

*Note: If you'd like to turn off System Integrity Protection altogether, I've posted instructions here.