How to make your own Fusion Drive

Fusion Drive is a utility that combines an SSD and traditional hard drive into a single storage space. Your Mac then automatically manages where data is stored, moving files and apps between the SSD and HDD depending on how often they're used. It's a great compromise between SSD's high speed and HDD's large capacity.

While Fusion Drive is officially only supported on an iMac or Mac mini purchased with an SSD and HDD combination, it can be set up on any supported Mac. Macworld published a useful guide back in 2012 on how to do this and after a few minutes in Terminal, you'll have a fully working Fusion Drive set up and ready to use. 

Aperture to Lightroom Migration Guide

Back in June, Apple discontinued development of Aperture. A move that wasn't all that surprising considering how long it had been since it had received a major update.

While there isn't anything wrong with continuing to use Aperture, the lack of updates will mean that any outstanding bugs or new features will never be worked upon, so many are now switching to Adobe Lightroom. 

Aperture Vs Lightroom has published a comprehensive migration guide, going far beyond Adobe's own PDF migration guide by covering everything from metadata to flags and labels. 

Restore the Power Key's Pre-Mavericks Behaviour

The release of Mavericks brought about many changes, though one that has been unwelcome to some was the altering of the Power key's default behaviour. Prior to this version of OS X, pressing the Power key would bring up a dialog box asking you to select whether you'd like to Restart, Sleep or Shut Down the Mac.

Now that pressing the key puts the Mac to sleep, it's become a hard habit to break for those that have used the Mac platform for many years. Fortunately, Mac|Life explain how to change this behaviour back using a simple command in Terminal. 

New Ebook: Mac Administration Basics

If you’re responsible for the configuration of tens, if not hundreds, of brand-new Macs then you’ll probably know how time consuming it can be to get them all set up. The process of setting up a user account, installing any required software and applying all of the available updates on each and every Mac before handing them to users can be both laborious and horribly inefficient.

Mac Administration Basics brings together six of our previously published guides for easy reference, incredibly useful when wanting to deploy, troubleshoot or configure Macs at home or in the workplace.

Members of The Instructional can download this for free by using their unique coupon code during checkout. 

Contents

  1. A Closer Look at System Information
  2. Reset a User Account's Password with an Apple ID
  3. High-Speed Data Transfers with Thunderbolt
  4. Build & Deploy OS X Images with AutoDMG
  5. How to Re-Run the OS X Setup Assistant
  6. Encrypt an External Disk or USB Stick with a Password

Offsite: How to Free up Space on iOS

Bradley Chambers has a bunch of great tips on freeing up some space on your iOS device, especially useful for those of us on 16GB devices who are frequently getting close to their capacity. 

While some of the tips may seem rather obvious (for example, deleting apps), there's a lot of great information about spring cleaning to reclaim storage space that you may not even realise was missing.