Mac OS X – Export Google Chrome Browsing History to CSV File from the Terminal

This post is just for my own personal reference, but you can use it too if you like. Just make sure to change the “UserName” below to whatever that user’s home directory is. I’ve mashed the code together from the following sources, changed it to export in csv format (making it easier to import into Excel or Open Office for further manipulation), made it into a one-liner for sake of ease, put the data in ascending order based on last URL visit date, and converted the dates into human readable format. Continue reading “Mac OS X – Export Google Chrome Browsing History to CSV File from the Terminal”

Mac OS X El Capitan – Cannot Restart into Boot Camp Partition

Ever since the 10.11 update, I couldn’t force a restart into my Windows Boot Camp partition on my Mac from the terminal, I would get an error message “Could Not Set Boot Device Property: 0xe00002bc”.

After a bunch of riggamaroll and dicking around with the USB keyboard not being detected for freaking ever, I was finally able to get booted into recovery mode. In the past, I have been able to hold the “Alt” key to select a boot device from the boot menu, but for some reason it wasn’t working any more on my Windows keyboard. I never could get the USB keyboard to show up until I was fully booted up into the OS, so eventually I swapped it out for a name brand keyboard and then it worked.
Continue reading “Mac OS X El Capitan – Cannot Restart into Boot Camp Partition”

Mac OS X – Force Spotlight Search to Index a Network Folder

I’ve had some ongoing issues with some Mac users at work recently who were complaining about the length of time that it was taking for Finder to open up some of our network shares. At first, I thought that the issue may have stemmed from our backups that happened to be running at the same time, but after I figured out how to make those processes run in the background and only when the system was idle and that the problem was still prevalent, I had to investigate further.

Upon further inspection, I found that the folders in the network drives they were accessing and sometimes taking up to a minute or more to populate, in most cases had several thousand files and subfolders. After the initial loading of the folder, everything was still easily accessible and readily available after that if you left that directory and came back into it, so chalk it up to a folder caching/indexing issue. Continue reading “Mac OS X – Force Spotlight Search to Index a Network Folder”