Craig Peterson joined us back in February. We neglected to announce him in a timely manner because we’re horrible people. That’s OK though, as he’s now one of us.

In contrast to the rest of the SRE team, Craig’s superpowers come in the form of development. He’s been focused on making our homegrown monitoring system, Bosun, better than all of the monitoring systems that have or will ever exist. As Bosun is open source, you can practically hover over Craig’s shoulder and watch his day to day work. In fact, I encourage you to. I’m sure Craig won’t mind in the least. …

(Question ID 66948)

This is a popular question with many similar or overlapping questions. Browsing the various linked and related questions I noticed the information on this subject is limited and fragmented. Most answers are simple software recommendations and do not touch upon any underlying issues. This article is meant to help fellow superusers appreciate the assumptions we take for granted and serve as a springboard for those that need to dig deeper to solve their problem.

Most people who are looking to place an ISO on a USB drive want to put any ISO on a USB drive and make the drive bootable (also known as making a live USB or installer USB from a binary image file). Examples include: …

In a previous blog post, we examined the history and future of the various DC Comics cinematic franchises that make up what I (apparently alone) am calling the DC Cinematic Multiverse. But DC isn’t the only company to have a massive tangle of cinematic universes under its belt. It’s long-time rival Marvel has been even more prolific when it comes to adapting their material for the large and small screen. Unlike DC, though, Marvel gave up control over much of it’s catalog during the dark times (the 1996 bankruptcy and subsequent reorganization), resulting it several different  …

Indrek asked this question on digital signature devices, such as the ones delivery drivers get you to sign for your packages. While he identified EU directive 1993/93/EC as appearing to regulate, he had some concerns around what should be done to ensure these signatures are as valid as paper counterparts.

sam280 pointed out that:

and

Which implies that the existing regulations don’t cater fully for this use case, and this is borne out by the accepted answer by D.W.

D.W.’s answer discusses the problem of law here but sums up with a very down to earth conclusion: …

Imagine someone has a question about physics, say “How can I figure out the acceleration due to gravity?”

A physicist answers with “You can throw a bowling ball from various floors of a multistorey building.” The physicist knows in their head the experiment they would perform. It’s so obvious to them that they skim over the details and say what they see to be the key points, and assume that the person asking will figure the rest out.

The problem with this is that a non-physicist has asked the question, and they don’t know the details that the physicist skimmed …

Now that El Capitan OS X 10.11 is out, here are some excellent resources available to help you in researching what is new, learning how to take advantage of the software and work through any issues you might encounter.

El Capitan: TidBITS Answers Your Questions

El Capitan: The MacStories Review by Alex Guyot

El Capitan: The Ars Technica Review by Andrew Cunningham & Lee Hutchinson

Complete OS X El Capitan review by Rene Ritchie

Apple’s OS X page

Apple’s Support Page for El Capitan – my personal productivity favorite is SplitView where I can focus on two apps and nothing else for a while. …