Guides — Maxim Beregov

Ventoy Multiboot USB: One Stick for Linux and Windows

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

One stick, a dozen systems, no more re-flashing.

What Ventoy is

A boot stick is usually made for a single image: Rufus, balenaEtcher or dd write the whole ISO, and to install another system you have to overwrite the stick. Ventoy works differently. It partitions the stick once: a small partition with the boot loader and a large one (exFAT by default) for your files. You copy ISO images onto the large partition like photos, into any folders. When you boot from the stick, Ventoy finds every image and shows a menu: pick one and its usual installer starts.

Windows 11 Without a Microsoft Account: Enterprise and LTSC

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

Instead of hunting for a new workaround every year, pick an edition that doesn’t need one.

Home and Pro: a Microsoft account is required

Per Microsoft’s requirements, Windows 11 Home and Pro for personal use require an internet connection and a Microsoft account during initial setup. For years people got around it:

oobe\bypassnro — a command on the network screen (Shift+F10) that added an “I don’t have internet” button;
start ms-cxh:localonly — opened a local account creation window;
a fake email address, after which setup gave up.

Microsoft is closing them one by one. The bypassnro script was removed from preview builds in March 2025, and in October 2025 the company announced that it was removing “known mechanisms for creating a local account” in setup because, it said, they skipped critical setup screens. What worked on last year’s image may not work on a fresh one.

Your Own Debian Live Image: Boot It and SSH Straight In

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

Stick in the port, power on — and you’re at that machine’s console from your own laptop.

Why bother

A stock Debian or Ubuntu live image boots a desktop and waits for someone at the keyboard. To reach it over the network you have to sit down at the machine, install and start an ssh server, set a password and find the address. Your own image does all of that by itself:

kernel_task High CPU on a Mac: What It Is and What to Do

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 16:00:00 +0300

Don’t try to quit kernel_task — look for whatever heated the processor.

What kernel_task is

kernel_task is the macOS kernel itself, not an app you can close. Every Mac has it, and it’s always in Activity Monitor’s list. Normally it uses only a few percent of the CPU: the kernel hands out processor time and memory and talks to devices.

One of its jobs, according to Apple, is to help manage CPU temperature. When the processor is too hot, kernel_task takes some of its time so that intensive apps can’t heat it further. In Activity Monitor this shows up as a high percentage for kernel_task, often together with fan noise. Apple stresses that kernel_task doesn’t cause the heat itself, and it reduces its activity automatically once the CPU cools down.

Mac Fan Loud: When It's Normal and What to Do

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 16:00:00 +0300

The fan isn’t the cause, it’s the response to heat. Look for what’s heating the Mac.

When fan noise is normal

According to Apple, a Mac’s sensors track temperature and turn on the fans to cool critical components. The fans speed up when the Mac does demanding work: compressing video, running a graphics-heavy game. The warmer the room, the sooner they start and the faster they spin. Noise at these moments is the Mac doing its job.

MacBook Battery Health: Capacity, Cycle Count and When to Replace

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 16:00:00 +0300

A battery is a consumable. What matters isn’t that it ages, but how fast.

Where to check battery health

System Settings → Battery, the Battery Health row. There are two values:

Normal — the battery is working as it should;
Service Recommended — it holds noticeably less charge than when it was new, or isn’t working normally.

The ⓘ button next to it shows Maximum Capacity — how much the battery holds now compared with when it was new. The lower the percentage, the fewer hours between charges. On older versions of macOS the condition isn’t in Settings — Option-click the battery icon in the menu bar instead (Apple).

System Data Taking Up Space on a Mac: What It Is and How to Shrink It

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 16:00:00 +0300

Large System Data isn’t a diagnosis, it’s a question: what exactly ended up in there.

Where to look

System Settings → General → Storage. At the top is a bar of the disk by category, below it a list: Applications, Documents, macOS, System Data and others. Most categories have an ⓘ button that opens the files and lets you delete them. System Data has none: it isn’t a folder but a remainder — everything that didn’t fit another category.

WindowServer High CPU on a Mac: Why and How to Bring It Down

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 16:00:00 +0300

WindowServer doesn’t invent work — it draws what apps and displays ask for.

What WindowServer is

macOS has a window server — WindowServer. According to Apple’s documentation, it manages all windows: the ones you see on the desktop and the offscreen windows used by running apps. Every frame on screen is its work: it puts windows, panels, the Dock and the menu bar together into a single picture and sends it to the displays.

Stats vs iStat Menus vs Activity Monitor: Compared

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:35:00 +0300

There is no best monitor — only the one that fits what you want to see and where.

If your question is just “what do I put in the menu bar”, the shorter answer is in the menu bar monitors guide. This is the full comparison: menu bar, widgets, windows and the Dock.

A disclosure: the author of this site is the author of Mac Resources. Stats and iStat Menus weren’t installed for this guide: what you’ll read about them is what their developers say on their websites and GitHub as of October 4, 2026. For mine — including what it can’t do.

From Wheel of Life to Goals: Plans, Habits and Check-Ins

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:30:00 +0300

The wheel of life ends where your calendar begins. If all you’re left with afterwards is “I should do something about my health”, nothing will change.

This part starts with an area you’ve already picked. If you haven’t, go back to the previous part — how to read your wheel and decide what to change.

From a score to a result

“Health from four to six” is not a goal. Three months from now you won’t be able to say honestly whether it’s a six or a five: the score depends on your mood and the week. A goal is a visible difference — something you can check with a yes or a no.

How Much Space an App Takes on a Mac and How to Remove It

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:30:00 +0300

Leftovers are usually small; clear them by hand only when you’re sure what you’re deleting.

A quick note on names. The folder in Finder is Applications. Apps is the launcher that replaced Launchpad in macOS 26 and later. This guide is about the folder.

The size of one app

Open Finder → Applications.
Select the app and press ⌘I (or File → Get Info).
Look at the Size line in the General section.

A Mac app is a package — a folder, not a single file — so for big apps Finder takes a second or two to add it up. There’s no need to look inside with Show Package Contents: the size in Get Info already covers everything in there.

Wheel of Life Template: Fill It In Online or Print It

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:30:00 +0300

The interactive wheel needs JavaScript. Blank printable template: PDF · SVG

How to Read Your Wheel of Life and Decide What to Change

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:20:00 +0300

If you haven’t filled in a wheel yet, start with the part on what it is and how to fill it in. This part is about reading it.

First, look at the shape

Step back from the numbers and look at the wheel as a whole. Three things stand out:

Dips — one or two segments clearly lower than their neighbours.
Spikes — the wheel jumps up and down: eight, three, seven, four.
Overall level — whether the wheel is large or small as a whole.

A small even wheel (fours across the board) and a large lopsided one (eights with a single two) tell different stories. The first usually means everything is hard at once, and the place to start is one simple step that makes the day lighter. The second means life is broadly in order and one area is sagging — worth thinking about on its own.

How Much Has Been Written to a Mac SSD: Checking Wear

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:10:00 +0300

Check it once — chances are you can stop worrying after that.

What macOS itself shows

System Information. Open it from Spotlight or Applications → Utilities → System Information and select NVMExpress on the left. The internal drive has an S.M.A.R.T. Status line at the bottom that reads Verified. That’s the only health indicator there — no data written, no wear percentage. Howard Oakley, who writes about macOS internals on the Eclectic Light blog, calls this entry simplistic: it doesn’t even report when the drive was last checked (his explainer).

Wheel of Life Categories: 8 Life Areas and How to Pick Yours

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:10:00 +0300

How to fill in the wheel itself is part one: the wheel of life: what it is and how to fill it in.

The eight areas explained

The names are an example, not a canon. For each area: what goes into it, what a 10 might look like, and a question that helps you score it. The 10s are composites from different people — yours will be your own.

Health. Sleep, movement, how you feel, energy for the day. A 10: “I sleep 7+ hours five nights out of seven and swim twice a week.” Question: do I have the energy for what I want to do?
Work and career. What you do, how you grow, whether you like the results. A 10: “I work on problems that interest me and I know where I’m heading this year.” Question: would I want to be doing this a year from now?
Money. Income, spending, savings, debt — and how calm you feel about them. A 10: “I have three months of savings and I’m not counting the days to payday.” Question: how much of my thinking about money is anxious?
Family and partner. Partner, family, children, parents. A 10: “We eat dinner together most evenings and spend one evening a week with no chores.” Question: do I have enough time and warmth with the people closest to me?
Friends and community. Friends, colleagues, communities, people you’re at ease with. A 10: “I see friends a couple of times a month and there’s someone to call on a bad day.” Question: are there people around me I feel good with?
Personal growth. Learning, new knowledge and skills, books, courses. A 10: “I’m learning something I chose myself and I can see progress over a month.” Question: did I learn anything last month that changed me?
Fun and hobbies. Hobbies, holidays, anything you do just because. A 10: “My weekends are mine, and there’s something I look forward to doing in them.” Question: when did I last rest in a way that actually restored me?
Home and surroundings. Home, city, daily routine, workspace. A 10: “My flat is comfortable, things are where they belong, and work is twenty minutes away.” Question: does what’s around me help me or get in my way?

The sleep and exercise examples are personal criteria, not medical guidelines. Everyone defines their own 10 for health.

How to See Network Traffic on a Mac: Who Is Downloading

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:05:00 +0300

There are two different questions here: “who is downloading?” and “how fast is it right now?” The first is answered by a list of processes, the second by a gauge that is always in view.

Who is downloading: Activity Monitor

Open Activity Monitor (⌘-Space, type “activity”, press Return) and go to the Network tab. Each process has four columns: Sent Bytes, Rcvd Bytes, Sent Packets and Rcvd Packets.

Who is downloading — sort by Rcvd Bytes;
who is uploading — sort by Sent Bytes: that’s how you spot, say, a backup to the cloud.

These are amounts, not speeds: an app that downloaded a lot an hour ago stays near the top even if it has long gone quiet. To see who is downloading right now, watch whose number keeps growing.

Mac Temperature: Where to Check It and When to Worry

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:00:00 +0300

What matters isn’t the degrees, but whether heat is slowing your Mac down and what’s making it hot.

Getting warm is normal

A Mac warms up under load, and that’s how it’s meant to work. If a laptop has fans, Apple says they turn on automatically to cool critical components. Fan noise while exporting a video is not a fault; when the noise is worth looking into is in the fan noise guide.

MacBook Battery Drain: What Uses the Charge and Where to Look

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:00:00 +0300

Go in this order: the statistics first, then the culprit, then wear. Otherwise it’s easy to “fix” the battery when the real problem is a single app.

Where to see battery statistics

In System Settings → Battery there are two options above the graphs: Last 24 Hours and Last 10 Days.

Battery Level — the average charge for each 15-minute period; shaded areas show when the Mac was charging;
Screen On Usage — how long the screen was on each hour or each day;
Energy Usage — on the 10-day view: how much energy the Mac used each day.

A steady, gentle slope is normal use. A steep drop over an hour or two — think about what was running then: a video export, a game, a video call. If the charge fell but there are no Screen On Usage bars for those hours, the Mac was busy without you: something worked in the background or kept it awake. If one day stands out of the ten, remember what happened that day.

The Wheel of Life: What It Is and How to Fill It In

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:00:00 +0300

Your first wheel takes about twenty minutes. All you need is a sheet of paper and a pen — or our life balance wheel template, which you can fill in right on the page.

The wheel is a tool for reflection, not a test: there’s no solid research behind it as a method, and there are no norms or “right” results.

Where it comes from

The wheel is usually credited to Paul J. Meyer, founder of the Success Motivation Institute. Meyer founded the institute in 1960, but that’s the year of the institute, not of the wheel: when the wheel itself first appeared isn’t reliably known. Today the exercise is popular in coaching. Wheel of Life is a registered US trademark of its owner.

What to Do on a Pomodoro Break

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:15:00 +0300

The bell rings, it’s a break. Your hand reaches for the phone on its own: a feed, a couple of messages, one email. Five minutes later you’re back at work — and somehow more tired than before. There was a break, but no rest.

Why you shouldn’t “save” a break is covered in part two; this part is about how to spend it.

Short break: 3–10 minutes

You can’t do much in five minutes, and you don’t need to. One or two of these is enough:

How to Set Up Focus on a Mac for Work

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:10:00 +0300

Notifications break your work more often than anything else: a banner in the corner, a message chime, a red badge on an icon. The first idea is to turn on Do Not Disturb for the whole day. But then you miss what you can’t afford to miss, and a day later you switch the mode off for good.

You need a work mode of your own: it lets a short list of important things through and silences everything else.

Mac Slow After a macOS Update: What's Normal, What Isn't

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:05:00 +0300

You updated, and it feels like someone swapped your Mac: the fans are loud, the case is warm, the battery melts, windows open with a lag. The first thought is that the update broke everything. Usually it didn’t: for the first few days after a major update the Mac does a lot of background work, and you can feel it.

Below: what exactly it’s doing, how to help it finish, and where “just wait” ends.

Menu Bar System Monitor for Mac: Which One to Choose

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:05:00 +0300

You can check CPU usage on a Mac in Activity Monitor, but keeping it open all day is awkward. A menu bar monitor shows CPU and memory load all the time, right next to the clock. And it notices trouble before you do: a Mac doesn’t slow down out of nowhere — first the CPU or memory hits the ceiling, and only then do you notice the stalls.

Choose by three questions, not by the feature count: what you want to see, how much menu bar space you’ll give up, and whether you’ll pay.

How to Keep Your Mac Awake: Settings, caffeinate, the Lid

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:00:00 +0300

A big download ran for an hour and then stopped. The screen went dark in the middle of a presentation. The build you left overnight is still halfway done in the morning. In all three cases the Mac simply went to sleep on a timer: nobody touched it for a while, so it decided it wasn’t needed. You can change that for good in System Settings, or work around it for one task — for example, with the caffeinate command in Terminal.

Swap on a Mac: How Much Is Normal and When to Worry

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:00:00 +0300

Open Activity Monitor, switch to the Memory tab, and at the bottom you’ll see “Swap Used: 6.2 GB”. Six gigabytes on disk instead of in RAM sounds like bad news for both the Mac and its SSD.

What swap is

When memory starts running short, macOS first compresses data that hasn’t been used for a while, right there in RAM — that’s the Compressed line. If that’s not enough, compressed data goes out to swap files on the startup disk. That’s swap. Apple’s guide describes Swap Used as the space on your startup disk used to swap unused files to and from RAM.

Why Is My Mac So Slow? A Step-by-Step Diagnosis

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:07:00 +0300

“Slow” is a symptom, not a diagnosis: the spinning cursor, windows that lag, a fan that won’t quiet down. When a MacBook is running slow, a list of twenty tips won’t help. What helps is checking things in order.

First find what is overloaded, then find who is to blame.

Everything else is detail.

First, pin down what is slow

Answer three questions before you open anything:

is everything slow, or just one app;
has it always been like this, or did it start at some point — after an update, after sleep, after plugging in an external display;
is it slow while you work, or even when the Mac is sitting idle.

Each answer narrows the search. If only the browser crawls, the problem is most likely the browser, not the Mac. If it started right after a macOS update, Spotlight may be re-indexing your disk, which Apple says can take hours or even days. What’s normal after an update and when to stop waiting is covered in Mac slow after an update.

Memory Pressure on a Mac: What Yellow and Red Mean

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:06:00 +0300

“Memory Used: 15 GB of 16.” It looks as if the Mac is about to choke. In reality that number tells you very little: a Mac showing it can run perfectly well or crawl, and only the pressure graph tells the two apart.

Why memory is always full

Free memory is wasted memory. macOS keeps it busy with cache: recently opened files, pieces of apps you’ve quit, data you might need again. When something more important asks for memory, the cache steps aside immediately.

Mac Desktop Widgets: How to Add Them and Which to Keep

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:05:00 +0300

It’s tempting to cover the whole screen with widgets. But a widget earns its place only when you can glance at it without clicking: how long until the next meeting, what the weather is doing, how busy the CPU and memory are. If you have to click to get the answer, you might as well open the app.

How to add one

Control-click (or right-click) the wallpaper and choose Edit Widgets. The widget gallery opens.
Find a widget with the search field, or pick an app in the list on the left.
Click the widget and macOS places it for you — or drag it exactly where you want it.
Click Done in the bottom-right corner of the gallery.

You can change the size later: Control-click the widget and pick another size. The same menu has Remove Widget and, for widgets with options, an Edit item — for example, to show a different list in Reminders.

Time Blocking and Pomodoro: How to Plan a Working Day

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:04:00 +0300

What time blocking is

Every hour of the working day gets a job in advance. Not “today: report, code review, email”, but “9:30 to 11:30 — report; from 2:30 — review”. Cal Newport made the method popular: he’s written about it on his blog since 2013 as planning every minute of your workday, then covered it at length in Deep Work (2016) and turned it into a paper planner, The Time-Block Planner (2020).

How to Check CPU Usage on a Mac: Activity Monitor Guide

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:03:00 +0300

The bottom of the CPU tab shows how much of the processor is busy and how much is idle. The other tabs do the same for memory, battery, disk and network, and Activity Monitor can quit an app that has locked up. It looks austere, but it is simple once you know where to look.

One tab, one question: who is using the CPU, memory, battery, disk or network. Everything else is detail.

Is 8 GB of RAM Enough for a Mac, or Do You Need 16?

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:02:00 +0300

On forums, half the people say “8 GB is plenty for anyone” and the other half say “don’t buy anything under 32”. Both are honestly describing their own experience, and neither tells you anything about yours. They run different apps, have different habits and keep a different number of tabs open.

Why people argue

Memory on a Mac doesn’t behave the way it did on older computers.

On a Mac with Apple silicon, memory is shared: Apple calls it unified memory — a single pool that both the CPU and the GPU draw from. An external display and heavy graphics take from the same amount;
macOS compresses data that hasn’t been used lately right in RAM, and when that isn’t enough, it writes it to disk as swap. So running short on memory shows up not as an error but as a gradual slowdown;
Memory Used is almost always high, because macOS fills spare memory with cache.

Hence the arguments: the same Mac flies for one person and drags for another, and not always because of memory — the other causes are in the slow Mac diagnosis. The “used” number won’t settle it — you need the memory pressure graph. How to read it is covered in the guide on memory pressure.

The 52/17 Rule and 90-Minute Cycles: Longer Pomodoros

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:01:00 +0300

If twenty-five minutes keeps cutting your thinking off mid-sentence, that’s not a weakness. Some work is fine in quarter-hour chunks; other work needs ten minutes just to spin up: open the code, remember where you were, rebuild the picture in your head. Longer rhythms exist for that kind of work — and they come wrapped in more myths than the classic pomodoro.

Where 52/17 comes from

The rule comes from DeskTime, an app that tracks which programs employees spend their time in. In 2014 the company took the top ten percent of its most “productive” users — those with the highest share of time in work apps and sites — and looked at how they split their day. On average: fifty-two minutes of work, then a seventeen-minute break.

How to Customize the Mac Menu Bar: Icons and the Notch

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:00:00 +0300

You install a new utility and its icon never shows up in the menu bar. The app is running, but the icon seems to have vanished. On a MacBook with a notch — the cutout for the camera — this happens when there are too many icons on the right: the extra ones quietly slip behind the notch.

The menu bar is for things that change and that you check at a glance. Everything else is detail.

Pomodoro and Focus on macOS: Silence Notifications

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:30:00 +0300

Notifications break more pomodoros than anything else: a banner in the corner of the screen, a message sound, a red dot on an icon. You don’t have to remember them every half hour — the timer can take care of it.

What Focus is

Focus modes — Do Not Disturb, Work, Sleep and so on — decide which notifications reach you. In each mode you can allow specific people and apps — calls from family, say — while everything else waits in Notification Center.

What to Do When a Pomodoro Gets Interrupted

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:20:00 +0300

The first days with the technique look the same for almost everyone: half the pomodoros get interrupted. That doesn’t mean the technique doesn’t work or that you can’t focus. An interrupted pomodoro is data: it shows exactly what pulls you away. Working with the technique means working with that data.

Two kinds of distraction

Distractions are internal or external, and each is handled differently.

Internal ones come from your head: an urge to check email, a sudden memory that you need to book a doctor, a pull to see if anyone replied in chat. They’re the majority, especially at first.

How Long Is a Pomodoro: 25/5, 15/3 or 50/10

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:10:00 +0300

If you keep breaking off at minute fifteen, or you’re only just getting into the task when the timer rings, change the rhythm instead of putting up with it.

What a rhythm is made of

A rhythm is four numbers:

pomodoro — minutes of work;
short break — rest between pomodoros;
long break — rest after a cycle;
pomodoros per cycle — how many pomodoros before the long break.

Tuning all four from scratch is tedious, so it’s easier to start from one of the ready-made options.

The Pomodoro Technique: What It Is and How to Start

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:00:00 +0300

Where the name comes from

Francesco Cirillo came up with the technique in the late 1980s, as a student who couldn’t make himself study. He took a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, wound it up for a few minutes and promised himself not to get distracted until it rang. Pomodoro is Italian for tomato — hence the name. A stretch of work on the timer has been called a pomodoro ever since.