Android Screen Recording on Mac

Scenario:

For one of the apps we are developing, I needed to make a screen cast of some strange behaviour inside the app on Android. But how can you record screen activity from a Android device on Mac OS X?

Solution:

After a little bit of searching, the solution was actually pretty simple. You need to do the following:

1. Install the Android Tool
Download the Android Tool from GitHub (please check out the GitHub project page to keep track of updates and news). The download gave you a zip file. Unzip the file and place the tool inside the application folder on your Mac.

2. Prepare your Android device
In order to be able to establish a successful communication between your Android device and the Mac, you have to enable the 'Developer Options'. Inside the Developer Options, you need to enable the 'USB Debugging' feature. If you like, you can also enable the feature that shows your touch actions on the screen.

3. Launch the Android Tool
Start the Android Tool (note: you may get the warning that the app is from an unidentified developer). Once the app is opened, simply plug in your Android device

4. Start Recording
The tool is as easy as it can be:

Click on the camera button to take a screenshot or click on the camcorder button for a screen recording. When done with screen recording, press the red square (stop) button which appeared on the camcorder button place. You can record as long as you wish :).

The files created will be stored in an 'AndroidTool' folder on your desktop.

Note: You won't be able to record audio with this tool and neither you can take screenshots of record videos of protected videos.

Last tip: once you have your screencast video file, put it through Handbrake. This will decreases you file size a lot (e.g. 8.3 MB to 2.4 MB)

Fix slow boot-up on Mac

Problem
Recently I ran into a frustrating issue on my new MacBook Pro Retina (with 512MB SSD). The time of (re)boot took a lot of time, holding the screen black for a long time.
I checked several tips, but it was not due to old hardware (...), also not that my disk was full (more than 50% free space).
I searched a lot and found a solution that works actually pretty well and seems really stupid to me (a kind of Microsoft-type-solution-when-something-unexpectedly-stop-working-well).

Solution
What you need to do is to go to System Preferences, and selecting Startup Disk. Then, select your primary disk, and hit ‘Restart’ from the same window.

That's all! It worked for me pretty well!
By the way, it seems that this happened after the update of OS X 10.10.3.

Time Machine - preparing to copy "forever"

Problem:
I just got a new HD in my iMac (HD replacement action of Apple). Got the latest MacOSX on it. So far so good, but placing back my data from my Time Machine backup disk, I ran into problems. I had first a message and sometimes errors, telling that my disk was not properly removed (however, that was done by the OS itself). I just restarted the computer and tried it again. I started with an action to place back some data (couple of MB's), just to try if everything was working well.
Well, it didn't. It was preparing to copy forever. And finder hang, couldn't shutdown the computer on the normal way. So, just hard reset...
Solution:
Due to the 'not properly removed' messages and errors, I decided to run the Disk Utility and from there I ran the 'Verify Disk' option on my Time Machine (TM) backup disk. This took about half an hour or so. The results it shown were all good (green messages).
But, guess what, after that, restoring data from my TM Backup worked fine. Depending on the amount of data I restored, it took just a little moment to 'prepare to copy' and then it started to place the data back on my computer just as aspected and with an appropriate speed!