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Transport the cursor to the center of frontmost window

My home workspace is a 27" Retina 5K iMac (2560x1440) paired with a vertical 4K display (scaled to view 1440x2560). While I love this setup in general, there's one time it's annoying: When I need to move the cursor between displays, and it's located far away from its destination.

There are many ways to solve this problem, including our own Keymo, which I still use when I want to teleport a drag across displays. But what I really wanted was a fast way to move the cursor to the other display when I switched to a window on the other display—because generally, if I've activated the window, I'm probably going to use the mouse in that window at some point.

Using Keyboard Maestro, it's possible to create a macro to make this happen automatically:

This macro will activate every time you switch applications, and then move the mouse to the center of that newly-frontmost window and highlight its location with a quick circle. Having tested this, however, I can say it's a non-ideal solution: Most of the time when I switch an app, I do not want the cursor to move. I found it more annoying—much more annoying—than useful.

As useless as the above macro is, with one minor change it quickly became one of my most-used macros…

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macOS app: Use HoudahSpot for enhanced searches

As I lamented in a recent entry here, macOS Mail search is totally broken for me. I pointed out that I can use Spotlight, but also alluded to a third-party app. That app is HoudahSpot, and it's what I use to not only search Mail, but any time I need a more-powerful search than I can get through Spotlight's interface.

Houdah's UI is a large multi-paned window, with search criteria on the left, results in the middle, and one of file info, Quick Look preview, or text preview in the right-hand pane. Here's how it looked for the same search that failed in Mail:

Using HoudahSpot for a search like this, though, is really overkill—I'd see similar results in Spotlight, because it's a very specific search term that's not going to find a lot of matches. Where HoudahSpot shines is in its ability to build more complex search queries.

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On the uselessness of search in macOS Mail

For the last couple macOS releases, I've had nothing but trouble searching in Mail. Note that I didn't write "trouble searching mail," but rather, "trouble searching in Mail." For example, today I needed to find an email from my business partner Peter about a hidden pref in Butler. (I was hoping this pref could help a user who was having problems with the pasteboard in a certain app.)

Update: See this post for a possible solution.

Based on a document on my hard drive, I knew the name of the default was Pasteboard Normalization Interval, but I couldn't remember the syntax of the defaults write command to set its value. So I searched in Mail…

So clearly, no emails in my database contain the words I'm looking for, right? Here's the exact same search, run in Spotlight:

Not one but two email messages match my search, and provided the needed syntax for the command.

Wait, I know what you're thinking: "Ahh, look, it's in quotes!" Doesn't matter; searching Mail for "Pasteboard Normalization Interval" still results in zero matches. Searching on even one word of the phrase, like Normalization, also finds no matches.

Again, I know what you're thinking: "Oh, I bet the Mail index is screwed up." Nope; even after rebuilding the index on all 250,000+ messages in my database, no matches are found. (And yes, I let the index complete its rebuild, which took hours.)

I've heard from others that search in Mail works for them. But it's a no go for me, and I know, for others. So something's wrong, but I don't know exactly what it is, nor how to fix it.

So for now, I have to rely on Spotlight to search Mail…or a third-party app, but more on that in a bit.



macOS app: Test DNS servers with namebench

If you've got a speedy internet connection at home, but it seems slow, it's possible its' not the connection itself but the speed of your chosen DNS server.

To figure out if the DNS servers are part of the problem, check out namebench, a DNS server benchmarking app. namebench compares your existing DNS servers to a large list of other DNS servers, and shows you how they all perform.

When namebench launches, you'll see a window populated with your current DNS server addresses, and a few other settings you can modify:

Click Start, then go ahead and find something else to do for a while—the benchmarking process may take 15 minutes or more, depending on how many name servers it can see.

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macOS app: BackupLoupe examines Time Machine backups

I'm somewhat paranoid about backups—I have many of them, both online and offline, onsite and offsite. I test my backups to make sure they're good. In short, I do my best to make sure a hardware failure or natural disaster won't take out my data.

My backup strategy includes Time Machine, mainly for recovering from "oh crud I didn't mean to delete that!" moments. We also use it, via a Time Capsule (RIP, sigh), to back up our laptops.

While I love how Time Machine works, I dislike that it doesn't tell you anything about a given backup other than how big it was. Enter BackupLoupe, a $10 "honorware" app. BackupLoupe examines your Time Machine backups and computes a "diff" for each one, letting you know exactly what was backed up in a given run:

Each backup is color coded—on the left of each backup's name, the color indicates the size of the backup, and on the right, the deviation of that size from the norm.

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Transforming text via Keyboard Maestro

Recently, Melissa Holt wrote about transforming text via the Transformations menu. After seeing this article, a reader named Hunter wrote to me with this comment:

Today in The Mac Observer Melissa Holt wrote about using the TextEdit/ Edit/ Transformations command to change the case of a sentence or paragraph. However, there is no option to perform, "Sentence Case", i.e., capitalize the first letter of the first word, and keep all other words in lower case.

Is there a way in Terminal, or maybe Keyboard Maestro to add this option to Transformations? It seems to me that the given choices have rather limited uses.

In addition to not offering sentence case, the Transformations menu has a few other drawbacks:

  • Not all apps have a Transformations menu.
  • Only three very basic transformations (upper, lower, capitalize) are supported.
  • The transformations are buried in a sub-menu, requiring lots of mouse navigation to reach.

While I don't believe it's possible to modify the Transformations menu, it's pretty easy to use Keyboard Maestro to build a "Sentence Case" transformation…or more usefully, as seen at right, a palette with many more transformations. Unlike the Transformations menu, the Keyboard Maestro solution will work in any app where you can copy and paste text.

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Create a workload for your CPUs

Over the weekend, I was testing how some of our apps work when the CPUs are busy. One way to load the CPUs is to rip a Blu-ray disc, but I was looking for a more controllable CPU load.

A quick search through the Mac OS X Hints archive (use this tip to search the site) found the answer from 15 years ago: Just say yes in Terminal to generate sizable CPU loads…

More specifically, use this command in Terminal:

yes > /dev/null &

If there's an award for strangest Unix utility, yes might just be the winner. All it does is output y (or whatever you list after the y; the man page suggests an expletive) until you kill the task.

The above command sends the output (via the > redirect) to the null device, which discards it. The ampersand sends the job to the background, so you get your Terminal prompt back.

You can run this command multiple times, each loading the CPU even more heavily (the screenshot shows three yes tasks running). Keep an eye on Activity Monitor to see just how much CPU it takes—as shown above, it does a great job at loading the CPU.

You can kill the tasks by issuing the command killall yes in Terminal, or by quitting Terminal—you'll be told that quitting will terminate the tasks.



How to make Sims 3 work in macOS Sierra

When we upgraded all our Macs to macOS Sierra, my daughter was upset because Sims 3 broke. After much scouring of the internet, I found the solution and tweeted about it:

It dawned on me, though, that if that forum post ever vanishes, I'll be in trouble with future new Macs and/or reinstalls, so I thought I'd document it here, too. Read no further unless you (or a family member) play Sims 3 and want to get it working in macOS Sierra. And really, try the linked forum post first; this is just a backup plan.

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macOS App: OmniDiskSweeper

There are tons of "where's my disk space going?" apps out there—search the Mac App Store for "disk space," and you'll get pages of results. Many are of the newer graphical style, where you see a pie chart or square or some other graphical representation of your files.

I've tried a bunch of these tools over the years, both graphical and text-based, but I still keep coming back to an oldie-but-goodie—and it's free: Omni's OmniDiskSweeper has everything I want in a disk space usage tool. It's got an intuitive interface, and a way to either delete what I find or open the containing folder to take a closer look.

Perhaps it's because I'm a column-view Finder kind of person, but I love the columnar drill-down layout that OmniDiskSweeper uses. Select the drive you want to examine, then start drilling down into folders to see what's taking up all your space:

Oh look, five gigabytes of cached Twitter content. Just what I didn't need. This is where the bottom left button comes into play: Select an item, click that, and (after a warning), it's gone. This is not a "move to trash" operation, this is a destroy operation. Be very careful with it! This is why you'll see a warning before the delete proceeds, because there's no going back.

The folder icon on the bottom right is the one I usually use, though—it opens the chosen folder in Finder, where I can then manually remove the cruft.

If you're a more visual person, you probably won't like OmniDiskSweeper, because the layout is completely text-based and columnar. But for me, it's the perfect tool to manage the limited space on my iMac's boot SSD.



Create a pop-up web search tool using Keyboard Maestro

My original Keyboard Maestro special character palette (which has been replaced by a much better version), used the Conflict Palette to display a window from which you could pick the special characters.

While this turned out to not be ideal for the special character palette (no way to pick more than one at a time), the Conflict Palette is ideal for many other tasks.

I use the one at right to search a number of web sites—activate the palette with ⌃⌥L then press a, for instance, type a query, press Return, and my browser loads with search results from my old macosxhints.com site.

Feel free to download my macro if you'd like to use/modify it.

I use a couple additional palettes—one for retrieving iTunes' artwork and searching the store, and the other for inserting commonly-used bits of code while writing help files in Coda for the Many Tricks' apps.

Here's how the web search palette looks in use; I love being able to search a specific site from anywhere without first switching to my browser. And because I have Keyboard Maestro syncing its macros, I can do this from any Mac I own.

The advantage of using the Conflict Palette for these web searches is that I need only remember one shortcut, not 11 different ones, and the palette is a nice visual reminder of which service I wanted to search.

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