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Browse Apple’s clearance aisle

Back in August of 2015, Apple removed the distinct online store from its web site. The new store is integrated through all the pages of the site, which is a change for the better. However, I used to enjoy simply browsing the store itself, but this change mostly ended that pasttime.

The one (good) notable exception to "no store browsing" is the Refurbished and Clearance Store, which is still linked at the bottom of every page on Apple's site. This is a great spot to look for deals on used but reconditioned Apple gear, typically for 15% to 20% less than brand new.

The site is nicely laid out, with links on the side of the page to each type of equipment. Click in, click around, browse at will.

To make it easier to jump into a given section of the refurb store, I took the top-level links and tossed them into a Keyboard Maestro macro group set to activate a pop-up palette:

You can download this simple macro for your own use, if you wish.

Now a browse of the refurb store is only a keyboard shortcut away. Good for me, bad for my wallet.



Mac OS X Hints and April Fool’s Day

When I ran Mac OS X Hints, I had a tradition of running April Fool's Day pranks. Here's a link to every one I ever published (including the intro of each) from 2003 through 2010 when I departed for Many Tricks. I've also found and included the images that went with each post, as these have vanished from the static version of the site that remains online.

2003: PR: macosxhints.com announces future direction

Beaverton, OR -- April 1, 2003 -- macosxhints.com today announced its new strategic direction to address the constant need for growth in the dynamic web site information portal business. In a highly anticipated move, the site announced that all future hints will eventually focus solely on the WindowsXP platform.

2004: Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s

Cupertino, CA -- April 1, 2004 -- Apple today announced its first-ever triple-CPU system, the PowerMac G5 Cubed. Featuring a total of three G5 processors, the G5 Cubed offers unmatched desktop processing power. "It's clearly the fastest thing we've ever made, and it's head and shoulders above anything the Wintel world has to offer," said Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs.

2005: Install and run OS X on an iPod

After running this site for a few years, I've come to know many people in the Mac world. Many of these fine folks are slaving away on pet projects, most of which will never see the light of day. Yet still, they toil, hoping for success. My good friend Richard is one such person. He's been obsessed with running OS X on his iPod since the day he bought his first generation machine. Not just installing it and booting a Mac with the iPod, but honest-to-goodness using OS X on the iPod. I should preface and say that Richard is brilliant, stubborn, and amazingly resourceful ... three required qualities for this particular project!

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April Fool’s Day: Ten simple Mac pranks—part 2 of 2

As promised, this collection of five more April Fool's Day pranks completes the set of 10 that began with these five pranks. As with the first group of pranks, this is still applicable…

Note: None of these pranks are destructive in any way, but please make sure you're close by to "solve the problem" before your target's frustration boils over.

And now, on to the second five pranks…

6 - Create strange keyboard shortcuts

Again in System Preferences, you can have a lot of fun with the Text tab on the Keyboard panel. Set up replacements that do all sorts of weird stuff:

  • Make them think they're just missing their keys, i.e. replace the with tje (you must use at least two keys in the original).
  • Mess with their grammar thoughts by replacing to with too, their with they're, etc.
  • Screw up letter case; replace the with tHe, she with shE, etc.
  • Completely change words, for instance, replace weight with w-you sure it's e before i?-ght or me with me, the brilliant one.
  • If you have some time, add the words from a full pirate talk dictionary. Hello becomes Ahoy there!, etc.
  • Change l to 1, o to 0, etc.


You get the idea.

7 - Run the screen saver in the background

Did you know you can run the screen saver in the background? I explain how in this tip. I'm not sure this has much practical value, but it's certainly fitting for April Fool's Day. Here's how it looks in action, from the original post:

After executing the command, press ⌃L in Terminal (to clear the screen). Then, because you have to leave Terminal running to make this work, minimize the Terminal window to the Dock, then hide the app via ⌘H. Even if your victim finds the Terminal window, they won't know how to stop the screensaver unless they're familiar with background tasks in Unix. (Or until they quit Terminal, which will terminate the screen saver.)

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April Fool’s Day: Ten simple Mac pranks—part 1 of 2

With April Fool's Day upcoming, here are some relatively-painless jokes to pull on your Mac-using friends. All of these pranks require direct unrestricted access to your target's Mac, and many further require that System Preferences isn't locked down (i.e. not set to require a password before changing any values).

Note: None of these pranks are destructive in any way, but please make sure you're close by to "solve the problem" before your target's frustration boils over.

The pranks aren't in any particular order, though they do sort of progress from easiest (to implement and to detect) to hardest.

1 - Make the Mac take a daytime nap

Head to System Preferences > Energy Saver, then click Schedule. Set the target's Mac to go to sleep in the middle of the day…

If they're working at the time, they'll get a pop-up dialog, so the Mac probably won't go to sleep. But they may think it was a quirk, until the same thing happens the next day.

2 - Change the desktop picture—often

The simple version of this one is to go to System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Desktop, click the Change Picture button, then use the pop-up menu to set it to five seconds.

This one won't fool most Mac users for too long, so you might as well have some fun with it: Instead of just changing the interval, copy a folder full of your own images, and then use the sidebar in the Desktop tab to choose that folder of images.

What kind of images? Well, nothing too bad, of course, but maybe fill it pictures of your target's least-favorite sports team. Or their college's rival school. Or screens of motivational sayings. Bright neon-colored backgrounds—whatever.

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Capturing macOS screenshots and onscreen objects

I capture a lot of screenshots—both for this blog, and for our Many Tricks' help files and web pages. Depending on the project, I may need a full screen, a portion of a screen, a window, an object, or some combination of the above. As such, I use a few different ways of capturing screenshots.

First up are the built-in macOS screenshot tools, which you'll find on the Keyboard System Preferences panel, in the Shortcuts tab:

These four commands let you capture full screens or windows, directly to files or to the clipboard. And, for many users, these may be all you need. If that's you, great! (You may want to assign some easier-to-type shortcuts, as these—especially the clipboard variants—require some advanced finger gymnastics.)

I use some of these built-in tools, along with a key third-party app, to handle all my image capture needs.

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More about macOS Sierra and Library shortcut keys

Yesterday, I wrote about an apparent change in Finder's Library shortcut key. To wit, it used to be that holding the Option key down would reveal a Library entry in Finder's Go menu.

However, on my iMac and rMBP running macOS 10.12.3—and on others' Macs, as my report was based on similar findings by Michael Tsai and Kirk McElhearn—the Option key no longer worked; it was the Shift key. But on a third Mac here, running the 10.12.4 beta, the shortcut was back to the Option key.

To further add to the confusion, a comment on the original article—as well as replies to the others' tweets—states that the user's Mac is still using the Option key in 10.12.3. So I thought I'd create a new user account, and see if I could figure out what was going on.

After some experimentation, I was able to discover why the shortcut key changes, and how to change it between Shift and Option at any time. This clearly isn't a feature, so I guess it's a bug, but it's a weird bug.

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Limited ports limit my interest in new Mac laptops

As I sit here working on my late 2013 13" Retina MacBook Pro (rMPB from here on), I wonder if it will be the last Mac laptop I ever own.

That's a strong statement, I know, but Apple's pursuit of an insanely stupid "as thin as a knife edge at all costs" design goal has led to a new generation of machines that make them much less portable than they were before…despite being thinner and lighter.

Here't the thing, Apple: Beyond a certain point, thinness is irrelevant. And honesty, you've more than reached that point with every laptop you make. You reached that point, in fact, a few years ago.

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Disable local Time Machine backups on laptops

Just noticed this post over on iMore…did you know that Time Machine automatically creates local backups on your laptop Mac? As described by iMore…

On Apple laptops, like the MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro, Time Machine includes the added feature of creating local snapshots so that, if you disconnect your MacBook from its external hard drive, you'll still have backups stored on your internal hard drive so you can recover data if you need to.

While the iMore article points out how to disable/enable the feature (sudo tmutil disablelocal or …enablelocal in Terminal), here's a bit more detail not provided in the article.

First, this is not some hidden hack; you're merely changing a setting using an Apple-provided command line interface to Time Machine. Apple, for whatever reason, chose not to include this setting in the GUI, but you're not risking anything by making this change.

Second, you'll find the local backups in a root-only folder named .MobileBackups, at the top level of your hard drive. You can—sort of—see how much space they take up by selecting About this Mac from the Apple menu, then clicking on the Storage tab. On my MacBook Air, which has a 2GB local backup, I see 4GB of purgeable space, which I assume includes that backup.

To get the actual size of the local backup, run this command in Terminal:

sudo du -h /.MobileBackups/

Provide your password, then wait a bit. The last line of the output will be the total size of the folder, stated in gigabytes…

…
…
 23M	/.MobileBackups//Computer/2017-02-16-092144
2.0G	/.MobileBackups//Computer
2.0G	/.MobileBackups/

And finally, if you disable this command, how do you know you've done so, months from now when you've forgotten about this? Time Machine itself will tell you, on its System Preferences panel. (Sorry for the low-res shot; I only have local backups enabled on my 11" Air!)

As seen, after disabling the setting, Time Machine's System Preferences panel will no longer list local backups as one of the tasks it performs.



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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