I’ve been taking screenshots on Macs for more than thirty years. I thought I was pretty much a power user. I’ve known forever that you can do not just the whole screen (⇧⌘3) but a specific target area (⇧⌘4), and of course the space trick for capturing a window (including menus!). But what I didn’t know is… Read more
Ventura’s new System Settings app, replacing System Preferences, removes the ability to control quite a few important things. One of those is whether or not the system goes to sleep automatically. Well, it does let you control this setting but only for when the system is on mains power: By default the system will sleep… Read more
Say you want to perform some operation after a delay, and/or at regular intervals, inside a Swift actor – maybe your actor represents a weather station and you want to periodically fetch the latest weather information, automatically. How do you do that? You could punt the problem to some other code, outside the actor –… Read more
Apple try to make it impossible to revert to a prior version of Safari Technology Preview (STP) – and they also try to force updates to the latest version immediately, without user consent. This is bafflingly hostile behaviour for what is supposed to be a beta version of the browser that users voluntarily, out of… Read more
When you tell Lightroom to deleted rejected photos, it pops up a dangerous dialog box: Though it does explain itself well – i.e. if you want to actually delete the photos, you need to click “Delete from Disk” – the default option is that misleading “Remove” button, which doesn’t really remove the files at all… Read more
Yet another example of a really bizarre macOS bug that’s pretty inexcusable as a test escape, given it occurs with the default installation settings on a completely clean OS install. In short, the Mojave update installer does not work (on High Sierra at least) if you have ‘Optimize Mac Storage’ enabled for iCloud Drive (System… Read more
I’ve been struggling since Mojave came out to deal with it’s over-bearing expansion of SIP (“System Integrity Protection”), which is basically a super-root notion that blocks access – even to root – to lots of basic parts of the system, including obvious & mostly sensible ones like /System and /Library, but also less usefully things… Read more