The 4th of July update for MacValley

Dear MacValleyites and friends:

Welcome! This is the 4^th of July update on things relating to the Apple universe. 

I emphasize the use of your existing Mac. Depending on our budgets, our Apple hardware ranges from the latest iPhone and Mac to older Macs and iPhones. I stand in the older Mac and iPhone group. When I pay off my car loan, then I’ll consider buying a new Mac. Until then, it’s the mid 2011 Mac Mini and the mid 2014 MacBook Air. 

My iPhone is a 5c with a busted screen. I read e-mail, get messages my prescriptions are ready and check the weather before I go home. That’s all I want my phone to do. 

I’ll bring you news from around the Web of Apple developments. I will emphasize developments in Apple’s hardware and software. Not so much on Apple’s other adventures in cars and streaming TV. 

If you want to write about Apple’s adventures in cars and streaming TV, then do so! I invite contributions. I’ll edit the copy for brevity and grammar, but you get a byline. 

I’ll keep you informed about developments with the new versions of macOS and iOS and iPadOS. Not so much about watchOS and tvOS. I won’t install the macOS and iOS and iPadOS betas myself. I’ll wait for the final releases this fall. 

I’ll have links back to the sources, so you can read the original articles for yourself. 

The emphasis is on having fun and saving money. If we wanted to do nothing but work, we would have Dells, wouldn’t we 😊

Tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog

The Four Things That Kill Your iPhones Battery The Fastest

We’ve all been there, trapped in that horrible zone known as dead battery land. You're trying to upload a critical Instagram post on your iPhone that will set social media ablaze and wham, your battery dies.

As all iPhone aficionados can affirm, we have an insatiable appetite for battery life. The more we have the more we want. While there are plenty of tricks out there on the Cloud, we’ve narrowed it down to four key problems that remorselessly drain your iPhone battery the quickest.

1. Screen Brightness Isn’t Your Friend

One of the biggest factors influencing your iPhone's battery life is its screen brightness. If you have your life on your phone and you leave it set to full brightness as a default, then you're undoubtedly burning through around three hours of your battery’s life as opposed to switching it to a less power-hungry half brightness.

So, try entering the twilight zone and set yourself on the path to prolonged battery life by adjusting your screen’s brightness down while still being able to view the centre of your universe, your screen. Activate your iPhone's Auto-Brightness function enables it to adjust automatically to your current levels of ambient light.

To change your brightness levels, go to your control centre then adjust the slider to your preferred brightness.

2. Feral Apps

Another key setting to check if you have battery life issues are your background apps. These can refresh even if you’re not viewing the app. This enables these apps to periodically confirm your location, automatically update its status and send push notifications. Enabling this constant refreshing seriously pounds your battery life as they are running even though they’re not in plain sight.

Check your app settings and disable the Background App Refresh function for all those apps you don't need to refresh continuously. However, remember some apps such as instant messenger apps, cloud storage services and step or activity monitoring apps need background refresh to be enabled, so be take care choosing which feral apps to reign in. However, disabling background activities for most apps will extract greater battery life.

To change your Background Refresh on an iPhone go to Settings >> General >> Background App Refresh. Once you’re there, scroll down to select which apps you prefer Background Refresh enabled and which ones you don’t.

3. Hordes Of Notifications Swamping Your Lock Screen

Now some apps are constantly pinging you with notifications. If you're not active on your iPhone when the notification comes in and your iPhone is locked, that notification will wake up your display.

This causes your iPhone’s display to constantly switch on, draining your battery even while your iPhone is locked. OK, it's a slow drain but when you're struggling with battery woes every little scrap of battery life counts, right?

You can deactivate these hordes of notifications on an app-by-app basis. Simply go to Settings > Notifications then walk through your apps list, deactivating notifications on individual apps.

4. Putting Your Battery Life In The Freezer

Thanks to the delicate electrolyte, anode and cathode chemical reactions within your iPhone’s lithium-ion battery, it's important that you avoid exposing your baby to extreme temperatures where possible.

Never absent-mindedly leave your iPhone to swelter in the open sunlight or boil in a hot car as heat accelerates the chemical reactions that cause your lithium-ion battery to dump capacity. These chemical reactions work by breaking down your battery’s electrolyte thus curtailing the number of accreted lithium ions attached to the anode, resulting in your battery having less capacity every time it's subjected to hot temperatures.

Exposure to cold can also shorten your iPhone's battery life temporarily and in some instances even power it down. Nothing smashes your battery life as much as the cold. When subjected to cold temperatures, the liquid inside your battery can freeze solid. While your battery life should revive when warmed its not a great look for your battery life.

Try to keep your iPhone at around an ambient room temperature of 20°C (70°F). This is the optimal charging temperature. However, as we don't all live in climate-controlled environments, we can push this to a range of 5°C to 45°C (41°F-113°F). Temperatures outside this range are bad news for your battery. Charging your battery at temperatures below 0°C (32°F) can permanently damage the battery.

Final Observation

Many things can drain your iPhone battery. It may even need replacing. However, if it doesn’t need replacing, tracking down the cause of your poor battery performance can make all the difference. After all, your life is on your iPhone isn’t it?

Author’s Bio

Alex Morrison has worked with a range of businesses giving him an in depth understanding of many different industries including home improvement, health care and business IT support. As the owner of Integral Media, he is now utilising his knowledge and experience with his rapidly increasing client portfolio to help them achieve their business goals.

Apple News and Views for Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Apple News and Views for Wednesday, April 17^th, 2019

 

1. Apple and Qualcomm’s legal battle…has come to an end. Apple and Qualcomm, fighting over Apple’s next cellphone modem, reached a settlement. An Apple iPhone with a Qualcomm 5G modem is expected in 2020. 
2. Wisconsin’s governor wants to renegotiate the Foxconn deal. This deal was touted as bringing thousands of jobs to Wisconsin. It’s not going to happen. 
3. In other news, the President of Foxconn makes noises about running for President of Taiwan. 
4. Back to the Mac. Jason Snell in Macworld opines on  how working on the Mac will change as macOS and iOS share code.
5. Using your iPad as a second display has proven popular. Will Apple integrate it into macOS 10.15? Stay tuned…
6. And in a development straight out of Mel Brook’s classic film The Producers, investors have filed suit against the producer of Nerds, a musical based on the rivalry & friendship between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. 

 

Your editor remains stuck in the past, running his late 2011 Mac mini with macOS 10.13.6. He doesn’t plan to upgrade until he pays off his car. By that time, Apple may switch to its own CPU for the Mac. 

 

He would remind his readers itching to upgrade of this. George R. R. Martin of Game of Thrones wrote those books on an antique 486 running MS-DOS. He deliberately disconnected it from the ‘Net. He writes with Wordstar without a spell checker, so the spellings of Westeros do not get flagged.

 

Tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog

 

 

Commander 1-Free Dual-Pane File Manager for Your Mac

 

One of our members asked me for an easy way to transfer files from one folder to another. 

I advised her to download and install Commander 1 from Eltima Software. For the money, it provides the best dual-and file manager you can get. 

 

Now you download it for free from either Eltima’s Website or from the Mac App Store.

 

Features You Will Enjoy

You will enjoy the convenience of two side-by-side panes. You won’t waste time setting up two Finder windows

If you want to swap the left and right panes, go up to the Command drop-down menu to select that command. You can do it even quicker by pressing the Shift+Option/Alt+E keys. 

Along the bottom, you’ll see a row Function Key commands. Through the Preferences menu for ViewerYou can pick which viewer app you want to use, either Commander 1’s own or macOS’s QuickLook or Preview

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, What’s the Catch

 

The Catch to this great deal is that Eltima makes its money from people who buy the Pro Pack. For the first 15 days after your download you can try out the Pro Pack features.

 

 

If you want them after the trial period, you need to buy a license for $29.99 from Eltima. 

If you decide to skip activating the Pro Pack, you still have all the free feature forever. 

 

If you often wish for a dual-pane file manager instead of wrangling the Finder’s windows, I highly recommend. For the price, it can’t be beat. 

 

Commander 1 Free with a $29.99 Pro Pack available after 15 day trial period. 

 

P.S.

 

If you’d like to save a few bucks, find the press release and read it. 

 

Tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog

 

 

Decluttering Your Mac of duplicate files

I recently worked on cleaning out and clearing my boot drive. I got it down to below 300 Gb in used space. Still bloated blue whale size, but an improvement. Digital decluttering has begun!

 

I haven’t read Marie’s Kondo’s decluttering books. To be honest, I have read lots of other books on decluttering. I suspect a lot of these methods are universal.  

 

How I did It

 

First, I found out which Rooms (folders and sub-folders) contained the most digital debris. I used the OmniDiskSweeper tool from the Omnigroup. Yes, the same people who make those other great Omni apps.

This one is free. You pick a drive or partition to sweep.

 

 

 

 

The app gets to work, sorting through all your files. It will say “sizing” in the titlebar of the window as it sweeps. It also shows the number of gigabytes swept so far.

 

When done, you will see a number showing the size of all your files in the titlebar. All your files, even the hidden fatbombs you forgot about.

 

 

Below in the window, you will see to the left all your top-level folders, both visible and otherwise hidden, by size.

Your /User folder will usually be the biggest.

Click on the size displayed to break it down further by subfolders.

In case you prefer a graphical display of your fattest folders, I can recommend Daisy Disk or GrandPerspective.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Duplicates, Duplicates, Duplicates

 

I have a lot of duplicate files. I’ve downloaded the same file twice or I have an earlier and later version. How do I find all the duplicate files?

A lot of the time, you know where you put duplicate files. You just want to search 1 or 2 folders. A lot of duplicate file finders, though, search the whole disk or partition first. You get a huge list of duplicates.

Gemini 2 from MacPaw allowed me to search only my selected folders.

I could weed out the duplicate files, placing a checkmark next to the duplicates to send to the Trash.

 

I got rid of 2.17 gigabytes of excess PDFs within an hour from just two folders of e-books. This beat sifting through a whole 1 Terabyte hard drive’s worth of duplicates.   

 

 

Step 1

 

Boot Up Gemini 2. I should warn you it has proven unstable at times, probably due to constructing tables in memory. This increases speed, but can prove unstable. 

To reach this screen, press Command + N for New Scan

 

Now drag the folder(s) you want to examine to the center circle. You’ll see a green symbol with a cross. You can release the mouse button.

 

 

This screen means Gemini 2 has accepted your files for scanning. Click on the green button “Scan for Duplicates"

 

 

You’ll see this screen as Gemini 2 scans your folder and sub-folders for duplicate files. Give it time. 

 

 

 

Gemini 2 has finished its wowrk. Now you can see the list of duplicates arranged by size

 

Gemini 2 displays the selected set of duplicates. Over to the right, you’ll see a display of the first page of a PDF

 

This is a closer view of what you see when choosing duplicate files to delete. Click on the rightward facing arrow next to the file title. 

This displays the files and their paths. 

Choose a file to delete  and this is what you see.

Over at the lower right-hand corner, you see the total amount of files selected for deletion and the button to click to delete them.

You’ve deleted your first set of files. Congratulations. Wanna go back for more, or call it a day? It’s your choice. 

 

Gemini 2 will start over where you left on the next time you boot the app up.

 

 

 

Tom Briant

Editor MacValley Blog

Apple News and Views for Monday 02-04-2019

Apple News and Views for Monday, 2/3/2019

How do they stand all that rain in Seattle? Just asking…

How to Reinstall macOS if macOS Recovery is unavailable

In other words, you’ve wiped the boot drive and don’t have an installer handy.

I assume you read this on your computer at work or another computer at home.

The most useful Siri Shortcuts for iPhone

Guess I need a better phone than my 5C

How to set up a Mac and macOS to take advantage of an internal SSD and external storage setup

Macworld finally took notice of this hack to make your /User directory portable.

Read this article by M. Christopher Stevens on how to do this right, and getting all the file permissions in place. Don’t do a simple drag and drop!

How to Give your 2012 or 2014 Mac mini a performance boost by replacing the hard drive with an SSD

If you bought a 2012 or 2014 Mac mini and want to bump up its performance, you can do it! Read the article to find out how.

Apple needs blockbuster acquisitions in gaming & video streaming to thrive, claims J.P. Morgan

Wall Street (those wonderful people who brought you 2008) wants Apple to buy Netflix and Activision.

Apple Watch Series 4 fall detection summons emergency services, saves elderly man.

Another reason to get an Apple Watch.

Tim Cook admits that higher iPhone prices are a ‘factor’ in declining upgrade rates

You think so, Tim?

 

Marie Kondo tries to get my digital life in order

How to KonMari Your Way to a Happier Digital Life

Today the closets, tomorrow the hard drives!

I searched on the topic “Marie Kondo digital” in Google. A lot of articles popped up.

Review: HP Tango X, an AirPrint printer that tries to look like a book

Adventures in making a printer not look like a large ugly plastic object in your stylish home.

Tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog

 

 

Did you backup your computer today?

Dear Friends:

Did you back up your computer lately? 

Today in Southern California the weather is wet and blustery. Good day to stay inside, watch Netflix or read Agatha Christie novels. 

But you must  make sure you backed up your Mac!

If you don’t know how to back up your Mac using Time Machine, Apple has you covered here. 

Tom Briant

Editor MacValley Blog

 

 

 

 

 

How to Read and Write to a USB floppy drive through MacOS

I have found a way to access floppy drives  in MacOS.

This technique uses readily available software and hardware. 

It doesn’t involve the Terminal.

It doesn’t involve undocumented commands within MacOS that may go away with the next update. 

I have tried this technique on both macOS 10.13.6 on a 2011 Mac mini and 10.14.2 on a 2014 MacBook Air.

Let’s proceed!

 

How He do it?

Parallels Desktop 14 and Ubuntu Linux 18.04 lie at the heart of this technique.

Ubuntu Linux 18.04 can access a floppy drive, unlike macOS and Windows 10.

Parallels Desktop 14.1 includes a simple way to install Ubuntu as a guest OS under macOS and can access both the host operating system’s User folder and the USB floppy drive.

 

Step #1:

Go to the Parallels website here to download a trial version. You can try it for 14 days before committing to buying it.

It comes as an installer. Double-click on it and follow the on-screen instructions.

Step #2:

Within Parallels Desktop, go to the File… menu and select New.

 

 

Step #3:

You will see a Create New screen offering several options.

You want the Download Ubuntu Linux, next to the orange dot with the white lines.

 

Step #4:

Click on the orange Ubuntu Linux circle to select it. You will see a light-blue square with rounded corners overlay it. 

Now click on the blue Continue button at the lower right-hand corner.

 

 

Step #5:

You will see a screen briefly describing Ubuntu Linux and the company producing it, Canonical Ltd.

Click on the blue Download button in the lower right-hand corner

 

 

Step #6:

The download will start. How long it takes depends on the speed of your Internet connection. Wired connections will run faster than Wi-Fi. 

This screenshot was taken with a computer on a wired Internet connection.

 

 

Step #7:

After the download of the compressed archive file finishes, it will take a moment to unarchive the file. 

 

 

Step #8:

You enter your new password. You will type it again in the next step to confirm it’s the right password

 

Step #9:

Retype the password to confirm it’s the correct one.

 

 

 

Step #10:

Click on the Orange Parallels box. Parallels is your user name, assigned to you by Parallels Desktop’s auto installer.

 

Step #11:

 

Type in your password

 

Step #12: Success!

 

You’ve arrived at the Ubuntu Linux Desktop

 

 

 

Step #13: Attach the floppy drive.

 

If you haven’t plugged the floppy drive into a USB port, do so now.

 

To connect the floppy drive to the Ubuntu Linux, you need to go up to the Devices Menu. This is part of Parallels Desktop itself.

 

Step #14: The Devices Menu

Now you see the Devices menu with its drop-down file item for USB & Bluetooth. 

Click on the USB & Bluetooth item. You get the physically attached USB Floppy Drive. 

Click on the item for the USB Floppy Drive to connect it to the Ubuntu Linux.

 

 

 

Step #15: The Floppy Disk Icon Appear on the Ubuntu Desktop

The Floppy Disk icon with the name of the floppy (in this case, it’s DATA0704) appears on screen. 

You have to put in a real floppy to make the floppy drive work. You’ll get an error message if you don’t.

In case of error message, just stick in a floppy disk.

 

 

 

 

 

Step #16: Open the Home Folder.

A bit of explanation. For the MacOS, the User folder is where the user’s documents are stored.

In Linux, the Home folder is where the user’s documents are stored.

So here, If you click on the Parallels Shared Folders to see a folder named Home, it’s the MacOS Users folder. 

 

 

Step #17: Apologies for Confusion.

 

Ideally, you should babysit this process from start to finish in case you need to intervene. It should take about an hour.

I tried this twice today on the same Mac mini. One time, no problems. The second time, I needed to shut down the whole Parallels Desktop software. After I restarted it a few minutes later, everything worked fine. 

You should undertake this with a patient attitude. The installation of the Shared Folders can get a little hairy at times. You may see a box asking for your password. If so, you should enter it. 

My conclusion after working with this is that this is the simplest method of gaining access to a floppy drive through a Macintosh running 10.13 or 10.14  without involving a second physical computer. 

This Parallels Desktop software is worth the $79.99. I tried using the free VirtualBox 6.0 software from Oracle. I spent four unsuccessful hours trying to replicate what I did in less than an hour with Parallels. Spend the money! You’ll get what you paid for in this case. Your time is worth at least $20/hour. Remember that!

The command you’ll use most often is the “Control + Alt/Option” combo to free your cursor from Ubuntu Linux. Remember it, Control + Alt/Option. 

Good Luck, be patient, and rejoice when this works. 

 

Thomas Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog

thomasbriant@me.com

 

 

 

Start With Growly Journal for your new 2019 Journal

Did you vow to start a journal in 2019? 

If you have the determination, but need an app to start with…may I suggest Growly Journal from Growly Bird Software?

Advantages:

1. It’s free
2. It gives you categories for entering data in case of brain freeze.
3. It exports to a per-entry plain text format.

 

 

Sure, you can get fancier apps and pay up to $40 for them. Why not start with Growly Journal?

Tom Briant
Editor, MacValley Blog