Mac OS X on The Dangling Pointer

Plex Media Server not showing updates

Thu, 19 Apr 2018 14:23:50 +0000

Since November of last year (roughly) I've noticed that the Plex Media Server app doesn't ever show that there are updates available. I've manually reinstalled the latest server copy several times and it still hasn't updated automatically. I found a solution that resolves this.

On macOS you have to delete a preference key for the last time the server was updated. A borked version got released which had a higher numerical value causing the server to never find an update.

Preventing Spam iCloud Calendar Invites

Fri, 25 Nov 2016 14:55:15 +0000

I woke up this morning seeing two notifications of calendar appointments I just couldn't miss. [sarcasm]

Annoying, right? Here's the best part. No matter what I do - Accept, Maybe, Decline - the sender of the spam appointment receives the notification of my action. There's no way to just simply delete the damn invitation from your calendar without sending the reply! Well I guess that means 章兴言 & 历昭 are going to get a sad decline from me.

Summarizing Text in macOS

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 16:16:43 +0000

There's a cool service in macOS called "Summarization" that takes a block of text and figures out the most important sentences or paragraphs in it. I've used this service before to help reduce the amount to read on longer posts and conversations. It is definitely not perfect but it can help provide some clarity where our TL;DR brains need it.

In this example screenshot you can see I'm looking at a Wikipedia article. The summarize service gives you the option to summarize by paragraph or by sentence. There is a slider to indicate how much detail you want to retain. While less seems better, I've found the algorithm loses accuracy roughly around 40%.

Changing the volume on a USB Headset on Mac OS X

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 20:24:51 +0000

Do you use a USB headset for video/audio conferencing on your Mac? Ever been frustrated that you can't really change the volume of just the headset if you keep your main audio coming through your speakers? There is a solution - use the Audio MIDI Setup app nestled in Applications/Utilities.

Look for the device that matches your USB device - sometimes it only shows the manufacturer of the USB to Analog converter if its a cheapie device.
Look for the "out" device if you're looking at changing what you hear, the "in" device for your microphone audio level.
Slide the master control to the right if its available. If master isn't selectable, slide the individual left/right channels. The individual channels don't stop at any specific points along the line so you might want to manually match up the dB (gain) value so each ear is an identical volume level.

Pinning Safari Tabs for Mental Focus

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 13:51:27 +0000

Have you heard about pinning tabs in Safari? If you have Mac OS X El Capitan then you have Safari 9 which includes tab pinning. From Apple's Support documentation:

Pin Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Gmail, or any other website you visit frequently throughout the day. Pinned Sites stay put on the left side of your tab bar so you can easily get to them at any time.

I frequently keep several tabs open on my work computer - the three Gmail instances I'm in and WordPress.com's Reader. Battling with my attention requires me to analyze my behaviors and continuously adapt to prevent problems. I recently discovered I frequently flip back over to Safari to look for the unread count in the tab titles and will derail my current thought process to read the email. My solution? Pinned tabs.