• 7 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle





  • Hopefully they won’t start standardizing TV’s that have to phone home periodically and if they are denied this for long enough, refuse to work until they’ve established a connection to their servers. I’m not aware of anything that does this but it’s definitely what will start happening if enough people disable network connectivity to circumvent smart features. This wouldn’t worry me too much since I’d likely want to use the device as just a display anyway and plug something useful in to the HDMI but if the whole machine is somehow tied up in these sophisticated operating systems, what if they just disable HDMI until they get their way?


  • Unfortunately… it can. Which I can say on the basis that, it did. There were no schedules or filters set in the settings for do not disturb and I don’t know of any other way to deliberately cause it to activate. If there’s more settings somewhere perhaps there some additional sets of rules and logic that would explain why this happened, but even if so, they never had any personal involvement from me.

    In any case though, I had found the article you linked already while googling but in my frustration I must not have read very attentively because I misread the option clicking method of setting or disabling the focus state, and was option clicking on the moon icon instead rather than the time and date. Clicking where I should have worked, as did the suggestion from another user to use the switch in the control centre. The strange thing is that after trying both of these methods successfully, the far more intuitive and obvious method that I tried right from the start unsuccessfully, now started working. Prior to disabling via option click, and also through control centre, if I clicked on the crescent moon icon I would be presented with a list of focus states, of which my system seems to have only the one, ‘do not disturb’, while I could find no off switch it did seem that the most obvious form of toggle was likely to be clicking on the ‘do not disturb’ text since that was apparently the mode that it was in and it stood to reason that would likely toggle it off, except, it didn’t do anything hence my utter confusion. Now it just works as you’d expect and I now have 3 ways to turn it on and off. The fact that that button just didn’t work is about as explicable as why the focus state tripped in the first place through no actions of my own when you say it isn’t supposed to do that.


  • Thanks for replying and the detailed list of options to check for.

    I have only the one apple device, the MBP on which the issue is occurring.

    Until you made this comment I was unaware of the existence of a shortucts app so I definitely never made any shortcuts. (Incidentally, does this differ much from Automator? Maybe I should look in to this). I wonder if creating a shortcut attached to an automation that triggers a focus state is something easily done accidentally, because I definitely wouldn’t have done so on purpose. I did once create an automation to close a specific app at a certain time in the morning (3 hours later than the time I noticed the do not disturb was switched on), but that was supposed to execute once on a specific calendar date and as far as I knew did only it’s intended job.

    If I look at the do not disturb settings, there are no allowed people and no allowed apps that can display notifications in do not disturb mode, and until I attempted to mess with it just before posting this, there was nothing in the set a schedule section and nothing in the focus filters section. As of now, there is an item in the schedule section, which is that the state should be on while in the location Antarctica, which I hoped would prevent it ever executing as I’m unlikely ever to be there and am not there right now. Before putting this schedule item in place I also attempted to set an actual time based schedule that was supposed to trigger one minute later than the current time as I attempted the fix and scheduled to run for exactly one minute on the logic that hopefully it would trigger do not disturb to only ever operate for 1 minute making it as close as I could effectively get to “off”

    I don’t know if anything’s been ‘learned’ that could be triggering this, but then again that’s kind of the crux of the problem. I’m instinctively resistant to the machine ‘learning’ anything and then executing without my involvement at any stage. I must admit that’s perhaps irrational, after all it ‘learned’ that I usually operate plugged in and decided to start a charging regimen where it only charges to 80% to extend the life of the battery and I thought that was pretty great but nonetheless, the exact implications of focus states aren’t immediately clear to me and they aren’t something I sought out or felt a need for so while they perhaps offer some benefit, once they are imposed I’m immediately resistant.

    Anyway diatribe aside, it doesn’t look like anything I was able to check in with your help could likely be responsible for the behaviour. I think it is likely related to time, as it was around 12:30 AM. It could be related to being off power and in battery mode which isn’t something I’d likely do after midnight very often but I couldn’t say. I believe I’ve seen this at least a couple of times whilst plugged in as well. Thanks anyway, let me know if you have any other suggestions to make it stay off now that I’ve at least switched it off.


  • I’ve seen this suggested in other forums where people were trying to disable this as well. I don’t own any other apple devices except the MBP that this is occuring on. I’m guessing the time of day is in some way a trigger state but can’t see any such thing set up anywhere in order for me to turn it off. I now know from this post at least two ways to turn off do not disturb mode which was my primary concern, but I would like to figure out what’s triggered it to be on in the first place. Hopefully now that it theoretically should only switch on if I’m in Antarctica it will never turn back on but I’m skeptical somehow.


  • I completely forgot I had the whole control centre thing, thank you. I used High Sierra way up until late last year and can’t help operating Sonoma as if it was still High Sierra. The control centre method did work, and I also discovered from a help link that I had misread an earlier help article and in fact if you option click the date it will also disable it (I had it in my head I needed to option click the do not disturb icon).


  • This really threw me for a loop before I figured out what was happening because I assumed I had dodgy connections somewhere.

    In the end I had to get a piece of software called ‘Balance Lock’. It’s not FOSS but it is free and according the app store doesn’t collect data. It also has no ads or in-app purchases. I’m pretty happy with it so far. It does one thing and one thing well and that is to keep your audio balance at a chosen setting and shift it right back there again whenever that balance slider likes to go for a little walk. Weirdest issue, apparently been around for years.




  • I had forgotten about this so evidently it has stopped, that said I have only ever used ublock origin and it was happening to me, with that on Firefox so I don’t know about this theory that it’s just that one particular adblocker.

    I find it hard to let go of the idea that Google was doing this, but then again I suppose the fact that it isn’t now would suggest they weren’t behind it in the first place since the supposed motive for it was to push people to Chrome and if you just stopped doing this after like a month tops then it wouldn’t be a particularly effective strategy.






  • No shit. This is great!

    Maybe you have even more helpful keyboard-fu: how can I quit textEdit/close a textEdit document and either:

    • Choose not to save at all or
    • Choose to save somewhere and pick a location and filename to do so WITHOUT touching the mouse?

    Especially the quit without saving thing. I used to do this all the time by pressing the tab key on the save prompt to select ‘don’t save’ but on Ventura the ‘delete’ (as opposed to ‘don’t save’ button) doesn’t seem to be accessible from tabbing as it just keeps selecting the tags dropdown list, or the filename field and alternating between the two, completely ignoring the remaining buttons.

    I did figure out how to save and choose a location without the mouse, but it’s kind of irritating unless I already have the full path in the clipboard. I can use the go to folder prompt in the finder save prompt which will after a fashion work but kind of annoying, I have a proper finder interface built in to the prompt where I can navigate down folder trees in column view or list view and any of the finder views and could do so comfortably if only it’d just let me select any one of the folders represented there without clicking.


  • Actually, no sooner than I finished writing this post did I find a solution that works 90% of the way there. I can bring up the go to folder prompt with cmd+shift+G already, but I realised if I want it to tell me the current folder I can just type “.” and it will display the current path and you can also just cmd+c to copy that to the clipboard. I should have realised that the go to folder bar behaves just like terminal in many ways so there’d be common commands for both.

    I guess this isn’t a complete solution because if I wanted the filepath of a selected object in Finder it wouldn’t work as it would only give you the parent directory, but that’s actually what I need probably more than 90% of the time and given the rest of the time where I need a full filepath for one specific object is so rare, it’s really not a problem to have to occasionally use the mouse.



  • Yeh I found someone’s stack exchange post with that very idea. I’ve gone ahead and done that but the result is weird. Like that person, despite the command being explicitly set as cmd+return, it has somehow been changed to cmd+shift+return, something I was only aware of because of that guy complaining about it. but worse still, on some obscure occasions, the app will refuse to do even that, and in fact on those occasions, refuse to accept even it’s official command of cmd+shift+D. I could no figure out what Mail’s problem was on those occasions, getting only a warning chime but not explanation. I assumed there was something wrong in the sender field, but clicking the send icon worked fine so it’s just WTF? Oh well, I’m content with cmd+shift+enter for those occasions when Mail feels like it. Can’t do much about when it doesn’t.




  • Well I think I should probably avoid saying the company name that sells the air-conditioning system with the bullshit app and tablet as a package only because it’s fairly specific to where I live but the app is called ezone and when I called them about replacement and balked at the outrageous cost they said it’s because they have the tablets put together for them so they’re custom and not mass produced the same way as an off the shelf tablet. If you go in to the settings on android for it and the about section it says the model number is just ezone1.

    They have it pretty well sewn up.i love controlling the aircon from any room easily but the bullshit with the broken connectivity and secretly changing my temperature to 18c all the time is enough that I’d rather have had a traditional IR remote with a digital clock style display. At least it works reliably.

    You know what else sucks about this thing? Obviously it doesn’t need to be fast or high performance, but they cheaped out so much that it barely manages to run the only app it’s supposed to run. When we first got it, it was slow and unreliable and connected only intermittently (rather than solidly for months followed by not at all for months) so we updated the app, but now they’ve updated the app to have little animations and it’s too much for the tablet to bear and it almost crashes trying to run a little spinning fan animation and takes forever to wake from the lock screen. So dumb, why make it do that when you know exactly what hardware a huge proportion of the user base will be stuck with? I’m sure if you bought it now the tablet might be slightly better but what am I supposed to do? I’m not paying a goddamn ransom to be able to operate my otherwise perfectly functional airconditioning. A machine that controls temperature is supposed to be the impressive hard to make part not the damned control surface.