Mac Tips

I’ve used a few different MacBooks over the last couple of years. Although the M2 offered a big performance boost over the M1, I noticed a couple of downsides. Firstly, the way the M2 handles external drives; secondly, my network connectivity repeatedly slowing down and dropping. These problems disappeared when I briefly had an M3 through work, but returned when I switched back to an M2. My network connection would suddenly drop for no apparent reason. The internet connection itself was fine, but my Mac hadn’t got the memo. It turns out, my MacBook was connecting to the slower, more congested 2.4GHz network instead of the faster 5GHz band. ...

One of my most memorable moments in academia was when two PhD researchers lost all their work just before submission. In one case, it was a house fire; in the other, a laptop stolen with the backup drive attached. This was devastating. In both cases, they’d created backups. Unfortunately, though, those backups were in the same physical location as the original files. Devising a proper backup strategy is something we’re always planning to do next month, when it’s a bit quieter. We’re far too busy right now. But it’s precisely when we’re frantically busy that we’re most likely to hit the wrong button, and also when a data loss would be most inconvenient. ...

When I replaced my MacBook recently, it suddenly started shrieking “Disk Not Ejected Properly” every time I wakened it from its slumbers. As the disk is my external backup drive, I felt nervous. My previous MacBook (an M3) handled the ejection without any problems; my replacement M2 has other ideas.1 Sometimes the error is triggered by the length of time it takes the drive to respond, rather than failing to eject safely. Either way, the risks are the same. ...

Recently, I need to transfer some humongous video files, with a estimated time of 16 hours 😳 Every time I turned my back for a moment, my MacBook immediately went to sleep and cancelled the transfer. No amount of swearing or fiddling with the settings solved the problem. Has anyone actually counted the number of power and sleep settings in MacOS? Anyway, finally, I found two neat solutions to this problem, both of which involve stimulants. ...