512 Pixels

Apple Support:

I want to mount Apple SCSI hard disks without restarting the system. Is there any way to do this from the System software or any of the included utilities? If not, can you suggest any other utilities that would enable mounting Apple SCSI drives without restarting?

Yes, there are several shareware utilities that allow mounting of SCSI volumes without a restart. They are: SCSI Probe by Robert Polic, SCSI Info by Bob Easterday, and SCSI Tool by Paul Mercer. SCSI Probe is available online.

Love it or hate it, it seems that the Touch Bar is here to stay on the MacBook Pro. As such, it seems wise to me to make it more useful.

A little backstory first, though… earlier this year, David Sparks finally talked me into buying a Stream Deck to use at my desk. As with most things, he was right about how much I would come to love it.

The Stream Deck is incredibly flexible, but one of my most common use cases is to tap a single button on it to open a bunch of related Safari tabs when it comes time to prepare for a show.

For example, if I press the button with the MPU logo, it opens these pages:

• MPU episode schedule
• Folder of MPU Outlines
• The MPU page in Relay’s ad-tracking system
• The MPU page in the Relay FM CMS

I’m doing this via with Keyboard Maestro, another incredibly flexible tool. Here’s what that looks like, with my secret URLs redacted:

As you can see, on my Mac Pro, this is triggered by a specific button my Stream Deck, as pictured above.¹

To re-use these macros on my MacBook Pro, I made a copy of them in Keyboard Maestro, which I have sync its data over Dropbox.

I then fired up BetterTouchTool, which among many other things, allows you to create custom UI elements on your notebook’s Touchbar, tying them to a wide range of actions. Turns out, you can even have BetterTouchTool become a trigger for Keyboard Maestro.

First, create a button in the Touch Bar section of BetterTouchTool, or a group that you can place buttons in, like I have:

The action you need to use is named “Execute Terminal Command (Async, non-blocking),” which makes the button fire off a script. Here’s the script itself:

osascript -e 'tell application "Keyboard Maestro Engine" to do script "PLACEHOLDER"'

Where I have that placeholder text, you’ll need to paste in the UUID of the Keyboard Maestro macro you want to execute. To get that, you will need to select “Copy as UUID” in Keyboard Maestro:

… and then paste it into BetterTouchTool.

(While in Keyboard Maestro, be sure to set the trigger for the macro to be a script.)

When this is all done, you can tap a button on the Touch Bar and fire any Keyboard Maestro macro you desire.

Happy automating!

It’s the end of the road for the once ubiquitous Mac app, as its creator Christopher Forsythe writes:

Growl is being retired after surviving for 17 years. With the announcement of Apple’s new hardware platform, a general shift of developers to Apple’s notification system, and a lack of obvious ways to improve Growl beyond what it is and has been, we’re announcing the retirement of Growl as of today.

It’s been a long time coming. Growl is the project I worked on for the longest period of my open source career. However at WWDC in 2012 everyone on the team saw the writing on the wall. This was my only WWDC. This is the WWDC where Notification Center was announced. Ironically Growl was called Global Notifications Center, before I renamed it to Growl because I thought the name was too geeky. There’s even a sourceforge project for Global Notifications Center still out there if you want to go find it.

This week on MPU, David and I catch up with Austin Mann to talk about his work and his annual iPhone camera reviews, including what sets the iPhone 12 Pro Max apart from Apple’s other new phones.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• TextExpander from Smile: Get 20% off with this link and type more with less effort! Expand short abbreviations into longer bits of text, even fill-ins, with TextExpander from Smile.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
• Indeed: Get a free $75 credit to boost your job post.
• Woven: The calendar with the most powerful scheduling tools. Try it free for 21 days.

This has made my Friday:

via Waxy

Joshua Stein has made a very specific utility:

StuffIt is the de-facto standard for file archiving and compression on Mac OS before OS X. Most old Macintosh software is preserved in StuffIt format, but a breaking change in StuffIt 5 makes archives created in this version unreadable in older versions of StuffIt. Since StuffIt 3.5 is the last version that works on System 6, many archives cannot be opened on compact Macs running System 6.

ReStuff is a SaaS that automatically converts StuffIt version 4 & 5 archives to a format readable in StuffIt 3.

Go read how this works. I love it.

Charles Fishman, writing at The Atlantic:

Dry ice often helps save Thanksgiving, even if the beneficiaries of its special magic may not notice. But this winter, it will help save the world from the coronavirus pandemic. A senior salesperson for Noble, which routinely supplies the pharmaceutical industry, had just taken a call from an official with the state of New York, assessing how much dry ice Noble might be able to supply, on short notice, in order to get the first coronavirus vaccine out to every corner of the state once it is approved.

That vaccine, the work of a partnership between Pfizer and BioNTech, is likely to be the first approved by the FDA. It is so delicate that it has to be kept at –70 degrees Celsius (–94 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s not just colder than most freezers; it’s colder than winter at the South Pole. But holding that temperature is not a problem for dry ice, which is a solid at –78 degrees Celsius (–109 degrees Fahrenheit). In fact, for shipping Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine, nothing else is practical besides dry ice. “There’s really no other way to maintain that temperature stability in transit,” says Azra Behlim, a medical-supply-chain expert at Vizient, a health-care consultancy.

The nation’s dry-ice makers aim to be ready.

This time on Connected:

There’s a lot of follow-up this week, then conversations about company retreats, Mac OS 9, password management, MagSafe and the Mac App Store. Then, Federico talks through his new email system. Myke and Stephen have feelings about it.

On Connected Pro, we had a discussion of my most perfect job and the end of Slack.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code CONNECTED at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
• Pingdom: Start monitoring your website performance and availability today, and get instant alerts when an outage occurs or a site transaction fails. Use offer code CONNECTED to get 30% off. Offer expires on January 31, 2021, and can be used only once.
• Bombas: Super comfortable socks for you and someone in need. Use this link for 20% off.

Happy Thanksgiving. Stay safe.

Apple Support:

Starting with certain models introduced in late 2020, Apple began the transition from Intel processors to Apple silicon in Mac computers.

On Mac computers with Apple silicon, About This Mac shows an item labeled Chip, followed by the name of the chip.

On Mac computers with an Intel processor, About This Mac shows an item labeled Processor, followed by the name of an Intel processor. A Mac with an Intel processor is also known as an Intel-based Mac.

Apple doesn’t capitalize “silicon,” and I can’t get used to it.

This week on Mac Power Users:

macOS Big Sur brings with it a new design and updated features. This week, Stephen and David wade in to macOS 11, before giving their impressions of the M1-powered MacBook Air.

It was a lot of fun to dive deep into Big Sur and review it with David. It is quite the release.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• 1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? You don’t have to worry about that anymore.
• Indeed: Get a free $75 credit to boost your job post.
• Woven: The calendar with the most powerful scheduling tools. Try it free for 21 days.
• Pingdom: Start monitoring your website performance and availability today, and get instant alerts when an outage occurs or a site transaction fails. Use offer code MPU to get 30% off. Offer expires on January 31, 2021, and can be used only once.

It’s that time of year, so I’m happy to present the 512 Pixels Holiday Gift Guide for People Like Me:

• Vintage Dogcow Watch: Currently $425 on eBay
• Apple III: Currently $699 on eBay
• Relay FM “Now Playing” Shirt: $30
• “I Want to Believe in RSS” Enamel Pin: $11.55 on the Diesel Sweeties Store
• Anything on Draplin’s website
• Lisa Introduction VHS Tape - $199.95 on The Missing Bite
• NeXT Cube and Megapixel Monitor: Currently $2,400 on eBay
• IBM PCjr to use as a boat anchor: Currently $256 on eBay

Repetitive typing, little mistakes, searching for answers — they’re all taking precious time away from you and your team. With TextExpander, you can take it back.

My thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring 512 Pixels this week.