I listen to news podcasts that I always listen to at 2x speed, and then music podcasts, that need to be listened to at 1x speed so the music is correct and it is annoying to change the setting every time. You already set podcast feeds to have individual controls to how they are shown (in what order, newest or oldest first. All I ask it to allow a setting to always playback at the speed you select.
This is a very cool app for those who want to customze their dock for different displays, so if you use a laptop and have external displays, you can have the dock be on the side on one, or hidden or on the bottom. Check out the free HiDock app, donations welcome.
I currently use 4 of them, 1Password, TextExpander, Fantastical and CleanMyMac X and so am going to take a look at the other 5, as so many I already think are great.
Dennis Sellers at the Rocket Yard at OWC’s Blog has the best way to fix this issue. I did it years ago, honestly having 2 menu bars and docks is just confusing to me, but I have been using a mac with 2 monitors for a whole lot of years.
Mac Performance Guide is quite negative on Mac performance, and it is the only place I have seen to show negative performance of Mac Studios, and he is certainly right on the Core Rote in Apple Systems. And this article on Spotlight Indexing is very interesting as I hate when does things that you have no control over. Spotlight is one of those things, especially when it indexes and you have no control over it. A simple pause indexing would be an amazing thing.
Personally I hate Spotlight as it doesn’t find everything for me, I use Find Any File for any major searches.
And for core rot I have to bring up my issue with Apple Music and moving iPhone sync to the finder. Also the fact that the damn sync has to sync twice to sync any files to my phone. Why? WTF!
Both Apple’s app stores for iOS and Mac have a huge problem, and that is subscriptions.
When the store started, it was all purchases, so you bought the app you owned it, but then they enabled in app purchases and subscriptions. Both are used to enable all features in apps, in fact some apps barely function or don’t function at without the additional purchase. And the subscription prices have been going up. It has gotten so bad, that there should be a way to filter out subscription apps, but that would cut into Apple’s profits too.
Apple acts like they are all noble, wanting privacy for their users, but then they hide subscription prices and in app purchase prices in the store.
The price is not shown in the first page, then hidden in a drop in the app info page itself. This info should be displayed on the main page, not hidden. And for subscriptions you should be able to not only filter them out, but set limits on subscriptions when you pay. An example being that you could say yes I subscribe but for only 1 month, and automatically cancel unless I re-subscribe. To have to know how to unsubscribe in the settings app is not putting the customer first, but instead Apple’s paycheck.
The app stores are getting so much pressure from regulators, but for the developer cut to apple and opening up devices, and not for things like subscriptions. The problem with 3rd party apps is already apparent on Android, with a plethora of malware, and how easily it can be installed, to steal your data. And with a phone acting as your digital wallet with ID and Bank Cards as well as your location, 3rd party apps could endanger so much in your life, but then it is not like Apple hasn’t allowed in scam apps that are still available in the app store! And even worse most congress people don’t understand technology enough to properly regulate it, other than who is paying them that is. I have no hope of US regulators making things better, but the EU is pretty consumer oriented, so maybe they will force changes.
App stores need to get better, and the companies are only worried about their bottom lines, not their customers (who become the actual product making the companies money in many ways), and regulators focus on the wrong things. Being worried about Apple’s cut, instead of how companies prey on people with subscriptions. And honestly they are Apple Devices, and an Apple built and maintained store, how can you say they don’t deserve a cut to allow access to their store.
And we have too many subscriptions in our lives. Before i could buy software and could wait on upgrades that weren’t absolutely necessary, now I have to pay or I lose use of the software. And I pay enough for Adobe Creative Cloud and Maxon’s Red Giant Plug-Ins (which have changed their licensing from 2 installs 1 in use to 1 install) and all the streaming services, plus phone bill, cable, rent/mortgage, that I can’t afford subscriptions for all my apps! At least Adobe Creative Cloud gets tons of upgrades, many subscription apps don’t get constant new features so why pay constantly?
So my iMac Pro has been crashing on shutdown. I shutdown and the computer seems to fully shut down, but then restarts and shows a crash. The crash kept showing com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily as the crash, so I realized it was hard drive related.
Now I have a lot of hard drives hooked up to my computer, not only for work, but for personal use as well, and I currently have 2 OWC Thunderbays hooked up to my mac, one Thunderbolt 3 which is mine and a Thunderbolt 2 that is works, and about 3 work hard drives, plus 4 external hard drives for storage in one 4 bay from OWC as well as s couple other storage and backup drives, and an external SSD as a media cache and about 4 work hard drives, and the internal on my iMac Pro. So a metric shit ton of hard drives.
Now I started disconnecting drives and trying things and got various results, with the problem occurring with different drives, but then finally it came down to the second OWC Thunderbay, the Thunderbolt 2 one. And if I turn that off the problem stopped happening. So I started wondering if it was the 2 different drives, and I wrote to OWC / Softraid as they are both OWC drives with softraid.
I gave them the crash report, and they told me something I didn’t know.
This is a kernel bug in MacOS. To avoid this, unmount and disconnect the USB drives before shutdown. (or your thunder bay). Its a known bug that 12 drives will cause a Mac to crash at shutdown.
Well how long has Apple had this damn issue. I know most people don’t get close to that, but I have surpassed it and ran the fuck into it.
Sure I can shut drives down first, but that is certainly a pain in the ass. And sometimes I have to shutdown the drives, then restart and then I can shutdown.
Color me frustrated, but OWC was fast and helpful.
