Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

mac

HDD attached to MacOS constantly rattling/spinning?

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I have an HDD attached to my Mac for backups and as storage for photos which are archived. (I don’t think this is MacOS version specific, but for me this happened with MacOS Tahoe 26.7. The last couple of days I noticed that my disk was constantly rattling / spinning, to the point where it started to annoy me. I rebooted my Mac, but it made no difference. I looked at the Activity Monitor and couldn’t identify what was causing this, so I opened up the terminal and managed to figure it out pretty quickly using the following command:

sudo lsof +D /Volumes/Backup

This provided a list of all the different processes, and users, accessing that particular volume. I noticed that command “mds_store” with user “_mds_stores” was accessing the disk constantly in various directories. A quick search revealed that this is MacOS Spotlight indexing and cataloging files to speed up search. As the disk is just used as a backup target I decided to disable the indexing of the volume the following way:

  • Open System Settings
  • Go to Spotlight
  • Scroll down to “Search Privacy…”
  • Click “+” to add the volume you want to exclude from being indexed and click Done

Within seconds, literally, the rattling stopped and I regained my sanity.

Logitech Brio Webcam issues with autofocus and not retaining settings on Mac OSX

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I have been using a Logitech Brio Webcam for the past year or so. It is a 4k Webcam which is very useful for webinars and meetings, especially as I run my Macbook with an external monitor and it is closed. Over the past 9 months or so I had a bunch of trouble with the Logitech Brio Webcam. This week I received a new Macbook and I had to reinstall all components, and immediately after I installed the Logitech software, all issues started popping up again. Auto Focus was just not working as expected, wide/standard view settings were not properly retained, and neither was the angle/width. I made sure I had the latest version of the software, the latest version of the firmware, but that didn’t solve any of the problems. Actually, it made things worse as now I had the camera randomly stopping as well, even had my Mac log me off randomly when using the camera. I solved all these issues by uninstalling ALL Logitech software. Yes, you read that correctly, I uninstalled all Logitech software and the Brio was usable again.

Unfortunately, this means that you can’t configure the Brio as you would wish, and it runs with the optimal/default settings, but at least it works. I was told that the Logitech G Hub software could potentially be a nice alternative. But after reading this thread on Reddit I decided I am going to skip that as well, as I don’t get a real comfortable feeling when reading all the comments. Unfortunately, I don’t have a way to configure the webcam right now, if I find a solution to this problem I will make sure to update this post. You may ask, what would you need to configure? Well in my case I would like to configure the Webcam to use PAL instead of NTSC for the refresh rate, which removes some of the flickering I would be able to spot other wise. Unfortunately, not possible just yet without the software to my knowledge, or maybe one of you knows the answer to this problem? To conclude, I think it is fair to say that the Logitech hardware is great, but unfortunately, the software is not.

— UPDATE —
I just installed Logi Tune (2.1.24), it seems a bit better at the moment, I use the following settings:

  • Autofocus – Disabled
  • Manual focus – all the way to the left
  • Auto Exposure – Disabled
  • Exposure – Between 15 – 18% for me
  • Brightness – 50%
  • Contrast – 50%
  • Saturation – 50%
  • Sharpness – 100%

OSX audio stopped working

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I have this issue regularly where the OSX audio stopped working on my Macbook. I am using High Sierra right now but had the same problem with Sierra. Not sure what is causing the problem, and not sure how to prevent it from happening. I have figured out though how to solve it, and as occasionally I find myself searching for the solution I figured I would quickly document it on my own blog. If your audio has stopped working you can simply stop the service responsible for it.

For me the following works solving the problem:

sudo killall coreaudiod

For me audio comes back again automatically almost instantly, some actually have reported they need to start the service again

sudo launchctl start com.apple.audio.coreaudiod

I hope this helps others as well as running into the same problem. If you have and you solved the problem in a different way please leave a comment.

Powerpoint for Mac switching resolution?

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I’ve had this issue for a long time. Whenever I would open PowerPoint and present using a projector all my diagrams and screenshot would show up fuzzy. Even if I would set up the screen configuration to be optimized for the projector it still would not look great. The funny thing is that I always have my screen setup in “mirror” mode, and this week I noticed that when I switched between my regular screen to Presenter Mode on PowerPoint that the resolution would change.

Apparently when you use presenter mode with PowerPoint on a Mac it sets the screens in “extended mode” automatically. By default it then seems to optimize for the Mac screen automatically, which usually does not work well for the projector considering most are low resolution devices. I disabled the Presenter Mode option next, and when I turned off presenter mode in PowerPoint it worked fine. You can switch it off in Preferences under Slide Show:

I normally don’t blog about this kind of stuff, but as I hardly was able to find anything useful about it anywhere I figured I would share it with the world.

Iomega PX6 / PX4 update that enables Time Machine to work properly

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Just wanted to point out that if you flash your Iomega PX6 or PX4 with the latest firmware, 3.1.14.995, it will actually enable you to do Mac OS X (Lion / 10.7) Time Machine backups and restores again… I discovered it by accident as somehow Iomega did not list it in the release note and they did not update the KB article which explains that it doesn’t work. Anyway, it works again… Simple download and upgrade of your PX6/PX4 firmware will do the trick, at least it did for me.