Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

microsoft

OneDrive stuck syncing on OSX

· · 1 Comment

I have had this issue with OneDrive for days where it said it is syncing a file but not making any progress whatsoever. I tried all kinds of different solutions people have recommended, from remove the OneDrive app to killing the agent to deleting the .plist file. Nothing helped solve the problem. Unfortunately on OSX you can’t see which file is stuck either, so it is very difficult to troubleshoot. I managed to solve it as following in the end:

Go to “Resources” under your OneDrive app folder, for me this was:

cd /Applications/OneDrive.app/Contents/Resources

Then run the following command, not this may (will) trigger a resync, which is annoying, but did solve the sync issue:

./ResetOneDriveAppStandalone.command

If this doesn’t solve it, it could also be that there’s a hidden file called “.DS_Store” in the folder which is not syncing. Simply look at Finder and find the folders which are not syncing, use the Terminal to go to each folder, and look for the file “.DS_Store” by using “ls -a” (I always use “ls -lah” by default). It hopefully shows a list of files with that hidden file included. If that is the case, simply delete the file using “rm” and then restart the OneDrive agent.

I hope that helps others who hit the same issue.

Disable Dark Mode for Outlook in OSX?!

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Yes, after the latest update MS Office is now also capable of supporting the OSX Dark Mode. Nice, but rather annoying for MS Outlook I must say, the dark mode just makes reading the different panes very challenging. I went looking for an option in the UI that allowed me to change the default, I couldn’t find it, unfortunately, but I did find a way to disable it through the command line. For MS Outlook, in particular, this is how you do it:

defaults write com.microsoft.Outlook NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool yes

You can do this for other apps as well if you want, simply change the identifier string of Outlook (com.microsoft.Outlook) with the string of the app you want to disable it for. If you don’t know the string you can do the following to find it:

osascript -e 'id of app "Outlook"'

In the above example, I am looking for the identifier of Outlook, but this could be “Spotify” or anything else as well of course. Figured I would share this, as I found myself searching for half an hour. Note that you need to close/open the app after making the change!

MS Word: Paste and Match Formatting by default

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Something that bugged me for a long time on a Mac was the copy/paste behavior. I always wanted it to default to match the formatting of the document I am working in, or even paste in unformatted text. Pasting formatted text just messes up your whole document. I never knew how to do this until I recently saw a tweet about it. As I received a question about it today I figured I would write a short blog as the original post on this topic is difficult to find. I do want to point out that all credits for this trick go to user “BAT”, and of course thanks to Rob Nolen for tweeting this!

So how do you “change” the default “paste” option? Well, you don’t really, but you can configure a shortcut and set it to call a menu item. You do this as follows:

  • Open System Preferences
  • Go to Keyboard
  • Click Shortcuts
  • Add an “App Shortcut”
  • Select “Microsoft Word” as the app
  • Use the following as the “Menu Title”: Paste and Match Formatting
  • And in the keyboard shortcut use the key combination COMMAND-V

Now you have created a shortcut that maps to the “paste and match formatting” menu item. Which is very very handy! Thanks Rob and BAT for sharing this, you saved me from a lot of frustration.

Google Chrome OS

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People have been speculating about it for a while. Just when everyone thought it would not happen anymore Google announced the Chrome OS.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

Don’t know about you guys but I think this sounds awesome and as a serious threat for Microsoft. Google has been taking over the world in a rapid pace and if this is being picked up who knows what happens… let the games begin!