Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

osx

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%

MS Office autoupdate in constant loop on OSX / Mac

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Oh man, this was driving me insane. I found myself in a situation where MS Office Autoupdate was in a loop, I think it ran about once an hour at least for 2 days. Each time, of course, it would tell me there were no updates. Frustrating for sure. I place it in to “Manual” mode but it would still open up every hour. This Autoupdate loop started to begin after an upgrade to MS Office 16.24 for Mac. I ended up doing the following to solve the problem. So far I have not seen the Autoupdate window anymore, so let’s hope it indeed solved it:

Open a terminal window and do the following:

cd ~/Library/Preferences

rm -rf com.microsoft.autoupdate*.plist

After the files have been deleted, manually run Autoupdate once. This solved the problem for me. One of my colleagues solved the problem by simply downloading the autoupdater for Mac from the MS website and manually update it. Just sharing this in case others are hitting the same problem.

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!

SSH on OSX Mojave failing with broken pipe error

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I recently upgraded my Macbook to OSX Mojave (10.14.1). Ever since I upgraded whenever I want to open an SSH session to any server on the internal (VMware) network I would receive the following error message:

packet_write_wait: connection to x.y.z. port 22: broken pipe

Very annoying as it made deploying labs in our dev cloud very complicated. I googled around and there were many suggestions on how to solve this, but none worked so far. A colleague today pointed me to thread on VMTN (surprisingly) which describes how to solve the problem. it is very simple, just add “ssh -o IPQoS=throughput” to your normal ssh command. So something like the following:

ssh -o IPQoS=throughput root@192.168.1.1

Thanks Alex for the pointer, and thanks Quinn for posting the solution on VMTN! Oh, and yes you can add the following to your ~/.ssh/config so that you don’t have the use the -o flag everytime:

Host *
IPQoS=throughput

Audio stops working on MAC / OSX

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I have this issue where my sound / audio just stops working on my Mac / OSX. Very annoying, and as I find myself searching for the command every time I have this issue I figured I would simply drop it on my blog as a reminder, much easier to find, at least for me. How do I get my audio working again? Well I simply open a terminal and kill the service responsible for it. It is then auto restarted and it starts working again (you can also kill it through the UI):

sudo killall coreaudiod

I have this problem in OSX 10.14.1, but also had it in 10.14 and 10.13.x. if anyone knows how to solve the problem please leave a comment!