In macOS Ventura on my M2 Mac, I found an option in the “Options…” panel of battery settings called “Optimize video streaming while on battery.” What are the trade-offs of turning this on? Lower quality video when on battery? While watching Netflix, I didn’t notice a difference, especially since I wasn’t watching Netflix in full screen. After digging into the help, I found this comment:
What is the impact on the batttery when this is turned on?
While on battery power, play high-dynamic-range (HDR) video in standard dynamic range (SDR), which requires less energy.
More details are provided in an HDR article. The forum posts on macOS Rumors and Reddit don’t really provide any additional information. Has anyone published any benchmarks on this? If so, please tweet them to me.
Was trying to research how to create a bootable backup on a USB-C external drive under macOS Monterey. I am using a backup tool called ChronoSync, so I started to research and found a tech note about bootable backups.
No longer can you just make a copy of your main hard drive and make it bootable. You need to first install macOS on an external hard drive, according to Macworld.
The above article recommends that I format the drive as an macOS Extended format. Is that correct? I thought that we were using APFS now, and my internal drive is formatted as an APFS Volume Group.
I couldn’t test this because when I clicked “Show All Disks…” in the installer to see external drives for installation, the installer told me that I could not install on the volume I had chosen because it was part of an AppleRAID.
AppleRAID volumes do no support installing a bootable drive.
Looks like I will buy a dedicated backup hard drive and update this. If you have any suggestions on external drives for bootable backups, then tweet me.
As of this writing Google Drive’s native Mac application is not supported on M1 Macs because it is a kernel extension and those don’t run intel code on the M1 architecture.
Manipulating Files in the Finder on Google Drive when Drive is no longer a folder
As I have many Hazel rules that sort files into my Google Drive files, I have been trying to find a way to sync my files from my local folder.
I found that Transmit had support for Google Drive and I could log in to my Google Drive using that App. Then I remembered that Transmit had the feature to turn a cloud service into a local drive, however after further reading I found this no longer worked as they don’t support the Transmit Disk feature anymore.
After migrating from my Intel MacBook Pro to my M1, I tried to do some sleuthing to find where the Google Drive data was stored to see if the files were readable locally.
I found the files stored in:
~/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS
Unfortunately, the files were not stored as a human-readable folder structure and instead seemed to be in another database format:
Google Drive storage in the Library folder
Syncing from Google Drive to a Local Folder
This seemed to indicate my only option was to use Transmit to sync the Google Drive files back down to my local drive to recreate the local copy of the files. One of the drawbacks of using Transmit Sync is the inability to sync the Google Docs documents like sheets.
Syncing problems down to the Local Folder
After doing the sync down to the local folder did not sync everything. I found quite a few errors of syncing down event XLS files and with the Transmit report, it was hard to figure out why.
/SZP GM/Accounting/Payroll Report/SZ Party Payroll Report - 201807.xls - Could not download “SZ Party Payroll Report - 201807.xls”.
/SZP GM/Accounting/Canceled Platinum Business MasterCard 2017-2019/hsbc-6.pdf - Could not download “hsbc-6.pdf”.
Updating my Hazel Rules
Hazel lets you change the folder with the “Relocate Folder…” option…
Hazel change of folder destination
WARNING This change all my rules to use the new folder and then started to move all my pdfs that were stuck in my downloads folder since my migration to my M1 Mac.
Uploading to Google Drive using Transmit
Now that Hazel had copied my PDFs I thought the next step was going to be to upload them to transmit. Just to be careful I used the “Simulate” command in Transmit to make sure that the upload was going to work? I got some confusing results as shown in this screenshot.
Upload sync unexpected results
The files that Transmit considered to be changed were not just the PDFs that hazel filed. This si where I got gun shy to complete the upload and have published this blog post to send to Panic to see if they have any advice. Will update it after.
Now that I use Sidecar to turn my iPad Pro into a second screen I got a bit tired of going to the display preferences to change where my iPad was physically sitting each time. Since I am hot desking I have to put it on the left or the right and that changes almost daily.
Originally, I thought I would fix this would Keyboard Maestro but it can’t change the display layout and it is too hard to automate it to do the preferences.
I found a stack exchange thread with a link to displayplacer. This is a command line tool that can be installed by homebrew which will do the job of display preferences.
After following the instructions to install the tool you can capture your current screen configuration and then run a command to switch.
I created a Keyboard Maestro macro that monitors when the iPad is plugged in and then prompts me to turn on sidecar and choose the side of the desk where the iPad sits.
