Jack Wellborn (tweet):
Nightly Time Machine is a collection of bash scripts that limits macOS’s Time Machine to once per night by only mounting Time Machine disks just before backing up and then unmounting them when Time Machine is finished. Preventing Time Machine disks from automatically mounting when connected also ensures they can be safely disconnected throughout the day.
[…]
At its best, Time Machine is “set it and forget it” in that you should never really have to think about it until a backup is needed or a backup disk needs to be replaced. Time Machine by itself is only at its best on desktops. On laptops, where external drives are frequently disconnected, Time Machine becomes a hassle at best and a risk to data at worst. With Nightly Time Machine, Time Machine is “set it and forget it” on laptops.
Earlier this year, I tried solving these problems using network Time Machine, but I gave up with that for my main Mac. I noticed that the Time Machine volume was mounted all off the time, and there was constant network traffic, seemingly because Spotlight was never able to catch up.
For my laptop that mostly acts as a desktop, I actually want the opposite functionality. Frequent backups during the day are good, but I want it to be quiet at night.
Previously:
launchd Mac macOS 12 Monterey Open Source Time Machine
neverminder:
i can’t log in to any of my banks without my phone. Most of the systems in my workplace also require phone app authentication. I can’t do any of those things with just a PC or laptop. Smartphones being the smallest and portable are surely the most lost and stolen. If someone got a hold of my PC or laptop - they would be able to do some damage, but not even close to if they were able to access my phone. Everything everywhere nowadays requires some app.
It seems wrong that Macs and PCs are in some cases now second-class citizens when they should be able to support a superset of the capabilities of a phone (well, aside from SMS).
Being able to run iOS apps on an iPad or Apple Silicon Mac is a potential workaround. As is Google Voice.
Sometimes, as with Symantec VIP Access, there is also a desktop version of the app, but that doesn’t mean that your bank or service actually supports registering multiple devices.
Previously:
Apple M1 Google Voice iOS iOS 15 iOS Apps on macOS iPad iPhone Mac macOS 12 Monterey Security Short Message Service (SMS) Travel Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
Mac Folklore Radio:
The story of how “the best-loved application for the Mac” took on Microsoft Works as told by programmer Bob Hearn in 2003.
Read Macworld’s roundup of integrated packages to see how ClarisWorks 1.0 stacked up against its competition.
This is great stuff. Hearn’s written history has been moved here (via Hacker News).
Mac Folklore Radio:
Steven Levy on why Macintosh developers aren’t scared of Claris, the software company backed by Apple Computer.
Original text from Macworld Magazine, June 1992.
ClarisWorks and other seemingly Macintosh-only products did indeed ship on Windows.
Don’t forget to check out the promotional video.
Previously:
Apple AppleWorks AppleWorks GS BeOS Business Claris ClarisWorks History iWork Mac Macworld OpenDoc
Howard Oakley:
Anyone who works predominantly in Dark Mode is reminded of this failure in QuickLook every day. There are workarounds, of course, and ignoring those instructions about using NSColor.textColor seems to work for Rich Text generated by apps, even though they still need to conform to the rules internally.
The root cause is that QuickLook is cutting corners, and won’t take the trouble to parse the Rich Text properly.
Dark Mode Mac macOS 12 Monterey Quick Look Rich Text Format (RTF)
