Get keyboard and mouse battery percentage
Shell scripts to get keyboard and battery values. Run it on a schedule somehow. I like a GUI so I use ‘Run Shell Script’ in Automator and schedule them with a daily ‘custom script’ event in iCal.
Migrating Home Assistant from a Raspberry Pi 3B+ to VirtualBox on OS X
I was recently given a 2015 i7 Macbook Pro, 16GB ram/500GB SSD, with a huge LCD leak covering almost the entire screen. A replacement screen is about £500 and a risky repair which may or may not work, plus I don’t need another laptop, so I decided to give it a whirl as an HA…
Siri unable to connect to HomeKit: “Hmm I don’t see anything connected”
I’ve enjoyed 6 months of well-behaved Siri on my iPhone X and then suddenly today I found that Siri couldn’t communicate with any HomeKit devices (Siri’s reply to anything HomeKit-related was “Hmm I don’t see anything connected”. Cue a fair bit of tedious trouble-shooting, I found that step 3 of this iMore article fixes it. The basic idea…
BarTunes stops working, error 16288, abort trap 6
I noticed today that BarTunes was no longer in my menu bar. Launching it caused a brief flicker in the menu bar but the app wouldn’t launch. Who knows how long it’s been gone? It’s one of those apps I use a lot, but only on some days (music days as opposed to radio days).…
Wake your password-protected screensaver using AppleScript
I’ve discovered that my previous attempt to automate Radium doesn’t entirely work if my password-protected screensaver was running. It seems that since OS X 10.9 disabling the password that way somehow causes the keyboard to remain ‘captured’ by ScreenSaverEngine
Applescript and Radium
Launching the OS X radio app Radium automatically, including the ability to select AirPlay speakers as necessary.
Play random iTunes at a certain time every day, or how to disable an OS X screensaver password using Automator
Every morning at 6am run Doug’s excellent Block Party script to create a playlist of 4 and 5 star songs from random albums.
Philips Hue Siri voice control cannot find bridge
After months of turning my Philips Hue lights on and off using Siri, I found myself unable to set a scene today. This fixed it for me: – kill the Hue app on iPhone – go to settings -> HomeKit – click Edit and delete the home named “Home” – start Hue app – go to…
Disk Utility and the inability to format HFS+ non-journalled
All I wanted to do with mine was to directly connect a USB hard drive. The drive formats supported by the WD TV are FAT32, NTFS, and HFS+ (non-journalled). FAT32 has a 4 gigabyte file size limit which makes it impractical for many HD movies, and NTFS is not natively supported by the Mac.
Using OS X to convert video with surround sound for the Xbox 360, and related notes
Background I am a long-time AppleTV user. I have children, so ripping my DVDs and putting them on a hard drive attached to my jailbroken AppleTV is a convenient way to let the kids watch their favourite TV shows and movies. Unfortunately the AppleTV stopped working recently. However I do have an Xbox 360. And since…