Jacken's Blog » osx

Disk that refuses to sleep in Mac OS X – how to fix it

Jacken — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:29:28 +0000

Image by DigaoSPBR

I replace my internal disk on my MacBook Pro with a SSD disk, which made a huge difference in speed. At the same time I removed the DVD unit and installed a new 500gb disk instead. The extra disk went to sleep when not in use, but then started within a couple of minutes or less. Here’s what I did to fix that problem.

Finding out the culprit

First of all I needed to change the time before the disk went to sleep. I set the value before sleep to one minute, so I don’t have to wait long between tests.

sudo pmset -a disksleep 1

This will set the time until sleep to one minute when using an AC adapter. Replace -a with -b for changing the setting when on battery power.

To find the applications that was accessing the volume, I opened the terminal application and started to observe the output of the following terminal command. To narrow the output I use grep to just show events and access to the extra disk. Otherwise your going to get a LOT of unnecessary output.

sudo fsusage | grep nameofvolume

Replace nameofvolume with the name of your disk. Enter your login password. The first thing I noticed was that fseventsd was logging information to the external disk. To deactivate the logging, just enter the following:
cd /Volumes/name
ofdisk sudo touch .fseventsd/nolog

Interfering software

I continued to look for applications or processes that accessed my disk, and one of them was iStat Menu. I checked the settings for iStat Menu, and the disk info part was disabled, but it still accessed the disk. So I had to disabled it. I love iStat Menu, so that felt a bit sad, but until they fix this it will be turned off.

I have a lot of links for stuff like the download folder, Final Cut Pro settings, buffers for applications and all my photos on the extra disk so naturally the extra disk will start when using applications using these files. But now when I surf the web or write, I no longer have to listen to the sound of the disk. Blissful silence.

You can now change the time before the disk goes to sleep. My 7200rpm disk starts very quickly so I kept mine on a couple of minutes. Added benefit? Much better battery life!

I hope this helps you if you have the same problem.

Blogging with Byword and Marked with WordPress

Jacken — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:55:26 +0000

Byword and Marked

I just got Byword and Marked from the Mac App Store because I’m totally addicted to writing in Markdown. I didn’t like the predefined fonts, but found a great typeface called Droid Sans that you can download here.

Byword

This is a really simple and nice text editor that handles Markdown like a charm. I really like the way it dims down the markup, making the text easier to read.

Marked

This is a nifty little application for previewing the live HTML output from your Markdown text. Great for catching mistakes.

Images

I’m using a WordPress blog and I have found that it’s easiest just to upload the images using the WordPress Dashboard and then copy the link. There are shortcuts for most of the Markdown commands, so all I have to do is to press alt-command-i and paste the link to the image. Thanks to Marked I know that the images will look ok. This looks like a great way of writing blog posts.

iPad/iPhone

I store all my blog posts in a directory in Dropbox, so If I want to I can edit the post with my favorite iPad/iPhone Markdown editor Writing Kit. For me that’s an enormous bonus. Bored on the subway? Write on your blog posts.

Finishing

So when you are finished writing, you just need to export HTML to clipboard and paste it into WordPress.

DNS problems with Snow Leopard 10.6

Jacken — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:49:28 +0000

I’ve had some bizarre problems with my DNS today. I checked /etc/resolv.conf but everything looked ok. Checked the settings dialog for my network and at first glance, that one seemed ok as well.

But normally there should be a dimmed version of the DHCP assigned values there.

Just select the empty one and press the minus sign. Sneaky little bug there!

Save your settings and you should be good to go.

Getting Perian 1.1.4 to work Snow Leopard 10.6 to work

Jacken — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:33:40 +0000

There’s a problem with getting Perian to work in Snow Leopard. But there’s a quick fix outlined here, but If the PreferencePane is installed to only the current user, you need to paste the following into the terminal:

cd cd Library/PreferencePanes/Perian.prefPane/Contents/Resources/Components cp Perian.zip ~/Downloads cp CoreAudio/A52Codec.zip ~/Downloads cp QuickTime/AC3MovieImport.zip ~/Downloads cd ~/Downloads unzip AC3MovieImport.zip unzip A52Codec.zip unzip Perian.zip sudo mv Perian.component/ /Library/QuickTime/ sudo mv AC3MovieImport.component/ /Library/QuickTime/ sudo mv A52Codec.component/ /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/