Category Archives: Apple

My Sandisk Extreme USB-C drive keeps ejecting itself…

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I have a 2TB Sandisk Exterme USB-C drive:

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/sandisk-extreme-portable-2tb-external-usb-c-nvme-ssd-black/JXJ62C9ZSV

Though, when I bought it, it was significantly cheaper than today’s price.

For “some time now” (many months) I have been seeing this popup on my computer:

Sandisk ejection notice.

Until recently, I had assumed Apple changed something and when I “eject” and the icon disappears from the desktop it really was not ejected yet. Perhaps some background cleanup was being done that didn’t use to happen. I would then eject using Disk Utility instead, and wait for the item to become grey, indicating fully un-mounted.

However, now that I am watching for this, I will see multiple alerts like this piled up in my Notification Center in the morning. This one, for example, was after I cleared all my notifications yesterday. I have not touched the drive or intentionally ejected it. Meanwhile, the four other drives plugged up are behaving fine.

And this drive is plugged directly into my computer versus the others going into a Caldigit TS3 thunderbolt dock. I would have expected more issues from going though a dock than connecting directly.

I am posting this to get it into the search engines. Anyone else ran into this?

Farewell, M-Audio iControl!

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In 2005, I bought this M-Audio iControl USB interface from the local Apple Store. It was a real-world mirror of the on-screen controls in Apple’s GarageBand recording software. It was super cool and useful.

For the past decade, it has been collecting dust in a storage bin. I decided to get rid of it, and found two of the knobs had been broken due to my improper storage. I ended up designing some 3-D printed replacements. They are functional, but not necessarily pretty.

Now that I have them designed, I have put the item up for sale. I generally take excellent care of my gear, so I still had the original box, manual, packing materials, and even the original receipt and the “backpack” style Apple Store bag ;-) Pity I didn’t take more care I storing the actual unit during a few moves…

I post this here in case anyone ever does a web search because they broke some of their buttons. (Honestly, I should have designed one for the row of track volume knobs on the right as well, just in case, but I really just wanted to make it functional enough to sale.)

You can find the designs on my Tinkercad.com page.

There ya go, search engines. Have fun.

Appleause.com merged into this site…

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My old appleause.com blog has been shut down, and the articles form there merged into this blog. I originally started that site back in 2007 with the intent of blogging about Apple stuff, mostly my research. Those articles are obsolete now. Firewire to SATA interface research? How quaint.

The one surprising thing was that I posted about resurrecting my Furby many years ago, even to the day I still get a few comments on that article each year. Crazy.

And if you wondered, I always pronounced appleause.com (like Apple + Applause) as Apple-Oz…

And if anyone wants a cool domain name for an Apple blog and wants to obtain that domain, let me know. I had big plans for it, and still do, but likely won’t have the time to work on it any time soon.

Apple Time Machine – AFP or SMB? Synology NAS hanging…

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I have been using a Synology DS1522 NAS to try to backup a Mac over a VPN. Sometimes it connects and works fine, and other times it gets stuck as “Connecting to backup disk…” Does anyone know a solution?

One thing I learned, thanks to asking BING AI’s chat, is that SMB is preferred rather than AFP:

Types of disks you can use with Time Machine on Mac – Apple Support

Tip: If given the choice between SMB and AFP, use SMB to back up to your external backup disk.

– Types of disks you can use with Time Machine on Mac – Apple Support

I went in to the Synology NAS control panel and disabled AFP and enabled SMB as well as Bonjour over SMB. We shall see if this helps…

Please leave a comment if you found this post while looking for a solution. I may have figured it out by the time you read this, and just forgot to update this post.

iOS 12.2 iPhone Photos won’t upload to iCloud over WiFi (but do over cellular)

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Sometimes Apple stuff is just “magic.” But when the magic fails, it can send you endlessly searching for a solution online. I am placing this post here so search engines can be find it in case someone else is having this same issue.

Normally, I can take a photo on my iPhone and see it show up moments later on my Mac or iPad. Lately, however, photos taken from my iPhone seem to get stuck uploading to my iCloud Photos library. I had a few photos that didn’t sync after several days (hooked to power overnight and on WiFi). Sometimes, switching to cellular causes these photos to upload immediately.

I read some tips that suggested turning off iCloud Photos and turning it back on (with a phone reboot in between). I did that, end then had 5818 photos waiting to upload. Not great.

After none of the tips I read (from dozens and dozens of forums, blog posts and “fix it” site articles) worked, I decided to try the “erase everything and restore from a backup” approach.

I did that, and after an hour of restoring and getting Apple Pay and Touch ID and such set back up, I find that I now have 14,803 photos waiting to upload.

Does anyone have any clue what causes this, and how to fix it? My phone has been plugged up an on WiFi for half an hour and not a single change in the upload count.

Thoughts?

Apple TV multiplayer and 3-D games list

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Since I have had no luck finding such a list online, I plan to start a new Apple TV page that will cover the various multiplayer and 3-D games.

Multiplayer implies more than one player at the same time. There is no category for this in the app store, so unless the developer puts that word in the description, you won’t find these games with a search.

I was very surprised to find that the new 4th generation Apple TV supports 3-D content. The Pangea Software games (some of which I’d played on the Mac years ago) are the only ones I’ve found so far that work in 3-D. Really neat.

Check out the page.

More tech whiners: Dongles

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana

Tech pundits are complaining about new Macs that only come with a USB-C port. “We have to have dongles for everything!” And the sky is falling.

I think back to 1998, when the original Bondi blue iMac came it. It had no floppy drive. It has no parallel printer port. It had no RS232 serial port. It had no ADB (some kind of Apple port; I never had any Apple stuff before the iMac so it meant nothing to me).

To hook up a modem, you needed a USB adapter (much more than just a dongle).

To hook up a parallel printer, you needed a USB adapter.

To hook up a SCSI hard drive, or a serial mouse, or an ADB accessory, or anything else … you needed a USB adapter.

And I remember that the Tech Whiners whined about this back then, too. And there was pain. USB adapters were expensive and sparse.

But today, USB is on everything. No more dongles are needed.

You know what I bet? I bet USB-C will do that same thing, and soon everything will just be USB-C.

We’ve been down this road before, folks.

Can you imagine how many different ports you’d need on your Mac (or PC) if this had not happened? I guess that’s what the Tech Whiners want…

Next time … keyboards.