Six Bartender Alternatives to Manage Your Mac’s Menu Bar

Popular Mac menu bar management utility Bartender was recently quietly sold to another company … However, the new Bartender owner is a largely unknown entity that has reportedly hiked Bartender’s purchase options, and is alleged to have added code to the app that may be associated with collecting analytics data on users.

Given that Bartender requires extensive permissions to operate in macOS, including screen recording, the whole event has understandably left many users concerned about privacy … here are some alternative menu bar utilities that are worth considering.

Source: Six Bartender Alternatives to Manage Your Mac’s Menu Bar | MacRumors

Purgeable Storage Space on Mac: What it is & How to Free It

You may find a “Purgeable” storage space when looking at disk storage and disk usage in modern versions of macOS, including Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, Sierra, etc, either within the About This Mac > Storage screen, Disk Utility, or the Storage Management section of System Information.

This curiously labeled disk storage item is similar to the “Other” storage space on the Mac that many users wonder about, so if you’re curious what purgeable storage space is, and how to free it up to clear it out, then read on.

Source: Purgeable Storage Space on Mac: What it is & How to Free It

Installing macOS Catalina 10.15 on Proxmox 6.1 or 6.2 using OpenCore

This tutorial for installing macOS Catalina using OpenCore has been adapted for Proxmox from Kholia’s OSX-KVM project and Leoyzen’s OpenCore configuration for KVM. You can get the full sourcecode on my GitHub here.

If you’d like to use Clover instead, use my older tutorial, but OpenCore works better!

Source: Installing macOS Catalina 10.15 on Proxmox 6.1 or 6.2 using OpenCore – Nicholas Sherlock

Convert an older model USB printer to a networked printer using a Raspberry Pi or other Linux-based computer — also works well for making an older printer compatible with a newer version of MacOS

We originally set out to do this because we were having problems getting an older model laser printer, specifically a Konica Minolta PP1350W, to work with MacOS High Sierra (10.13). With previous versions of MacOS we’d been able to connect the printer directly to the computer, and with some fiddling with drivers and other software, get it to work. But newer versions of MacOS seem to be far less tolerant of this, and we had a spare Raspberry Pi, so the idea came to us to use the Raspberry Pi as a bridge between the printer and any computers on the local network from which we wanted to be able to print. The bonus is that the printer is no longer tethered to a single machine, but instead can potentially be used by any computer on the local network.

You do not need to have a Raspberry Pi to make this work – any computer that can run Linux will do. And of course the Raspberry Pi or other Linux computer can be used for other purposes besides this. We do not guarantee that this technique will work for every older printer out there, but this will work with a surprising number of them.

Source: Convert an older model USB printer to a networked printer using a Raspberry Pi or other Linux-based computer — also works well for making an older printer compatible with a newer version of MacOS – Two “Sort Of” Tech Guys

PySimpleGUI: Super-simple GUI to grasp… Powerfully customizable (Python)

Looking to take your Python code from the world of command lines and into the convenience of a GUI? Have a Raspberry Pi with a touchscreen that’s going to waste because you don’t have the time to learn a GUI SDK? Look no further, you’ve found your GUI package.

Source: PySimpleGUI (Github)

Note: Scroll down the page for instructions and sample usage. This really does seem like an easy way for Python users to add GUI interfaces to their Python scripts. The author has said in a Reddit post that “It’s based only on tkinter. Zero package dependencies. And it’s a single .py file. That means not much can go wrong.” And that it “Works in Windows, Linux, Mac. Running on my Pi board that has 3.4 installed on it.”

If you Mac (particularly Mac Mini) goes to sleep or hibernates even though you have disabled sleep in the Energy Saver settings, try this

UPDATED March 19, 2018:

Apple Mac desktop system users (particularly Mac Mini users) that have attempted to disable system sleep or hibernation may have discovered that no matter what changes are made in the Energy Saver pane in System Preferences, when they go away for a while and come back they are greeted by a progress bar (perhaps accompanied by the Apple logo, similar to what would be seen during a reboot) and the only way to recover is to press the power button briefly (which may not always work).

What is weird about this is that in some cases the system for the most part continues to operate normally in the background. So, it is not truly sleeping. If you have music playing, it will continue to play. If someone sends you an instant message, you’ll hear the notification tone. If you click somewhere along the bottom of the screen, if and when the display comes back you will see you have launched some random application from the dock, depending on where you clicked. And so on. But still, that damn Apple logo and progress bar will randomly appear when you wake up the screen.

So, here are some ways to try to fix this, that may or may not work for you. First, open the Terminal application and from the command prompt enter this:

sudo pmset -g

Enter your password when requested and it should show you the System-wide power settings. Note particularly the values for these settings: autopoweroff, hibernatemode, and standby. They SHOULD all have a value of 0 (zero). If any of them have any other value (particularly autopoweroff), then try running this:

sudo pmset -a autopoweroff 0 hibernatemode 0 standby 0

Or you can change any of the values individually, for example:

sudo pmset -a autopoweroff 0

Also, you should increase the standbydelay (the time in seconds before the Mac will try to sleep, and yes it is in seconds no matter what Apple documentation says) to a larger value:

sudo pmset -a standbydelay 86400

Then run sudo pmset -g again and make sure your change was saved. What you are doing is disabling a specific type of sleep mode that has been problematic for many users. If you find that you system still tries to go to sleep, and you have disabled sleep in the Energy Saver settings, then you may need to do one of two things. One is to open a new Terminal window and enter this:

caffeinate

and just let it run until you are ready to shut down your system. Or if that does not work, try disabling display sleep – go to the Energy Saver settings in System Preferences, and move the slider bar for “Turn display off after” all the way to the right, to the “Never” setting. It will warn you that this could shorten the life of your display, but this may be the only thing that actually works. You can always turn off your display using the power switch on the display itself, or if that is in a place that’s difficult to find or hard to press, you could plug the display’s power cord into a switched outlet (such as on a small surge protector strip) and use that switch to turn the display on and off.

Note that you may want to run sudo pmset -g again to make sure that none of the above three settings have changed, if either of the following occur:

1. You make a change to the Energy Saver settings, or

2. You reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac (note that if your Mac is unplugged or loses power for more than a few seconds, the SMC may be reset).

If any of the three settings mentioned above have changed to a non-zero value, change them back to zero.

I say to TRY this because even doing all this may only reduce the frequency of the sleep states, not eliminate them entirely. The thing that finally made the difference for me was to make the changes to the pmset settings and to disable display sleep completely. There is a real bug in MacOS that needs to be addressed to truly fix this.

For more information on this, search on “autopoweroff” in your favorite search engine.