Thanks, very cool. I’ll quote myself: I inspected the tags with YATE and they are fine, there is no reason for this to happen. As you can see, Finder doesn’t have a problem with it. It wasn’t even about the actual cover image – I resized it and saved this modified image into the files, still no dice. I obviously also restarted iTun… erm Music.app, still no luck. I removed and re-added the files – nope. I combined these and other approaches in various ways, as you do when something like that happens. Only after I rebooted the entire computer, it finally worked and showed the album cover in Music.app. Also when I then tried again with the original, unresized artwork, obviously.

Responsive! Web apps! Mobile first! Wiggle wiggle wiggle!

Thanks Fuchen for the video.

When you have nothing selected in Photos.app, you can still click on “Export Photos…”, but nothing happens. At least I think so – I can’t be quite sure because the entire app is a big fat “no proper feedback for anything” mess.

What I expected to happen would be an export of all photos. When nothing happened after clicking, I thought maybe it already prepares for the export before bringing up the dialog, i.e. downloading some data in the background. Even though my computer is set to “Download Originals”, I still often have to wait for… something… when doing things with my photos. But iStat Menues showed no indication of data being transferred, so that probably was not it. I quit Photos.app and retried, because sometimes that does… something… these days. Still, nothing happened after clicking the menu item. I then selected all my photos myself using Cmd+A, which makes the menu item say “Export 23.072 Items…”, and upon clicking that it instantly opens up the export dialog.

So I can only assume that the menu item when having nothing selected really should be disabled, as it doesn’t do anything. I miss iPhoto, back when photography wasn’t something used to lock people into the ecosystem with proprietary features.

PS: It’s not related to which section you’re in, I only used “People” for a cleaner screenshot, but the behavior is the same in “Library”, “Memories”, “Places” etc.

You’ll never guess what happened when I tried to follow the advice of closing this message and copying my text. I’m so burnt by these kinds of things that I’m using a keylogger on myself so I always have a backup.

Has resizing the “Disk image size” ever worked for anyone using Docker Desktop? After watching the loading spinner for an hour I gave up, not for the first time.

I’m sorry for making the mistake, but could you give me a chance to fix it?

Thanks Fuchen for the submission!

This message is a lie.

In order to help a coworker restoring their Macbook, I was preparing a bootable USB medium according to the official (and frankly excellent) documentation from Apple. Step one is downloading the OS you want to install, in this case 10.15, so you get Install macOS Catalina.app. This process alone is pretty wild on Big Sur, now that they moved back from using the App Store for OS updates: In the support document all old versions back to High Sierra are linked – to the Mac App Store. I was not able to find those pages via App Store search, however. Not sure if that’s intentional or just the bad search.

So I clicked the “GET” button on Catalina’s App Store page. Which redirects into System Preferences, and then proceeds to download the file there. It is still put into /Applications as expected, but seeing that redirect out of the App Store is wild. After a successful download, System Preferences jumps in your Dock to alert you about an error: This installer is too old to be run on my OS version. No shit, sherlock? Luckily it does not instantly delete the file upon confirming that error, so I could proceed with the instructions.

After successfully (and easily, to give credit where it is due) creating the bootable USB medium from the downloaded installer, I wanted to get rid of it, as it weighs over 8GB. I could move it to the Trash after confirming with my admin account – to be expected for things that the App Store put into /Applications. When emptying the Trash, though, this error message pictured above came up.

Well, it did just start the installer right away after downloading it, so maybe some files are still in use? Good thing I need to reboot for the 11.2.1 update anyway. But alas, even after rebooting, the file refused to be deleted, same error message. I confirmed that the file was very much not in use using lsof.¹

I tried a few things, and went researching on the internet – apparently that problem is rather old, but never seems to have been fixed, just a few results:

• Can’t remove “Install macOS High Sierra.app”
• Delete “Install macOS High Sierra” from Trash
• Can’t delete “Install macOS High Sierra.app”
• Unable to remove Catalina install file on Big Sur Beta

The solutions that (should, I haven’t had time to actually test it myself) work are either disabling SIP or rebooting into Recovery Mode and mounting the disk there. I did nothing uncommon, nor is my setup in any way responsible for this. This hits normal people who simply follow official Apple instructions. 8GB wasted, which you won’t be able to reclaim without a significant investment of time, and nerves – if you’re not too comfortable with these kinds of things. For many people that is a lot of disk space, because Apple is still pricing their internal storage like it’s made of Fabergé egg shells. Once again I wish macOS wasn’t free, so I could at least request a refund for all the time I have to waste debugging it.

Don’t you just love it when your computer tells you to do something and then prevents you from doing it? Especially when it tells you to manually save your work because it can’t do so automatically (message on top), but a split second later shoves an error in your face that makes it impossible for you to actually do that? Gotta love webapps.

Thanks Fuchen for the screenshot!

Imagine what we could achieve if we had machines that were powerful enough to split text on their own.

And yes, if they did it automatically, I’d certainly complain about how Google Messaging ’21 is doing a horrible job at splitting my messages, ripping apart sentences and what not. And rightfully so, because… why even have this limit in the first place? 4096 characters isn’t exactly a lot, especially when it’s in the context of a “dump anything you want in here” thing, where I can also casually drop in a 50GB video file and have it magically be put into my Google Drive and sent as a link. Shouldn’t a messaging app be good at actual messaging?

• Left: Alarm, with the “Stop” button at the bottom.
• Right: Timer, with the “Stop” button at the top.

I could never quite put my finger on why I always felt a bit insecure on either of those screens. Nothing terrible happens when you hit the “wrong” button, but it was odd to me that I never was confident on where to press. Today I realized the reason – these almost identical screens have the functionality switched around. Why?!