Meeting Report

Monitor Problems and London Guests

At our meeting held on the 14th May we were joined by guests from the London Mac User Group. We had a presentation showing interesting troubleshooting and tips stemming from a monitor problem, some iOS tips and lots of friendly discussion and advice.

Monitor Problems

DaveK told us about a problem with his monitor which has become increasingly unwilling to turn on (but works well once it finally does come on). To overcome this in the short term he’s trying to keep his Mac from putting the monitor to sleep but this proved surprisingly difficult. During his investigation he came across quite a few useful tips:

  • Hot corners, found in System Preferences/Desktop & Screen Saver and Mission Control can be used to put the display to sleep by moving the mouse to a screen corner. They can also be used to quickly access other features like Mission Control and viewing the Desktop.
  • You can set the display to never sleep in the Energy Saver preferences.
  • There are a number of apps that give you more control over your Mac sleeping (or not). Dave mentioned Amphetamine and Craig mentioned Lungo.
  • Dave also tried using Automator with a Run Apple Script action to simulate keyboard input at regular intervals.
  • All the above failed and Dave found his monitor was still going to sleep! He eventually found this was being caused by a sleep Schedule set in the Energy Saver preferences which overrides all the other settings and apps.

London Guests

We were joined by Alastair and Craig from the London Mac Users Group who are also hosts of the group’s Brew & Byte podcast.

LMUG will be hosting a live on-line watch of Apple’s WWDC 2021 keynote presentation, keep and eye on their news letter for more details.

iOS Tips

Robert had some quick iOS tips:

  • Setting notifications to persistent.
  • Taking full page screenshots in Safari.
  • Choosing lossless recording in voice memos for higher quality (especially if the recording is to be edited).
  • Dragging from the number button on the keyboard to type a single number or punctuation mark.

Apple News

We discussed some recent Apple news including:

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