Hands-On Tech 241 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Hands On Tech, what happens when you've got processes that you want running on your Mac but it keeps falling asleep? Stay tuned for my answer. Hello and welcome to Hands On Tech. I am Mikah Sargent and today we are answering your tech questions. I'm looking forward to this one. This question comes from Kevin. Kevin writes, Dear Mikah, I have a Mac Studio M1 Max from 2020 running Tahoe 26.0.1 and I use Super Duper to back up my hard drive. Even though I have quote prevent automatic sleeping when display is off checked, the Super Duper backup does not do the backup until I wake it up in the morning.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:50]:
I also have quote put hard disks to sleep when possible unchecked. I cannot schedule a wake up for the Mac because that has been taken out of Tahoe. Is there a setting I'm missing that will take care of this problem? If not, is there a third party app that will do this? I have looked at TinkerTool which will do that and a lot more. Do you feel it would be worth getting it for all the features it has? I've been a faithful Club twit member since November 2023 and watched almost all of the Twit podcasts, especially the Mac shows. Whatever suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated. Kevin, you are greatly appreciated. Thank you for being a member of Club Twit. I really appreciate it.
Mikah Sargent [00:01:26]:
So I love this question because there are a lot of tools that can help you with this problem and some of them incredibly powerful, others not as powerful, but can still get done what you want to get done. And the first app that I want to talk about is one that you may be, you may have heard of. Actually, I'm going to do a little bit of a I'm going to. Before I even get to it, I'm going to mention something. If you were to go to the terminal on your Mac and type in the word caffeinate, it will actually run a process that keeps your Mac from falling asleep. And caffeinate was somewhat of an inspiration for the app that I'm about to talk about. Because while caffeinate sort of runs in the background, I have found that even running caffeinates it doesn't quite get me what I want. For one thing, it's just keeping the Mac awake for a long, long, long, long time.
Mikah Sargent [00:02:26]:
And I don't necessarily want that in this case. That's not what you want, Kevin. You don't want the Mac to be staying awake and awake and awake and awake and awake and awake and awake. Until it comes time to run this backup, you'd like for it to do its thing, but then, excuse me, when it comes time to do the backup, that's when you want it to wake up and do what it needs to do right so that it's not using a bunch of power. And yes, you, you're very right that the later versions of macOS took out a lot of the user control. I say user control because power user control is still there, but user control of the scheduling system in the Mac for energy saving stuff. Now if you go into your system settings and you go to the energy area, you'll notice that it is not jam packed anymore. It used to have a lot more features.
Mikah Sargent [00:03:12]:
Now when I look at mine it says prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off, wake for network access and then start up automatically after a power failure. That's it. Except mine also has UPS options because I do have a UPS attached. But the fact that this is so bare is frustrating to a lot of power users who were sort of semi power users who would use this page as much as they wanted to. So how do we do it? Well, the first app that I'm going to recommend, the one that was in many ways inspired by Caffeinate, is an app called Amphetamine. And Amphetamine, as you can imagine thinking it is a more powerful form of caffeine. In this case, it will keep your Mac running. And by default that's what it does in the menu bar when you launch this free utility.
Mikah Sargent [00:04:12]:
By the way, no in app purchase, just a free utility. You can set it to run in the background and you can have it go indefinitely. You can set it by minutes, you can set it by hours. You can have it go for a certain amount of hours and minutes. You can have it run while a specific app is running. You can have it run while a file is downloading. There are all sorts of special conditions for having it run. And while it's running it means that it will keep your Mac open and awake.
Mikah Sargent [00:04:46]:
But there are all sorts of tools that go along with it. So by default you will see that we have a quick start session that you can get going by simply right clicking. That's how I have mine set up. And then it has special behaviors. So when it starts, does it go ahead and start doing a, you know, hey, don't go to sleep yet. Now this is what's great too is that you can set it up so that it will do specific things like when the session is over or actually when you, when you are running this, if the Mac is forced to sleep by you going and choosing for it to sleep, go ahead and end the session. You can say while it's running, I would like for the display to be able to sleep. That's something that I always recommend is let the display sleep while the Mac is still running in the background.
Mikah Sargent [00:05:42]:
Now here's the important thing and what I specifically want you to keep in mind, Kevin, whenever it comes to using Amphetamine, which again, it's free. So one of these other tools that you might invest in, try this first, and that is the Triggers section, because I believe this is going to do what you want it to do. So what you will do is you will run Super Duper in the background. Okay. And then open up Amphetamine and choose to enable Triggers. Now, when you first do this, it's going to ask if your Mac can have permission for automation tasks on your machine. Yes, we'll click the plus icon and here we'll give it a name. So in this case we'll call it Kevin.
Mikah Sargent [00:06:30]:
Actually, let's call it Super Duper Backup and then we give it a criteria. Now, there are multiple options here, but in this case, the reason why I said to run it in the background is because what I would want to do, what I would want you to do is to hit the plus icon and then choose Application. And then you can look for the app or you'll see it says don't show helper apps or processes. I want to deselect that to show helper apps or processes. Find the process that is the actual Super Duper backup and select that. So in this case I'm just going to pretend like that that process is 1Password Browser helper. Of course, that's not it in this case, but we're going to choose Add Criterion. And so in this case it says if this application is running, then I want you to turn on.
Mikah Sargent [00:07:32]:
In this case, I want you to turn on Amphetamine and keep it going for as long as this application is running. Do I want to allow the display to sleep? Yes, I do. Do I want to allow the screensaver to run? Yes, I do. After, for example, 15 minutes of inactivity, I'll choose Save and make sure it's enabled. And then what I can see is that up at the top you can't see this, but in my menu bar Amphetamine is running. And that is because right now that one password tool is running. So what this does is it keeps your Mac from falling asleep for the whole period that the Super Duper backup is going. And here's what else you would do.
Mikah Sargent [00:08:14]:
You said specifically, Kevin, you say, I use Super Duper to back up my hard drive, even though I have prevented it, does not do the backup until I wake up in the morning. So that tells me that you've got it scheduled to run at night, right? Hit the plus icon. Oops. Rather not hit the plus icon, but select your specific trigger. Hit the plus icon for criteria and then add schedule. And now you can say on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday from whatever time you run it. Let's say it's 0200am So 2am to 8am, right? While, while that application is running, then make sure that you have. You have Amphetamine running and keeping your Mac from falling asleep.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:14]:
Then you choose Save and it's. And it's working. So that is one example. As an option, when you go and you get Amphetamine, you're going to see an option called Drive Alive. This is something that you're going to want to use as part of this installation. Because of the Mac and its power saving features, Drive Alive is requiring the hard drive to stay awake during this period of time. And most importantly for you, you have to, because you're doing a backup. In particular, you're going to want this going now.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:52]:
By default, Amphetamine does not come with DriveAlive as part of the installation. It's a helper tool that will be installed after the fact. So go into the settings, find Drive Alive, and then use it from there. Are you ready to grow in 2026? Let me tell you why advertising on Twitter is the way to make that happen.
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Mikah Sargent [00:11:42]:
Now that's one option again, free, very easy to use. Amphetamine. Let me Did I remove that trigger? I'm going to get rid of that trigger because I don't actually want it and set this back. But let's go to my second suggestion. This is a far more powerful tool and it's a lot like TinkerTool. So it's kind of up to you. But I have used and do use a tool called Power Manager. Power Manager is a lot like TinkerTool.
Mikah Sargent [00:12:17]:
I can't remember if I said it yet. Available for $13 on your Mac. That has all sorts of automations based around what you're trying to do. So my Power Manager tool currently does one thing and every day at 7am it runs a simple script. That script is Brew Upgrade. And all that does is that it updates my homebrew packages just so that I know that they're always up to date. The next time there's a open SSH issue, then I know that it's automatically getting updated and fixed. Right? But let's click the add button and see what are some options here.
Mikah Sargent [00:12:55]:
So first you can choose a template. So there's networking stuff like requesting a URL, there's executing a command line, there's launching an application, there's opening documents, there's powering things on. So in this case what we might want to do is have your machine power on at a specific time. If you have it go to sleep or to have it then go to sleep after you are done doing a thing, you can have it power down, you can, you can have it run shortcuts, you can have it run scripts at specific times. It's so powerful. All of the different things that you're able to do that will kind of help you to narrow in on exactly what you're looking for. So in this case, you know, we would want to have it, let's go with power on or wake up at a specific time and date. We'll click Continue.
Mikah Sargent [00:13:54]:
And what we want it to do is wake up, right? Because I imagine, Kevin, you're not someone who turns off your machine entirely, but it can do that. So for you, let's say that at 2am is when you want your Super Duper to do what it does. Then you would say, oh, I guess I would need to choose Power on daily. And then we would go to wake up and choose Continue. Now at let's go with 015 8am on every single day, what I want to do is just wake and then you can say wake. For Super Duper backup, choose Continue and click Add. Now Every day at 1:58am we know the machine is going to wake up. You set your super duper backup for 2am Right? That can go and then you can say, and then, you know, the backup usually takes about X amount of time.
Mikah Sargent [00:15:00]:
So then I can tell it to go to sleep by choosing power off daily. In this case, we'll choose Sleep. And let's set this for, you know, make sure it goes to sleep by 4am, right? And then we can set that event and go from there. So you have all of these options for being able to set the specifics of when you want this to run. And one great thing that you might do, Kevin, is if you decide to go with, if you try Amphetamine and setting it to when Super Duper starts running, turn on Amphetamine. And if it's not working still, because your Mac is maybe asleep ahead of time and it's not able to turn on the Amphetamine tool to keep things going. Pair the two, right? So Power Manager wakes up your machine every day at 1:58am Then at 2:00am or while the Super Duper clone is running, Amphetamine kicks in. And then as soon as that Super Duper process is complete, amphetamine says, oh, I can turn off.
Mikah Sargent [00:16:09]:
And. And now your Mac can just automatically go to sleep when it comes time. So if you need to use both, then you have that option to do so. But I recommend starting with amphetamine, see if that's enough to get you to where you're trying to go. And then from there you can kind of add some other things too. Now, incredible. Power users will tell you that all of this is achievable. Just using Terminal, it's very involved and so I'm not going to talk about that process.
Mikah Sargent [00:16:37]:
But you can still make use of the built in scheduling tools, cron jobs using just the terminal, which is kind of what in many cases these tools are doing in the background for you. I find very easy and more importantly easy to find what you did afterward versus using Terminal and then forgetting that you set up different cron jobs and different tasks in the background. And then you go, why is my Mac behaving so odd? And it turns out that, oh you, I'm not speaking from experience, not at all. So yes, Kevin, that's my suggestion to you. Start with Amphetamine Free, set up the triggers scheduling with, with Drive Alive and then go from there where Power Manager might come through and help you out with the tasks that you're trying to complete. All right, we'll take a quick break so I can tell you about Club Twit and then we'll be back. Let's take a moment here so I can tell you about Club Twit at twit.tv/clubtwit. When you head to twit.tv/clubtwit, you out there can join our club.
Mikah Sargent [00:17:48]:
It is $10 a month, $120 a year. When you join the club, you gain access to some pretty awesome benefits ad free content. It's just the shows, none of the ads, because you in effect are the support of the show. So we give you special custom feeds that are just yours and yours alone that you are able to listen to all of our shows with no ads. You also gain access to our special club feeds. So these feeds include bits and clips. These are behind the scenes, before the show, after the show, bits that are, you know, exciting, interesting, hilarious, what have you. There's also a feed for our coverage of tech news events.
Mikah Sargent [00:18:32]:
So Leo and myself covering Apple's recent event, we have live commentary of all sorts of stuff as it comes up, the Made by Google event and many more throughout the year. And then you also gain access to another special feed that has our Club Twit shows like Mikah's Crafting Corner, that's my crafting show as well as Stacy's Book Club, the daily D and D adventure that we kicked off last month, mid last month, late last month, and so much more. So when you join the club, you're going to get access to a huge back catalog of great stuff that you have not seen yet. So that's always a fun time. And then you also gain access to our Discord server, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at TWiT. So if all of that sounds good to you, well, join the Club twit.tv/clubtwit is where you go. We kick things off with a two week free trial. We've got some promos running right now as well.
Mikah Sargent [00:19:31]:
So now's the time to head to twit.tv/clubtwit and check it out. And we would love to have you as a member. So thank you very much. All right, we are back and there's a quick question that comes in from Jorge this week. Jorge writes, hello Mikah, what could happen if Apple put Safari on an Apple tv? Safari is on iPad, iPhone, Macs, but not on Apple tv. Why not Think of it and then did a, an angel smiling emoji afterward. Jorge, I think I thought of it and I don't like it and I think that that might be why. Yes, Safari is on iPad, it is on the iPhone, it is on your Mac on all of those devices.
Mikah Sargent [00:20:16]:
I have a finger or a cursor that I can move around on the screen to easily interact with what I'm seeing on the screen on an Apple tv. I've got a remote, I don't want to use that to try to get go around on Safari. That's not great. There's also another issue. I think people sometimes forget just how process intensive and how powerful browsers actually are. Web browsers once upon a time used to just have to render a little bit of code because a website was like, hey, I'm a bunch of text and I've got a pretty background that is, you know, yellow to dark orange gradient and take this text and have it move across the screen and then we're good. And so you'd have like the marquee tag and you'd have the background color. Right.
Mikah Sargent [00:21:33]:
And then we got cascading style sheets that added a little bit more information. So now not only am I taking the text that's on the page, but I'm also referencing another document that exists somewhere else that is telling me how to take the text that's on the page and now look at it, process it, now change it based on what that text over there says to do to make this text look a certain way. Oh, and by the way, while you're doing that, I want you to also reference these five other, these five other servers that have information on them about these ads that you should display on the sides of the screen. Oh, and by the way, I also want you to automatically play this video in the bottom right corner that is coming from another loc, a local CDN that has, you know, the file located on it, but don't do the whole thing. I actually am serving this up to you as a live stream that is happening right at this moment so that you're not able to take this whole video and download it after the fact. And also if in the background you could load from these other three websites that are looking at how you're moving your cursor across the screen. Oh and by the way, I also want to make it so that when you're scrolling up, it doesn't actually scroll down exactly with the page, but instead will scroll in this very smooth way that for me as a web designer looks really cool and interesting, but for you as a user is actually very annoying. Oh, and by the way, because of the requirements in the United States and elsewhere, I also need you to load this banner over the top of the page that tells you that there are cookies for this page.
Mikah Sargent [00:23:01]:
Oh and by the way, also in the bottom right hand corner I need you to put this circle that has an accessibility icon that says that this page is very good and very right about making sure that anyone can use this page. Oh and by the way, I also want you to show this pop that actually leads you to a bit of malware. What? What? Meanwhile, what the Apple TV has to do now is just show you some photos for the most part that are loaded from a specific site and then afterwards stream some video to you or in the case of games needs to do a little bit more loading. But these games are low powered and therefore aren't taking up a whole lot of processing on the dev. What I'm trying to say is there's a lot that needs to happen on a browser. And while Apple TVs are getting more and more powerful over time, they're still not the most power intensive devices. And that's why if you've ever used a browser on a smart TV or one of these different streaming set top boxes, it's not great because a website requires a lot of processing. And I think that that's again only part of the reason why.
Mikah Sargent [00:24:21]:
Right, but here's the other thing, Jorge. An Apple TV technically can use Safari because an Apple TV is an airplay destination. And so you can bring up a Safari page on your phone or on your Mac and have it display on your Apple TV by way of AirPlay, which by its nature is like using Safari on an Apple tv. So in a way it's there if you want to use it, but it's not there directly. And I think that that's okay. So thank you for your question. That was supposed to be a quick question, but then you, you heard me. I started really just going in.
Mikah Sargent [00:25:06]:
That's all for this episode of Hands On Tech. If you are curious to hear my thoughts then and I would love it if you emailed me hot@twit.tv and then I can help you out with your tech questions. Alright, that's the end of this episode. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll catch you again next week for another episode of Hands-On Tech. Bye Bye.
