Ruslan's Tech Blog

MacOS Appearance Auto - theme isn't changing

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I recently started to appreciate light theme again. Feels great during a day light.
Still, I like the dark mode too but now I just want to see it at night.

And fortunately, for those who likes both themes, there is a mode called “Auto” in the MacOS settings.

Hooray! Problem solved.

Not really

In case you haven’t configured Night Shift feature then it’s not going to work.

Also, if you like me, and configured Night Shift to start “night” at 12AM then it means that the dark mode will be enabled at 12AM.

Auto mode requires Night Shift feature. Make sure it’s configured.

Fun solution from the internet

If you try to google this issue you’ll notice some reasonable points like:

You wouldn’t like to see the screen colors suddenly change when you are in the middle of work, would you? It would be confusing and irritating, and you would most probably disable auto Dark Mode once and for good
Source: geekupdated.com

And solution is:

All you have to remember is that the color theme is being switched when you put the display to sleep, even for a short period of time.

If you want to apply the Dark Mode immediately, simply close the lid of your Mac and open it again.
Source: geekupdated.com

This solution is “obviously” not that irritating as sudden color scheme change.

MacOS fix not stable WiFi (ping spikes)

Thu, 31 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

hey,

I currently use Windows machine but I do programming inside Linux virtual machine and inside MacOS driven laptop (some iOS specific stuff) which is in the same room where I am and connected to the local network.

Since I develop in Vim I use SSH connection to run Vim instance directly on MacOS machine. If I need anything graphical (like Xcode) I use VNC client.

Issue

SSH connection is super non-stable. It’s pretty painful to use Vim with very slow connection. If I try to ping my MacOS laptop I can see clearly some ping spikes. Usual ICMP travel time is about 3ms but sometimes I get 700ms or 1000ms. Insane.

Solution

Based on this found it is probably related to WiFi card power saving features.

To prevent it you can use this command (inside MacOS machine)

ping -q -n -s 0 -i 0.1 192.168.0.1  # you can ping any (real) address basically

What this ping command does is just keeping your WiFi card busy all the time.

Please note, you have to keep this command running all the time. You can probably create some kind of background script but I just use alias which I run when I’m connected to my Mac. Otherwise I don’t want to overload my home network.

VNC, MacOS, and frozen login screen

Fri, 18 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes my VNC client just shows me Mac’s login screen with infinitely loading animation. If it happens for you too, you can try to login via SSH and run this command:

sudo pkill loginwindow

Now you can try to connect trough VNC and it should work.

Basically it just kills the process of login window and MacOS just runs it again automatically.