Macinations

March 14, 2024

Monterey/Big Sur – Dialog box not responding to mouse clicks

I’ve run into this problem multiple times where Monterey prompts that an application needs access to a folder such as Downloads or Documents. However, when I click ‘OK’ nothing happens. When I click ‘Don’t Allow’ nothing happens. The button responds visually, but doesn’t actually do anything. Further, I can move the dialog, drag it around the screen, and make it go away, but the actual buttons don’t register. After searching, a lot of people have run into the same issue. You can click everywhere else, but those specific system dialogs don’t respond. About the only key that works is pressing ESC to make it go away. I found the issue, at least for my system. If I turn off the mouse pointer tool, myPoint Pro the issue goes away and I click the dialogs and they respond as expected. myPoint Pro has no issues anywhere else, nor does it have issues on my Mac Pro running Mojave. This seems to […]

March 13, 2024

A 4 year Covid retrospective

It was March, a Friday the 13th in 2020 to be exact, an auspicious day to start a 4 year lockdown. That was the day the country shut down and we took shelter to curb the spread of Covid. At the time, I wasn’t even aware of what Covid was. I’m not known for keeping up on current events. It was like an orderly evacuation. I left everything at work, including this Mac Pro, figuring I’d be back in a week. Oh the naivety. While everything has reopened, I’m still taking shelter, just to be safe. And quite frankly, I prefer it this way. After 4 years, I’m entrenched in the remote working lifestyle. I work from home 100% of the time. It took a hot minute to adjust, but I have the pieces to be my most productive self while steering clear of contagion. Those first couple of months were a little unsettling. Obviously there was pandemic uncertainty. Matters […]

March 10, 2024

A look back on a year with SpamSieve

Last year the spam and garbage email was completely out of control. A new message for me to delete was coming in every couple of minutes. It was so much junk, so many interruptions. In came SpamSieve to solve all my problems, right? Over the course of the year, how much spam has SpamSieve kicked to the curb? SpamSieve and I got off to a rocky start. I had issues with the initial configuration where it didn’t detect anything. Once I got past that, it’s been pretty hands off. Since installation, junk messages went down significantly, with 95% accuracy. So, how much junk SpamSieve has kept me from dealing with. Surprisingly, it’s nowhere near as much as I thought. Mail gets flagged as junk, but not by SpamSieve. If we go back a year, I also went through a massive “unsubscribe” phase. I took myself off every mailing list except for two or three. That alone cut down on a […]

March 3, 2024

A look back on a year with SpamSieve

It’s time to check in on another app I’ve been using for a year, SpamSieve. Like plenty of other people I put SpamSieve to work to help manage email. There is so much junk, so many interruptions. So, over the course of the year, how much spam has SpamSieve kicked to the curb? SpamSieve and I got off to a rocky start. I had some issues with the initial configuration, but once I got past that, it’s been pretty hands off. Since installation, junk messages have gone down significantly, with 95% accuracy. Since it’s been a year, I wanted to see just how much junk SpamSieve has kept me from dealing with. Surprisingly, it’s nowhere near as much as I thought. Mail is flagged as junk, but not by SpamSieve. When I checked the SpamSieve stats, it showed that it had blocked 1800 spam messages. At first glance, 1800 messages seems pretty good. However, that’s 5 messages a day by […]

February 27, 2024

Writing a novel with AI

With all the excitement over AI, the big question remains: Can AI write a novel for you? The simple answer is yes – AI can write a novel with a lot of assistance. However, it’s not as easy as some people like to claim. AI writing books and sites claim that all you need to do is provide a 100-word synopsis, and in the time it takes to make a pizza, AI will spit out a novel. First, that’s not enough material for AI to work with. Second, AI doesn’t provide hundreds of pages of text in a response. (If anyone actually knows a site that produces 2000 word responses to input and doesn’t charge $200 a year, let me know.) I’ve used AI to help write a lot of different things, from articles to interview questions. Articles aren’t bad because it’s following a bulleted list of items and they are short. It still needs a lot of revision though. […]

Monterey/Big Sur – Dialog box not responding to mouse clicks

A 4 year Covid retrospective

A look back on a year with SpamSieve

A look back on a year with SpamSieve

Writing a novel with AI

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