macOS

Re-formatting a Flash Drive

I recently bought a 2TB flash drive. You read that correctly. 2TB.

I have been playing around with it and basically, I hosed this thing up. Every time I would insert the drive into my Mac, it would display 3 drives. It was driving me insane.

Today, I decided tom play around some more and discovered that those extra drives were actually called volumes. I discovered an easy way to get rid of them. Well, sort of.

There are actually volume controls on the main window highlighted below.

CleanShot 2021 03 06 at 13 34 01 2x

All you have to do is figure out which volume you need to get rid of and hit the minus button.

…and hope that it works the first time. I’ll tell you that it probably won’t. I have had to hit that button a couple of times but eventually, the volume got deleted.

Once I got everything down to one volume, the next thing I wanted to do was to re-format the drive as ExFat which is the Microsoft version. The advantage on a drive like this is that you can use the drive on almost any computer. I love APFS but not everyone else does.

I found a great video about how to take care of the problem of APFS being your only obvious choice. If you expand what you can see, you just have to go a level up to have the option of reformatting in ExFat.

MacMost article is here.

Phantom Controls

One of the fun things that happen when we are testing beta software.

Screen Shot 2020 07 05 at 6 30 50 AM

This random control was left over from Chrome. I was saving an image to the desktop and the control just stayed there long after I shut Chrome down.

Apple’s Latest OS Releases

It is that time of year when Apple releases the beta versions of the next OS releases. I will admit that I do not really like the “High Sierra” name for MacOS. I was hoping for something cooler.

I have installed iOS and MacOS. I plan on installing WatchOS and TvOS at some point.

So far, I love the iPad changes. A full dock is absolutely wonderful. The file system access is nice too but I don’t see Dropbox in the sidebar so I’ll have to figure out why that is.

I am very excited about the next releases.

MacOS Sierra – Initial Impressions

I look forward to every June when Apple releases the next version of their various operating systems for developers to go through and test. It is a treat for geeks like me. I usually grab a new hard drive and make a backup copy of my current system. I install the new OS and my expectations are that something will break.

This year I'm happy to report that, for the most part, that did not happen. It is extremely unusual for a new OS to NOT break things. A whole lot of things. For me, my work access almost always fails. It usually has something to do with VPN, Java, etc.

That is not to say that bugs don't exist. I've spotted a few. I think Siri is buggy. Logging on to the forums will show you that beta testing causes it's fair share of grief across various configurations, however, my iMac 27″ 2011 is doing just fine. I am using an external cradle to run MacOS Sierra on an external 4TB hard drive. The cradle is connected using Thunderbolt 1.

I have encountered a weird window issue where pressing the minimize button doesn't really minimize. The window acts like it's getting ready to get smaller but it snaps right back in place and then cannot be closed until you quit the application. I'm not sure what is causing this particular issue. I've changed the preference from “scale” to “genie effect” for minimizing windows and so far, I haven't had a problem. It could be just the scale effect itself. Not sure.

So far, I think this beta version is more solid than those I've tested in the past.

Good job, Apple!