Mastodon: @nileane@nileane.frEmail: nileane@macstories.net
Niléane is a French-Réunionnese podcaster and activist, working and advocating for trans rights. She is passionate about technology and always likes to experiment with Apple products and software to improve her workflows and everyday life.
Episode 22 — September 10, 2024
Club MacStories Town Halls are part of the monthly and other special live audio events we hold in the Club MacStories+ Discord community. The show is a recorded and lightly edited version of the Town Halls that we produce, so Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members who can’t attend the event live can listen later. To learn more about Club MacStories+ and Club Premier, visit our Club plans page.
Tips and tricks to master your apps and be more productive.
Last week when Jonathan wrote about his new macro keyboard in MacStories Weekly, he also mentioned how he was able to create a quick shortcut to mute and unmute his microphone with a single keystroke. As soon as I read this, I realized that I also needed to add a microphone mute switch to my setup.
While I imagine that dictation is useful to many, I must admit that I have personally turned off the feature on all of my Apple devices. As a result, the Dictation key is sitting there unused, just waiting to be remapped. As you know, I’m already using my beloved BetterTouchTool to remap macOS’ native window buttons and to remap some of the Magic Keyboard’s keys to perform actions with Raycast. So today, we’re using it to remap the Dictation key on the Magic Keyboard and turn it into a microphone mute switch – something that macOS’ System Settings does not let us do.
Exploring topics beyond our day-to-day coverage.
Later this month, I will be traveling to La Réunion island, the place where I grew up and where my parents still live. This will be the first time in six years that I’ll get to see them. To mark the occasion, I wanted to get my mother out of a tough spot. Her old iPhone 8 Plus has a broken screen, and the front-facing speaker is barely audible. Not only that, but the phone is also no longer able to run the latest versions of iOS. She is well due for a replacement.
Unfortunately, despite being a French overseas department, the island is remote enough that finding a good deal on an iPhone is pretty tough there. Because of staggering import fees, buying any tech online can end up costing a fortune. You’re basically stuck with two options: buying new in-store from a reseller or seeking out a used iPhone on the local secondhand market. So if I wanted to help my mother replace her phone, I would need to purchase it here in continental France and hand it to her when I fly there.
More stories for Club members.
I have only ever really played two games in my life: SimCity and its spiritual successors on one hand, and on the other hand, Minecraft. This game has been with me for the better part of a decade now, and while I haven’t really launched the game for more than an hour at a time over the past two years (and have been neglecting it completely for the past few months), I’m finally back into it now. And I am obsessed with placing blocks again.
Even though Minecraft runs pretty well on my M2 MacBook Air, I found that the game could chug in some places, especially when loading new parts of the world or raising the render distance. To alleviate this, I knew I could probably find an optimization mod that would allow the game to run more smoothly on my machine. Back in the day, when I was pulling all-nighters in Minecraft on my old 2015 MacBook Pro, I would rely on OptiFine, a well-known mod that enhances performance on lower-end machines.
Exploring topics beyond our day-to-day coverage.
About a month ago, I upgraded my desk setup with an 11-inch iPad Pro that I’m now using as a secondary display. I am still loving this setup. Unfortunately, though, because I want to keep the iPad Pro plugged in to my Thunderbolt dock at all times in order to use Sidecar in wired mode, I had to free up a USB port and unplug the external SSD that I was using as my main Time Machine backup destination. Since I was then out of available ports, I started looking for a wireless solution to keep my Time Machine backups running on a daily basis.
While I could have simply found a way to add more ports on my desk, that would have meant investing in a bigger dock, or adding one more dongle to my poorly-hidden cable mess on the desk. So instead, I wanted to leverage the Linux machine in the living room that I’ve been using for a bunch of experiments lately. The idea was to plug my external SSD into the Linux machine, share a folder from the SSD on my local network, and then set that shared folder as a Time Machine backup destination on my Mac.
Tips and tricks to master your apps and be more productive.
Two weeks ago, in Issue 406 of MacStories Weekly, Federico shared a tip for BetterTouchTool that resonated with me. Just like him, I am used to minimizing my windows instead of hiding them, which can be annoying since minimized windows no longer come up when you Command (⌘) + Tab to their app’s icon.
To solve this, Federico used BetterTouchTool to remap the Command (⌘) + M keyboard shortcut to hide a window, instead of minimizing it. While that helps, there was still a small piece missing for me. Most of time, instead of using the keyboard shortcut to minimize windows, I just click the yellow minimize button in a window’s title bar.
Members of Club MacStories share their computing setups.
Niléane: I spend my days working at a tiny desk at home. It’s an ALEX desk my partner and I bought from IKEA last year to be able to fit an additional workstation in our bedroom, so we could work in two different rooms during the day. Since this desk had to fit in our bedroom, it had to be a small, compact one. I wanted my desk to look clean and cozy, but I also wanted to fit a lot of personal tech items in this tiny corner of the room. So it has been a really fun challenge trying to keep this balance.
Tips and tricks to master your apps and be more productive.
I mainly use Bluetooth headphones at home for listening to music and podcasts. The three devices I primarily switch between are the 2nd generation AirPods Pro, Beats Studio Pro, and Sony WH-1000XM5. No matter which one I use, I always face the same issue when they are connected to my M2 MacBook Air: every so often, the audio randomly starts stuttering for a few seconds. Before I switched to the M2 MacBook Air as my main computer last year, I was using the M1 iPad Pro. I never had an issue with the iPad Pro or iPhone, so something was definitely up with this new MacBook Air.
As always, I started googling. I was obviously worried that something was wrong with my unit. However, I quickly realized how common of an issue this actually is. There aren’t enough words I could write in this sentence to prove to you how many Apple Community posts and Reddit threads mention a similar problem on Apple Silicon MacBooks. The symptoms vary, but they typically involve the same set of devices: game controllers, mice, and headphones are commonly affected by Bluetooth lag in these reports.
More stories for Club members.
A couple of months ago, I tried using Orion Browser, by Kagi, as my main web browser on macOS. Orion is based on WebKit, just like Safari, and it looks a lot like Safari as well. However, it is supercharged with extra features, and most notably supports Chrome and Firefox extensions. Although I have since gone back to using Safari as my main browser on the Mac, I was quite pleased with the overall experience. Coming out of my disappointing experiment with Vivaldi, I was wondering whether Orion could also be a viable alternative to Safari on iOS, as a fully-featured and highly customizable web browser.
At first glance, Orion Browser for iOS resembles Safari. The address bar is in the bottom toolbar, and you can swipe on it to switch to adjacent tabs. Although the animations are not as smooth, most of the interactions in the app also feel a lot like Safari. This is a comforting feeling. Orion is not attempting to stand out with a radically different interface and vibrant colors. Instead, the place where Orion sets itself apart the app’s settings panel. The number of available toggles and options is so vast that I won’t be able to mention them all.
