What? Why?

I’ve read that masks do not actually thwart these systems.

Never heard of anything on the playlist before and I doubt I would have really stumbled on it normally because it’s not the style I normally seek out but so far it all slaps. How is it they’re allowed to include this stuff on their website?

Didn’t know they’d taken out the storage drives but I was aware despite my general ignorance that it’s not turnkey ready to go. I guess what I’m wondering is, is there any part of the of the process involved in designing and building such a supercomputing cluster that is already taken care by buying it in the manner that it has been sold and could that in any way offset the increased costs of trying to bring such a cluster online rather than starting from scratch? I’m not saying it is the case, so much as wondering aloud for anyone with expertise to chime in, to see if that’s a way it could make sense.

I understand there’s a mountain to climb to bring this thing in to a usable state for anyone, but could it maybe get you to base camp more quickly?

Does the hardware being all so arranged as it is in this manner to create a supercomputer make any difference to that evaluation? Like does the work of putting all the outdated hardware together in the complex way needed to make it functional for supercomputing make it potentially cheaper than buying more modern hardware but having to build it all yourself?

Aww I was just about gush about how awesome they’ve been all these years. Guess I haven’t really kept up to date. I mean it doesn’t sound like it’s gone totally to shit, but just clearly embarking on a path straight in to the shit

I believe while I was figuring this out I discovered one of rogue amoebas apps that I could use in conjunction with sound flower and I was nearly certain I had it, it was something to do with how Skype worked that sabotaged me, I couldn’t believe how stubbornly persistent Skype was despite how hard I tried to workaround it. I believe I was trying to make a single virtual sound device that combined my mic output with the system Audio so I could choose that as my microphone in Skype but SOMEHOW it was always able to fuck me over don’t remember how, only that I was extremely angry.

I tried to set this up on a mac using soundflower so I could share my screen with an edit project with the director during lockdown and still chat to them at the same time. Didn’t work for some frustrating reason relating to Skype.

Unfortunately… it can. Which I can say on the basis that, it did. There were no schedules or filters set in the settings for do not disturb and I don’t know of any other way to deliberately cause it to activate. If there’s more settings somewhere perhaps there some additional sets of rules and logic that would explain why this happened, but even if so, they never had any personal involvement from me.

In any case though, I had found the article you linked already while googling but in my frustration I must not have read very attentively because I misread the option clicking method of setting or disabling the focus state, and was option clicking on the moon icon instead rather than the time and date. Clicking where I should have worked, as did the suggestion from another user to use the switch in the control centre. The strange thing is that after trying both of these methods successfully, the far more intuitive and obvious method that I tried right from the start unsuccessfully, now started working. Prior to disabling via option click, and also through control centre, if I clicked on the crescent moon icon I would be presented with a list of focus states, of which my system seems to have only the one, ‘do not disturb’, while I could find no off switch it did seem that the most obvious form of toggle was likely to be clicking on the ‘do not disturb’ text since that was apparently the mode that it was in and it stood to reason that would likely toggle it off, except, it didn’t do anything hence my utter confusion. Now it just works as you’d expect and I now have 3 ways to turn it on and off. The fact that that button just didn’t work is about as explicable as why the focus state tripped in the first place through no actions of my own when you say it isn’t supposed to do that.

Thanks for replying and the detailed list of options to check for.

I have only the one apple device, the MBP on which the issue is occurring.

Until you made this comment I was unaware of the existence of a shortucts app so I definitely never made any shortcuts. (Incidentally, does this differ much from Automator? Maybe I should look in to this). I wonder if creating a shortcut attached to an automation that triggers a focus state is something easily done accidentally, because I definitely wouldn’t have done so on purpose. I did once create an automation to close a specific app at a certain time in the morning (3 hours later than the time I noticed the do not disturb was switched on), but that was supposed to execute once on a specific calendar date and as far as I knew did only it’s intended job.

If I look at the do not disturb settings, there are no allowed people and no allowed apps that can display notifications in do not disturb mode, and until I attempted to mess with it just before posting this, there was nothing in the set a schedule section and nothing in the focus filters section. As of now, there is an item in the schedule section, which is that the state should be on while in the location Antarctica, which I hoped would prevent it ever executing as I’m unlikely ever to be there and am not there right now. Before putting this schedule item in place I also attempted to set an actual time based schedule that was supposed to trigger one minute later than the current time as I attempted the fix and scheduled to run for exactly one minute on the logic that hopefully it would trigger do not disturb to only ever operate for 1 minute making it as close as I could effectively get to “off”

I don’t know if anything’s been ‘learned’ that could be triggering this, but then again that’s kind of the crux of the problem. I’m instinctively resistant to the machine ‘learning’ anything and then executing without my involvement at any stage. I must admit that’s perhaps irrational, after all it ‘learned’ that I usually operate plugged in and decided to start a charging regimen where it only charges to 80% to extend the life of the battery and I thought that was pretty great but nonetheless, the exact implications of focus states aren’t immediately clear to me and they aren’t something I sought out or felt a need for so while they perhaps offer some benefit, once they are imposed I’m immediately resistant.

Anyway diatribe aside, it doesn’t look like anything I was able to check in with your help could likely be responsible for the behaviour. I think it is likely related to time, as it was around 12:30 AM. It could be related to being off power and in battery mode which isn’t something I’d likely do after midnight very often but I couldn’t say. I believe I’ve seen this at least a couple of times whilst plugged in as well. Thanks anyway, let me know if you have any other suggestions to make it stay off now that I’ve at least switched it off.

I’ve seen this suggested in other forums where people were trying to disable this as well. I don’t own any other apple devices except the MBP that this is occuring on. I’m guessing the time of day is in some way a trigger state but can’t see any such thing set up anywhere in order for me to turn it off. I now know from this post at least two ways to turn off do not disturb mode which was my primary concern, but I would like to figure out what’s triggered it to be on in the first place. Hopefully now that it theoretically should only switch on if I’m in Antarctica it will never turn back on but I’m skeptical somehow.

I completely forgot I had the whole control centre thing, thank you. I used High Sierra way up until late last year and can’t help operating Sonoma as if it was still High Sierra. The control centre method did work, and I also discovered from a help link that I had misread an earlier help article and in fact if you option click the date it will also disable it (I had it in my head I needed to option click the do not disturb icon).

This really threw me for a loop before I figured out what was happening because I assumed I had dodgy connections somewhere.

In the end I had to get a piece of software called ‘Balance Lock’. It’s not FOSS but it is free and according the app store doesn’t collect data. It also has no ads or in-app purchases. I’m pretty happy with it so far. It does one thing and one thing well and that is to keep your audio balance at a chosen setting and shift it right back there again whenever that balance slider likes to go for a little walk. Weirdest issue, apparently been around for years.

Unsurprisingly I gave up on Pages in the end. I really wanted to like it, I was all set to embrace something I saw as being a kind of fancy, expensive option over the usual free software I use, but without the bitter taste of Microsoft products. It would also just slightly have made the choice of my new Mac feel better too since weirdly enough, much as I really like Apple computers, I rarely actually use any Apple software on them.

Pages had all this going in it’s favour but it just pissed me off too much to use it when LibreOffice was right there and not such a hassle. The lack of ability to natively save word formats was what really kneecapped it on top of the significant friction of the unfamiliar. A shame but not unexpected I guess.I’m still curious what the deal was with everything online including many of the official support articles being from 2012, WTF?

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The reduced wait time I think is the only real leg to stand on. It arguably doesn’t make sense to undermine theatre ticket sales by making it cheaper at home, although I’d argue that it should be that the theatre option is the premium option that should cost more while home streaming is the cheap option if you don’t want or need the theatre experience which should make it a complimentary income source to ticket sales not a threat to it but I guess they reckon they’ll make them both cost the same until the cinema run is over so they never make less than a full theatre ticket price until then.

I hate how things being convenient means they have to cost more. “Convenience fees” are such a crock. If it cost them more to offer the convenience over their usual service, but they don’t run video stores any more and this has arguably less overhead than the renting physical media business did so it should be cheaper for everyone and yet instead they contrive additional expense on top because they made it convenient.

Well shouldn’t rental be much less than the price of buying and much less than the price of cinema tickets? That’s how it used to work.

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Thanks Bob. Getting used to using mail clients again after sticking with mainly browser based for years. Thought I’d try it out and see if I liked it. It’s proven a little stressful but I’ll persevere for a while and see if I find any benefit over browser based.