Andrew Canion

2020-08-31 Update: No, I have not found the fix.

I mentioned in Episode 15 of Keep Practising that my Logitech mouse was giving me the #$%@s with respect to the amount of judder and unresponsiveness on macOS. This problem exhibited irrespective of whether it was connected to Bluetooth or the Logitech dongle.

Good news. I may have found a solution. Early days yet, but since applying this fix I haven’t experienced the issue again.

I can’t take credit for the fix. That goes to ‘rubytraindriver’ on Reddit/r/MacOS.

The suggestion was to remove, and then re-add, both Logitech Options and Logitech Options Daemon from the Mac’s Accessibility options, within the Security & Privacy preferences pane, Privacy tab.

This simple - but entirely obfuscated and obscure fix - offers another example of how infuriating the Catalina macOS security model is for users.

I’m not on the Big Sur beta, but I hope that it does better at this stuff than Catalina.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in 2020, it’s that friendships are important. I’m getting better at making and maintaining them, but there’s always work to be done.

In Nerd Corner I vent about the poor connectivity of my Logitech MX Master 3 mouse.

Like the show? You’re welcome to buy me a coffee as a vote of thanks!

Recently I came across an annoying calendaring problem. I have a number of domain names, with associated email aliases. These all reconcile via my Fastmail account.

I noticed the other day that calendar invitations created in my calendar app of choice, BusyCal, were defaulting to being sent from one of my non-default email addresses.

There was no obvious setting for this in BusyCal and it was an issue that I hadn’t noticed at all over previous years so I assumed there was some problem at the server end. I checked Fastmail but its calendar settings were configured to send calendar events from my primary and preferred domain. Nevertheless, I fired a support ticket to Fastmail. Over the next few days (the one ding on Fastmail is slow support turnarounds) they verified my settings were correct. They inspected the logs generated by BusyCal created events, and tested things from their end. After all of this, they confirmed the problem was coming from BusyCal.

Off I went to BusyMac support. Their fast support turnaround confirmed that it was BusyCal causing the problem, and that the software had no ability to choose which email to send from - it took the first in the arbitrary list of available email addresses.

It didn’t end there, however. Soon after, I received an email saying that they had looked at the issue - agreed it wasn’t ideal, and built a new beta build that offered up an option to choose the originating email address for new events. They provided me a download link to this new beta.

It works perfectly. Now, BusyCal will create new event invitations from my preferred domain.

What really works, though, is tech support. These are the unsung heroes of software. Helping mere users like me get more out of their products. This is another reason why I am happy to pay for software. These people are doing real work, and like the rest of us, they deserve to get paid for what they do.