Daily Battles: How to Rearrange Icons in your Menu Bar for MacOS Big Sur

I have a lot of icons in my menu bar on my Mac because I use a lot of free programs such as:

• Moom for remembering my windows locations
• BetterSnapTool and Spectacle for auto snapping my windows
• f.lux to change my screen color so I can sleep better
• Irvue to automatically change my desktop backgrounds

I also have a lot of built-in utilities that I access frequently, such as:

• Bluetooth manager
• WiFi manager
• Sound input source and volume control
• Timemachine for backup
• VPN

Then there are programs like:

• WeChat
• Google Hangout
• Android Web Messages
• iOS Messages
• Slack
• VLC
• etc.

As someone with OCD, it is super important for me to be able to group things together the way I want. So how can you do that on a Mac with Big Sur?

The answer is super easy, although took me a while to find:

Solution:

You just hold the command key and then drag the icon with your mouse!

Yep, it's that simple! But if you don't know, you don't know.

By the way, I also am very particular with icons in my Dock and icons on my Mac touch bar. But since other people have provided detailed instructions, I'll just link them here:

How to customize the Dock and Menu Bar

How to customize the Touch Bar on a Macbook Pro

Hope someone finds this blog post useful! Moving on to my next daily battle!

Leave a comment if you find my blogs useful. You can also follow me on Twitter for more useful tips and tutorials!

Video of the Day:

The right way to work!

"We'll try and get the roof finished today, babe." 🍻 🍻 pic.twitter.com/6rIzua4KHS

— 🍺 Hold My Beer 🍺 (@HldMyBeer) March 30, 2021

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is blog.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Pandora Won't Auto Start on Firefox

I think one thing we all have learned is that after some system updates or application updates, something just stops working. This time, it was my Pandora station not playing after Firefox updates.

You see, I live inside this giant robot called Philip. And Philip is also my sweet smart home assistant. In the morning, Philip would turn on music throughout my home, and gradually increase volume from low to medium to wake us up with beautiful and relaxing and free music on Pandora.

Then, one day, Philip just stopped doing that.

When I finally had a chance to investigate, I found the problem:

Philip uses Firefox to play Pandora in the morning. In the past, when opening Pandora on Firefox, it would just automatically start playing. But now, when I go to Pandora website, I have to manually click the play button to start the music.

So why was it working and not stopped working? Because I updated Firefox. And with a new Firefox, it automatically blocks music or video from playing on all websites. What you have to do is to explicitly enable autoplay on each website as shown below.

Click the lock icon on the left side of the address bar will show a popup menu where you can enable autoplay again. You can also go into the Firefox Preferences page to manage websites where you want to allow or deny autoplay.

To go to Firefox Preferences page, simply type about:preferences in the address bar and hit enter. Then just search for Autoplay.

Well, after this tweak, (and after I fixed the stupid Bluetooth volume control problem in Windows 10 since stupid Microsoft updated my computer AGAIN and then changed the registry setting,) I finally can enjoy Philip's morning natural music wake up ceremony again, and I can finally find some peace again during a pandemic.

Hope this is useful for someone else running into the same problem. Remember, whenever you update, something WILL break. So happy living in a technology world (or inside a giant robot)!

Leave a comment if you find my blogs useful. You can also follow me on Twitter for more useful tips and tutorials!

Video of the Day:

How the kids and their dog worked as a team to evade the coming home dad.

Security camera：kids, dog, and dadpic.twitter.com/T3bcuLvsYf

— 习近彭 (@wakeupfrog01) March 14, 2021

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is blog.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Mac Not Detecting External Monitor After Waking Up From Sleep

Are you having problems connecting your Mac to your external monitor(s)? Especially after your Mac goes to sleep, and then upon wake up, it no longer detects your external monitor(s) that was working just fine before?

Maybe you see something like this:

Turned out this is a bug macOS Big Sur introduced by update 11.1, and the recent 11.2 as shown in this article: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/02/03/macos-big-sur-external-display-issues/ Basically your Mac failed to wake up the monitor after the monitor also went to sleep.

In my case, the Mac laptop always successfully detects 2 external monitors, but always fails to detect the 3rd external monitor. Very Annoying Indeed!!

So how do you solve this problem? Here are several things you can try:

Solutions:

1. Turn your monitor off and then back on.
2. Unplug your external monitor (HDMI plugged into a USB-C adapter) from the Mac laptop and then plug it back in.
3. Use the key combination ⌘-F2 or ⌘-fn-F2 to force monitor detection.
4. Go to System Preferences, select Display, and then hold the OPTION key down. The Gather Windows button will change into Detect Displays. Click this button will help your Mac find the external monitor.

If any of the above methods work for you, great! To be honest, still quite annoying. But to really solve the problem, we'll have to wait for Apple to release a fix maybe in the 11.3 updates.

Leave a comment if you find my blogs useful. You can also follow me on Twitter for more useful tips and tutorials!

Video of the Day:

The proper way to fish!

“What you do all day?”

“It was a long, tough day of fishing.” 😏😂😜🎣 pic.twitter.com/AV6vQGgGi8

— Fred Schultz (@fred035schultz) March 14, 2021

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is blog.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: How To Not Receive Phone Calls on Your Computer From An Android Phone

Last time in my blog I talked about how not to receive phone calls on your Mac from your iPhones. For more details you can read this blog post here:

Daily Battles: How To Not Receive Phone Calls on Your Mac

But guess what, your Android phone can still ring on your computer, whether it is a Mac or a Windows machine, and it is just as annoying, and you want to turn it off.

So why is your Android phone ringing on your computer? 

This could have something to do with how you set up your Google Voice.

This could have something to do with how you connected your SMS messaging to your computer.

This could have something to do with your Google Hangout settings.

But They Don't Matter!

Here's what you have to do to disable it!

In your Gmail browser window, click the arrow next to your name in "hangouts", and then uncheck "Ring on incoming phone calls." 

Credit goes to Clay Nichols for providing this solution on the web.

Hope you find this useful and stop getting annoying phone rings on your computer!

Video of the Day:

Covidiots Hall of Fame

The video from The Daily Show has a pretty good summary that fits this thread very well!pic.twitter.com/vCbtE7so0V

— Lanny Lin😷🧢 (@lannyland) February 23, 2021

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is blog.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Slack Message Stuck as Unread or New

If you have OCD like me, it really, really bothers you when there are notifications showing that you have unread messages. This could be your chat messages (phone messages, Google Hangout messages, Microsoft Team Chats, Zoom Chats), emails (Gmail or Outlook), social media (Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, you name it), or your Slack for work.

Slack has become this tool required almost for every office job out there today. People expect you to see it quickly and respond quickly. You expect yourself to be on top of your Slack messages because it might be new information you don't want to miss or new issues that require your immediate attention. So when you have read all your messages, but the Slack app is still showing that you have unread messages, it becomes a super big nuisance and just annoys the heck out of you.

Especially after you have clicked the All Unread menu and was issued that you have read all your slack messages! You would go nuts!! I did!

Tried everything I can think off:

1. Restarting Slack
2. Right-click and select Mark All as Read
3. Restart the computer
4. Open the web version of slack
5. Click through everything in the thread to "read" them again

Well, none of that worked. But eventually I figured it out and hopefully this can save you a ton of frustration:

On your computer, while Slack is selected, keep hitting the key combination SHIFT+ESC untill Slack stops showing you messages still as new. Just make sure to do this after you have read all your messages, because this forces slack to mark all messages as read.

There you go! Now get back to work! I'll move on to my next daily battle too!

Leave a comment if you find my blogs useful. You can also follow me on Twitter for more useful tips and tutorials!

Video of the Day:

Birds! I like birds!!

Every day the most magical wild birds visit this woman's porch — but she wasn't prepared for a bright red parrot to befriend her and bring his girlfriend over to meet her ❤️️ pic.twitter.com/1gIwZ16xq6

— The Dodo (@dodo) February 25, 2021

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is blog.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: How To Change Screen Capture Saving Locations on Mac

If you take screen captures a lot on a Mac computer like me (e.g., to post daily Covid Analysis Graphs on Twitter),  you'll probably find your Mac Desktop cluttered by all these screen capture files, something like this:

Not something you want to look at every day, right?

So what's the best way to solve this problem? My solution is to have a folder I designate to screen captures. And here's how you can change your default screen capture folder on a Mac so all screen capture files will automatically be saved to that folder.

Normally to capture a portion of your screen, you use the key combination of Command + Shift + 3. and then select the region you want to capture. To capture the entire screen (or screens when you have multiple monitors), you use the key combination of Command + Shift + 4.

So the trick to change the default screen capture saving folder is the key combination of Command + Shift + 5. You'll get a toolbar like the one shown below. Then you just click Options and then select Other Location from the popup menu.

Hope you find this helpful in managing your cluttered computer desktop.

Leave a comment if you find my blogs useful. You can also follow me on Twitter for more useful tips and tutorials!

Video of the Day:

World's cutest security camera!

World's cutest security camera. 💕💕😂😂pic.twitter.com/e9U9NzKN3I

— Figen.. (@TheFigen) February 21, 2021

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is blog.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: When Should I Change Water Filter with a Brita Pitcher?

Using a water filter for your drinking water can make tap water taste much better while saving on plastics bottles and containers. The most popular brand of water filter system is the Brita brand such as the one shown below (about $16.99 on Amazon). They sell both the pitcher and water filters. 

However, how often should you change the water filter, so the filter is not dirty, water still tastes good, and you can also feel assured that you are still consuming really filtered water?

The pitcher itself has a button and light indicators of when you should change the filter. However, it is a very confusing design and you would likely find yourself not knowing how they work. Pushing the button makes all the lights flash and you also don't want to accidentally reset the detector.

Even on Brita's website, there are confusing instructions. For some models, you are supposed to push the button for 2 seconds. This picture above shows 5 seconds. Some others say hold the button for 8 seconds.

So here's your solution:

After you change your filter, push and hold the reset button for 8 seconds doesn't matter what the instructions says and whichever model of pitcher you are using!

So how do you know when it is time to change the filter? Don't press that reset button. It will just make all the lights flash and make you accidentally reset your timer.

Turned out you just watch the lights while you are filtering a new batch of water. That will activate the detector which will let you know if it is time to change the filter.

Here's a video I found useful describing the different steps you should take to replace a water filter.

Good luck! Let's drink good water and also preserve the environment!

Leave a comment if you find my blogs useful. You can also follow me on Twitter for more useful tips and tutorials!

Many times, you don't really need the exact answer, you just need a range.







BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is blog.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: How To Not Receive Phone Calls on Your Mac

If you want to stop receiving phone calls from your Android phone on your computer (could be a Windows computer too), read this blog: instead:

Daily Battles: How To Not Receive Phone Calls on Your Computer From An Android Phone

Imagine you are in a video-conference meeting, and you have diligently turned the ringer on your iPhone off. Then in the middle of the meeting, while you are presenting, a phone call comes in and starts making loud ringing sounds on your Mac computer. Even worse, turned out it is one of those "we have an urgent message about your vehicle warranty" calls (or "the second warning").

Looking all over your Mac and you fail to find how to disable this. You still want your iPhone messages to show up in your Mac so you can reply to messages by typing on a comfortable keyboard instead of the tiny on-screen thing on your phone. You just want to turn off the incoming phone call.

Turned out the control is not in your Mac computer. It is in your iPhone settings.

Go into Settings - Phone - Calls on Other Devices and then toggle it off as shown in the screen captures below.

That's it. Good luck with your online meetings in the future!

Video of the Day:

If you make it fun, people will do extra work!

Very nice! 👏👏👌pic.twitter.com/HcEAiQVvtY

— Figen.. (@TheFigen) February 20, 2021

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is blog.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: How To Retweet Someone's Twitter Video With Your Own Caption Without Downloading and Re-Uploading the Video

On Twitter, you probably have seen big name accounts (normally they have a checkmark next to their names showing they are verified) tweeting video clips with the original video poster's name as a tag link at the bottom of the video. Have you ever wondered how that was done?

Here's an example of me doing it:

So disappointed to not see any Martians.pic.twitter.com/9QFmjduTGs

— Lanny Lin😷🧢 (@lannyland) February 19, 2021

You could try to download the clip (there are lots of online tools available for you to do that), and then re-upload it. But that takes a lot of effort/bandwidth, and you also can't link the original poster's name below the clip. That's just not the right way to do it.

It's actually really easy to do that on a computer (which I use most, cause I hate looking at my tiny phone screens and get my eyes all tired). All you have to do is to first copy the original tweet's URL, e.g.,

        https://twitter.com/lannyland/status/1362863201243652096

And then just add /video/1 to the end, and now the link becomes:

        https://twitter.com/lannyland/status/1362863201243652096/video/1

Include that in your own tweet, and you'll be able to successfully embed the clip while still giving the original poster the credit. 

I normally simply retweet someone's funny videos. But if I really want to hide the original poster's caption and use my own, I use this method. Big-name Tweeters such as Rex Chapman do this a lot. Here's an example:

Dad of the Year... pic.twitter.com/SddyAPDxuX

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) February 19, 2021

So there you go, it's that easy to embed a video. Happy tweeting!

Reusability is the foundation of computer programming. 







BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is blog.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: How To Play Different MP3 Songs In Similar Volumes

When you play multiple MP3 songs on your computer, especially the ones you have downloaded off the Internet, it is possible that each song has its own volume. Some might play with such low volume that you can't really hear anything while others might have super high volumes that blow your socks off.

Luckily, computers today are smart enough to figure out what's the generally acceptable volume for human, and can automatically level off the volume, so your socks don't get blown off.

If you are using VLC Media Player (which I am using on a Mac), then it is really easy to set up.

You want to go to the menu and then select the first item on the menu (normally File on Windows computer and VLC Media Player on a Mac), then select Preferences to open the settings window.

It is very important that you click the Show All button at the bottom. Then you get a different screen. Here you want to expand Audio and then select Filters. On the right side, make sure the option "Volume normalizer" is checked as shown below.

Now click Save, and then restart VLC Media Player, and you are all set. All MP3 songs will play at the same volume automatically so you don't have different songs as dramatically different volumes.

If you are not using VLC Media Player, and you are also using a Windows computer, you can also set auto volume leveling at the computer level. It is called Windows Loudness Equalization. You basically want to go to the property page of your speakers and check the "Loudness Equalization" option under the Enhancements tab.

Check out this web page for more detailed instructions if you can't figure it out.

Hopefully, this can be helpful in your problem-solving today. Moving on to the next daily battle!

By the way, if you wonder how you can download one or multiple videos off YouTube, you can check out my other blog post:

Daily Battles: How To Download All Videos In a YouTube Playlist In Batch

Leave a comment if you find my blogs useful. You can also follow me on Twitter for more useful tips and tutorials!

Video of the Day:

Another one of my favorite Parody Commercials: iPhone 5

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is blog.lannyland.com