Big Sur bug: Mail Search (corespotlightd) fails on multi-user machine after a user logs out

We are indebted to GanawaGangunawa for figuring out why Mail search was failing on Emily's M1 MacBook Air (known to our family as "Crashy" [1]). It's a Big Sur bug (though I think it happened in some Catalina environments) that hits multi-user machines.

In our case Ben and Emily both have non-admin accounts on her M1 Air running Big Sur 11.2.1 with fast user switching enabled. When Ben logs out Emily's Mail search stops working. There's no error message, but search does nothing and Smart Folders are inactive.

The fix is to kill corespotlightd.

I created an AppleScript with the contents: 

do shell script "killall -9 corespotlightd"

I saved it as an application and put it on Emily's dock. Two clicks fixes her Mail search until Apple fixes the bug.

[1] When we first got the M1 Air it crashed (spontaneous restart) every few hours. Reinstalling Big Sur meant it crashed every few days, with Big Sur 11.2 it didn't crash, with 11.2.1 it restarts every week or so. I suspect a firmware/OS mismatch in the factory was the initial problem and that for the rest that Big Sur/M1 are not quite stable yet. I almost returned Crashy in the 2 week return window but it seems just stable enough. Good chance future OS updates will fix. It does pass hardware test.

Fixing the Mojave Mail split view in full screen bug

For many users Mojave email will periodically open in Split View mode even then Mail Preferences: General split view is unchecked.

I'm trying this fix:

1. Check Mail Preferences:General "Prefer opening messages in split view when in full screen". Confirm Mail opens in split view. Maybe quit and restart.
2. Now open mail preferences and uncheck that option and force quit Mail. (Somewhere in the Mojave era or earlier macOS preferences got wonky such that an app on exiting could do weird and occult things to preferences.)
3. Restart mail with Safari open in full screen and confirm you don't get the Split View -- get Mail as full screen.

Works so far but I wouldn't be surprised if fix doesn't last.

Put display to sleep on Mac with Touch ID: ctrl-shift-power replaced by hot corner

I use Ctrl-Shift-Power to put my MacBook Air display to sleep each night. That doesn't work on a Mac with Touch ID. I believe the only option is to use a hot corner and choose display sleep.

Don't blame your hub when your USB Flash (thumb) drive disconnects from your Mac

I tried using a SanDisk USB Flash ("thumb") drive as an alternative Time Machine backup device on my daughter's 2020 Intel MacBook Air (Catalina) and my 2020 Apple Silicon MacBook Air (Big Sur). It worked when directly connected to a 2011 MacBook Air (High Sierra), but when connected to an Anker USB-C hub it kept disconnecting:

I was pretty annoyed with the Anker hub and decided to return it, but then I tried it on my 2016 MacBook Air (Mojave) with a rock solid old Elgato Thunderbolt 2 Hub. The same thing happened there!

So I can't blame the Anker hub too much. I canceled my Amazon return. The bug is probably some mixture of faults in macOS, the processor in Flash drives, and some global Hub/USB flaw. 

It would be interesting to test Apple's hub-equivalent dongle -- the USB-C Digital AV multiport adapter.

Migrating from 9yo 11" High Sierra MacBook Air to 2021 Big Sur M1 Air

I replaced Emily's 8-9 yo MacBook Air 11" running High Sierra with Apple's latest (M1) Air (Big Sur). A few notes for others who might be facing migrations....

1. I used Migration Assistant over WiFi but I didn't migrate any applications. Apps have changed to much, better to install from source. Pay CLOSE ATTENTION when they tell you to write down the user passwords! (I took a photo). Migration Assistant brings over a lot of old junk but it also saves a lot of time; it's a pain to migrate mail archives without it.
2. Only 1Password needed Rosetta so far. As I write Office 365 is installing.
3. Citrix Workspace for Apple Silicon worked! That was biggest risk.
4. I couldn't get Carbon Copy Cloner email notifications working. I contacted vendor. The app works for back up though.
5. I didn't want to use the iCloud Document sync feature and Migration Assistant did preserve my High Sierra settings.
6. You need to open Photos and let it update before reenabling iCloud photo sync. There's no error message -- it just won't work.
7. For multiple users I couldn't update the User Profile Login picture from the user account, I had to do it from my Admin account in Users and Groups preferences. (Needed update for Retina images)
8. I did better skipping iCloud setup initially then doing it from each User account separately.
9. I had to reenable Fast User Switching on 1-2 accounts.

Overall I ran into a few bugs and glitches but High Sierra is 3 releases from Big Sur so that's a hard jump. Really wasn't terrible so far. 

The new Air is rather faster than the 9yo 11" Air, but not amazingly faster than my 5yo MacBook Air (Best Computer Ever Made). Most delays are waiting for servers, so local speedups don't make a ton of difference.

Update 4/2/2021: Alas, it turned into a bit of a disaster.

Google's mysterious new blogging platform

Google Blogger has been largely forgotten, but over the past 1-2 years it's been receiving regular updates.

Mostly these have been improvements with a few odd regressions. Some of the regressions have been fixed.

It's kind of curious. Google still uses Blogger for some of their blogs on googleblog.com (ex: Scholar), but they also have a new platform - https://blog.google (Keynote, Data Centers). On the Keynote blog page the RSS feed is hidden (but exists), on Data Centers and Photos blog there's a familiar feed icon top right. Data Centers articles date to 2012, but the .google domain was only registered in 2014. So they've migrated some old content, probably from Blogger.

I looked a the source from a Data Center post and it's surprisingly old school readable. There are commented out tags for handling IE 7 (!) and metadata for Open Graph and Twitter Card. Style sheets refer to "/static/blogv2/css/blog.min.css?version=4.4" />. 

I wasn't able to find any articles on "Google's new blog platform". That doesn't surprise me, Google search is fairly useless these days. Clearly they are up to something internally.

If they do make this a public blogging platform I'm sure it still won't handle paragraph spacing correctly.

Blogger will republish old posts with new dates but keep old URL

So I learned something today about Google's ancient blogger platform.

You can republish old content with new dates without breaking the URL. Today I revised a post I'd written in 2008, but I set the publication date to today's date.

The post republished with today's date and is ordered correctly on my tech blog page, but it kept the old URL embedded date: tech.kateva.org/2008/09/os-x-major-version-updates-my-approach.html.

It's probably always been that way, I just never tried republishing before.

It's something I'll do more often now.