Mitch's Blog

Yesterday morning, I was typing happily on my Mac when I noticed the cursor disappeared. I was typing but no text was appearing. I determined that another app was stealing focus. The problem app was the Finder. I figured this out through the simple expedient of watching the menu bar to see which app jumped to the foreground when the problem came up.

This was going on every minute or so. Very annoying! I continued working like that all day, just Cmd-Tabbing back after the Finder stole focus. Around 4 pm I decided enough was enough.

After trying several possible solutions, I resolved the problem by rebooting in safe mode.

A couple of other things I tried before that:

• Of course I tried Googling, and got the usual mishmash of confusing forum responses and just plain wrong search results. Completely unhelpful.
• I asked ChatGPT.

Interestingly, ChatGPT’s answer was wrong but led me in the right direction.

ChatGPT’s first suggestion was a complete hallucination—it suggested disabling a feature in Finder through a menu setting that simply does not exist.

It suggested resetting Finder preferences. I followed the instructions (this time they were accurate) and that did not solve the problem.

It suggested incompatible hardware might be to blame. I gradually disconnected stuff from my MacBook until I was running it in pure MacBook mode—no external keyboard, no external storage devices, no external display, and so on. That didn’t solve the problem either.

ChatGPT mentioned third-party software twice, which led me to restart the Mac in safe mode. Safe mode accomplishes two things: Restarts the Mac without starting third-party software, and also performing some system maintenance. I suspect the system maintenance is what worked.

This is a five-year-old MacBook and I expect I’ll have to replace it soon enough. But it will survive another day!

This post is primarily for the benefit of anybody coming after me Googling “Finder stealing focus on Mac.” Good luck, my friend! I hope my advice helps you fix your problem.

A brief history of an American gift to world cuisine: the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This article at the Saturday Evening Post by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie takes a few paragraphs to get going, but then it delivers.

Peanut butter was reportedly invented in 1894. Early recipes featured “a banana and apple salad served over lettuce with a peanut butter dressing” and “a peanut butter ‘loaf’ recipe involving two cups of chopped olives and a teaspoon of onion juice”

“Animal House” is where the 1960s finally and decisively turned into the 1980s — the 1970s being understood as a transition period highlighted by double-knit and “Kung Fu Fighting.” With “Animal House,” we crossed the line from hippies to yuppies, from “all you need is love” to “greed is good.” It seems crazy to say it, but the film’s Deltas — a fraternity of proud, self-defined losers — became role models for a generation obsessed with winning. You could argue we’re still living with the fallout.

— Ty Burr at The Washington Post: I was on campus when ‘Animal House’ debuted. It changed everything.

I love this movie and can quote from it endlessly. And Burr is right.

Donald Trump is Bluto.

We’re watching “Hijack,” a miniseries about an airline hijacking, focusing on Idris Elba as Sam, a passenger working to outwit the team that’s taken over the plane. Highly recommended—very suspenseful!

The British Home Secretary is a supporting character. I’ve heard of that position but realized I had no idea what the home secretary does.

My half-assed Internet research tells me the Home Secretary is responsible for British internal security, so they are basically Britain’s top cop. They’re also responsible for immigration and emergency services, such as the fire departments.

The equivalent position in the US seems to be the Secretary of Homeland Security. However, the Home Secretary position was created in the late 18th Century, while Homeland Security was created in the aftermath of 9/11.

We Jews are left out of progressive discussion of diversity. Jews don’t count.

A significant part of the progressive movement is outright anti-Semitic.

And conservatives have a weird variety of anti-Semitism that fetishizes Israel and supports some prominent American Jews.

But I just can’t bring myself to care about Jewface in movies and TV.

When I was a kid, we rode bicycles for miles every day, unsupervised. Also unsupervised: We played in schoolyards and playgrounds, went into stores, and went to the movies. Even when we were playing in another kid’s backyard, often the adults weren’t outside with us. I can’t even remember if the adults were home.

And I was, by the standards of my childhood, a sheltered, sedentary, bookish kid. Other kids were having even MORE adventures than I was.

And of course Generation X, the generation younger than mine, were famously latchkey kids.

I don’t see any of that anymore. Kids seem to be always, always supervised by adults.