I was so glad when Josh Centers wrote in the latest TidBits: Wait, you didn’t know that Monterey offered options for customizing the pointer size and colors?
I thought it was just us mere mortals who had those facepalm moments. I’ll share my most recent one.
My list of Bluetooth devices is a morass of strange device codes - BH283A, CZBT03, two identical “Soundcore Speaker” and so on. If I’ve not used a device for a while it’s always a little game of roulette pairing which random name with which device. I understand why you can’t rename Bluetooth devices themselves, but often wondered why you couldn’t assign an alias.
Imagine my joy when, after upgrading to iOS 15 I found that now you can rename devices on your phone (connect a device, select the info button in Bluetooth Settings, and then rename in “Name”).
Then came my faceplant as when I noticed you could do this in iOS 14 (and possibly many more previous ones).
Anyone else care to confess?
I found out by accident that pressing the square ‘key’/button surrounding the round Touch ID button locks the new MBP. I have been using the shortcut cmd+ctrl+q before realising this! (This is embarrassing, but I thought the square part was just an ‘island’ to make the Touch ID button blend in with the rest of the keys.)
I’ll hop into the confessional as well. This tip will come in very handy, because I have a pair of speakers out on the patio that are in every way excellent, except the geniuses at the company decided that a really good bluetooth name for their speakers would be…wait for it…“Bluetooth”. I am not joking. I’m gonna go alias that puppy right now!
odd, I can’t seem to find “Name”, or any way to change the name.
(iOS 15 / iPhone X)
edit:
figured out the trick was that the device has to be active when you change the name. If it is just on the list of devices previously connected, you cannot change the name.
On El Cap and Sierra and probably earlier, control click the device name in the Bluetooth system prefs and you get a little menu with disconnect, rename, and remove. Bluetooth needs to be turned on for the menu to appear.
Sure, I’ll fess up that until today I didn’t know you could copy Text Substitutes from one Apple ID-affiliated device to a different Apple ID-affiliated device with a simple select, drag and drop.
Now if could only figure out how to do the same with my pre-set mail signatures…
I spent hours trying to create a shortcut to give the longitude and latitude coordinates for a picture because all the iPhone shows is a map and no coordinates. I did this because I took a picture of invasive plants in a park and the park ranger asked me where they were located. I spent five minutes trying to find the latitude and longitude.
After finally hacking together a short cut to that that, someone pointed out that the link on the bottom that names the location takes you to Apple Maps where you can get directions, share the location, and get the latitude and longitude.
For the benefit of anyone as challenged as I am, this doesn’t work if Compass is not allowed to see the phone’s location. It’s obvious after the fact. After I allowed Compass to use the phone’s location, it gave latitude, longitude, elevation, city, and state.
Thanks! That’s especially useful for cheapo Chinese devices with weird names. It doesn’t seem to work for everything, however; my Garmin watch doesn’t have a “name” field.
You mean where the device name is the Bluetooth chip’s SDK default name (e.g. “Realtek”) instead of the name of the device using the chip?
Unfortunately, I see this far too often. Sloppy programming. It takes literally one line of code to set a device’s name and they just don’t care. For all I know, they may simply be shipping the sample code that came with the chip without any customization at all.
Oh, and a new discovery (for me) on the topic of this thread: You can command-click an icon in the menubar (the ones that populate from the right side), and either drag it to a new location (might help the MBP Mx notch-related issues until Apple fixes that), or drag it down off the menubar to delete it.
