Disabling sleep on MacBooks
I complain about Apple products a lot, mainly in how they dumb everything down. It isn’t the internet that is making people stupid, it is Apple devices like the iPhone and OSX. Last time I was complaining about the Macs need for hibernation, this time it about their need to NOT sleep. It is one of those fascinating dumb downs of Macs, you will use this device how the designers made it and you don’t have a choice in the matter. Either the Mac is on or off. If it is on and you close the lid, it is going to sleep. This is so universal that even my mother knows it.
Turns out, someone wrote some software to fix this issue. Really depressing that 3rd party software is needed, but what do you expect, it is the IdiotBook. It is really simple:
- Go to the InsomniaX homepage
- Download InsomniaX (Direct DL Link)
- Install & Execute
- You’ll see a new blue icon in the top tray, click on it
- Click “Enable Insomnia”
- Close your screen and relish in the fact that your mac hasn’t gone to sleep
I can think of about a hundred reasons why you’d want to do this. For me the major push was to play music at Christmas. But you might want to leave your computer running for a long download (For example). The only word of caution I have, at least on the MacBook Air, it doesn’t turn off the screen. So I turn it off with the screen brightness settings (F1/F2) before I close it. Annoying, but better than nothing.
Uhm…
MacOSX is FreeBSD with some bells and a proprietary window manager. Mac doesn’t even do much with the underlying OS; it’s not a kernel fork.
Soooo, most anything that will run on BSD, runs on Mac. I use native-compile Transmission on that side of my multi-booting macbook; it prevents sleeping when closed. Okay, I’m rarely using that side these days, but still… rEFIt for the win.