Birds Like Wires

With huge external drives being far more affordable these days I usually have one hooked up permanently to my laptop dock for Time Machine. But I don’t need all that space dedicated to backup, so it gets chopped up into a backup partition, an encrypted APFS storage container and a bunch of 20 GB partitions which hold a bootable macOS backup, plus a couple of recent macOS installers – just in case I end up having a really bad day.

However, in common with many Mac users I’m sure, I can’t be dealing with all that clutter on the desktop or Finder sidebar when so many partitions are mounted. What a mess! Luckily, /etc/fstab is still a thing you can use in macOS Mojave, so there’s a quick and easy way to prevent these emergency-use volumes from mounting automatically.

First of all, plug in the drive and let everything mount, then fire off a diskutil list in Terminal. You’ll see all of your drives and their identifiers. In my example the external drive shows up as disk2 with various partitions being disk2s1, disk2s2, etc.

Sometimes it’s easier to show than tell, so I’ve bashed together a quick video showing how to remove (or replace) the battery in an early AlertMe SPG100 SmartPlug.

Apologies, I seem to be channelling somebody else in my presentation style.

Latest Release: 21st August 2018

Download: Version 30301 – (136MB) MD5

This software is not supported or endorsed by OpenPeak or O2. Use at your own risk.

Towards the end of April 2012, something rather unprecedented happened over on the Joggler Forums. It appeared that we were being linked to by O2 themselves as the point of contact after they discontinued their support for the device. After some negotiation, the forum was provided with a ‘sunset’ build of the OpenPeak OS for the OpenFrame 1, on which the Joggler is based.

It’s rare that a company bows out from a device so graciously, effectively opening up the platform to enthusiasts to continue developing and supporting. They could have locked the device down, but they chose not to, and they deserve recognition for that.