Hands-On Mac 178 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Hands-On Mac. Let's take a look at what you can do when you use a UPS, an uninterruptible power supply, on macOS. Stay tuned Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Hello and welcome to Hands-On Mac. I am Micah Sargent, and today we are taking a look at using an uninterruptible power supply, the battery-powered system that lets you sort of gracefully shut down your machine in the event of a power outage. It is something that I recommend to honestly everyone, but in particular, anyone who does anything like what we're doing here In the event of a power outage at my house, instead of everything just shutting down immediately because there's no more power available to the device, it instead does get a little bit of extended time. It is a battery that is surrounded by a place to plug stuff in, and in some cases they have power conditioners and other tools that kind of help you to manage your system, and when you connect a supported UPS to your Mac, macos notices that that's done and provides you with some functionality to control the UPS. So let's head over to macOS and take a look. All right, here we are on macOS, and the first thing that I want to mention is that, if you have installed the software for a UPS and you've connected it to your machine, then you will be able to determine that macOS has recognized that you have a UPS installed in a few places. The first place I want to mention is system information. So system information is a tool that lets you kind of get an idea of what is installed on your machine and in this case the text can be kind of hard to see on the screen. But I have gone in the left column, in under the hardware section, to power, and the first thing you'll see is, depending on if you have a Mac laptop or if you have a desktop, you may see AC power here, you may see battery here, but the first thing will be AC power. This is just the stuff that is built into your system. I'm running a Mac studio so I can see with AC power that I have sleep on power button turned on, automatic restart on power loss turned off, wake on LAN turned on current power source meaning, is there a current power source? Yes, and then prioritize network reachability over sleep is set to no. Right below that is UPS power, and that is how I know that this machine has officially recognized my UPS. It has some of the same information display, sleep timer, sleep on power button, automatic restart on power loss, wake on. Basically, if this machine, the Mac Studio, is running on UPS power instead of AC power, what is it is it able to do? What is it allowed to do for those settings? And then, under hardware configuration, I can also see that it has an option that says UPS installed. Mine says yes. If you have a UPS installed and you check the system information utility and UPS installed says no, then you know you've got an issue.

You can access system information simply by holding down the command key, hitting the space bar and typing in system space. I and F is usually enough, at which point it'll know that you're talking about system information. Hit enter and it launches system information. That is the first place that we're going to go. The next place we're going to go is the most important place. So I will downsize that and I'm going to open up the system settings app, which used to, of course, be called system preferences, and in the system settings app I will choose energy. So typically, you're going to open up to the general page, I will choose energy and immediately I can tell that this Mac has recognized that I do indeed have a UPS installed. So let's take a look at what that means. With the UPS installed, I can see immediately up at the top of that energy tab that it shows UPS level, with a colon and then 100%. So I know that the battery power of the UPS is currently at 100%.

Now if I look at these options, these options are going to be related to what we saw in the system information page Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off. Wake for network access, which says, while sleeping, your Mac can receive incoming network traffic, such as iMessages and other iCloud updates to keep your application up to date, and then start up automatically after a power failure. So what that means is, if there's a power failure, immediately attempt to try and turn on if the or once the power is restored. So that is something that you might toggle on if you want to make sure that, as soon as the power is returned, turn that machine back on, especially if you have schedules that run in the background right when you are away from your machine. You don't want to not be able to access the device because there's no power or because there wasn't power and then there suddenly was. So that is something that you can toggle on, but you'll notice that if you have a supported UPS installed, there's a new option beneath that says UPS options.

If we click on that now, I can see a few things. First and foremost, I can see that it has recognized the model of UPS that I have. I have a CyberPower 1500 AVR LCD3. And beneath it are these options that we talked about before Shut down your Mac after using the UPS battery for X amount of time. Shut down your Mac when the time remaining on the UPS battery is blank, and then shut down your Mac when the UPS battery level is below blank. These options give you the ability to work in concert with the software provided by your UPS to make sure that the machine shuts down gracefully while you are connected. You'll notice I have none of these toggled on, and that's because we're going to do this together.

So there are three different options here, and I want to use the option that says shut down your Mac when the time remaining on the UPS battery is. First I'm going to go to the Power Panel Personal application, which is the means of controlling my CyberPower UPS, and currently the CyberPower UPS is plugged in via USB to this machine. That's how it's communicating with it and knows what's going on. And what we want to do is take a look at the settings for this. So I'll go into our energy reporting and energy settings option and or rather, go into the settings pane and take a look at the different options, and we want to go into runtime. So this says shut down this computer when remaining battery runtime is only five minutes. Use this option to extend operating time while on battery power. So what this does is Power Panel Personal has its own rules for how long the machine stays running. So I wanna make sure that my settings via Mac OS are close to, if not identical to, that setting.

So in this case, I would choose to toggle on the second option shut down your Mac when the time remaining on UPS battery is and we've got it five here, five here. I'm actually going to set it, though here to 10 and click done. So what that does is Mac OS itself now knows that when the remaining battery life on the UPS is 10%, go ahead and shut down my Mac. That way, I know that it's going to gracefully turn off and I won't have any loss of data simply because I have lost power, and that is everything that you have within the UPS options.

Now, depending on the software that you have installed and what you've set in the application itself, you may notice that the two will kind of disagree with each other, and so you want to make sure that they are set to the same. If you decide to go with that. Now, depending again on the supported UPS, you may find that you don't need to install the software provided by the company, like CyberPower in this case, and that you can do everything you need to do with just macOS. That's completely up to you, so it's just a matter of what you're more comfortable with, what makes sense to you. And I wanted to mention the last place that you will notice. Your UPS is in the menu bar. At the top, you may see a sort of electric bolt icon where you once saw power, and it will give you quick information about the fact that it's currently running and that the power is coming from the power adapter, but the UPS has 100% battery life. So a few different places where you can take a look at your UPS settings and make changes to them based on what you are aiming to do.

Folks, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of Hands-On Mac. I know many of you out there have at times either considered getting a UPS or have indeed installed a UPS for your machine, and maybe you're curious about what all you're able to do. So I wanted to give you a nice look into that. As I always mention, feel free to reach out to me. Mike at twittv, I want to remind you about our club Club Twit, twittv, slash club twit. We do offer a monthly plan, and now we've returned the yearly plan as well. Very exciting, so be sure to check that out. $7 a month and we have a two week free trial. I look forward to seeing you in the club, where you'll get ad free episodes of all of our shows, access to the TwitPlus bonus feed and access to the members only discord server. Thank you so much for your support. I'll catch you again next week for another episode of Hands on Mac. Bye, bye.