I wanted to get all of the peripherals that I could share using the OWC Dock set up over spring break, so I worked on that today. I plugged my Focusrite Scarlet Solo and Razer webcam into the dock, and moved the Samsung T5 drive I split between Time Machine backups, and Steam, Epic, and Blizzard game libraries closer towards the center of the port array on the Mac Studio. This will make plugging the Thunderbolt cable into the Studio much easier than threading between other peripherals’ plugs.

I haven’t tried plugging another device in the dock yet, but at least it’s set up. I’ve been using my iPhone as my web cam at work using continuity camera, and don’t do many meetings from home such that I’ve needed the camera. But the Razer Kiyo Pro really looks nice, I have to say.

HDMI vs DisplayPort 1.2

I was rearranging cables to make all of this magic happen and I saw a nice thick braided cable snaking up from the side of the desk. I followed it to a DisplayPort plug, which I’ve been using for Aaron’s old Alienware from my Windows phase. I remember reading before that DisplayPort may be favorable to HDMI before when messing with the KVM switch, so I asked ChatGPT about it. Since my Samsung U32J59x supports DisplayPort v 1.2, ChatGPT thought it might be beneficial, too. So I unplugged HDMI from the display and replaced the cable with the DisplayPort cable. And that worked just ducky.

Display sleep Issue

The switch from HDMI to DisplayPort resurrected the ghost of a familiar bug: the Mac doesn’t sleep the Samsung after a period of inactivity when it’s connected via DisplayPort (or the other way around), but things work as expected over HDMI.

ChatGPT informed me that this was a known issue. The current workaround is a Launchbar action that fires a simple script: pmset displaysleepnow, which is self explanatory. It’s an extra step for me and I’d have to know that I’m not coming back to my desk for a while (which doesn’t always happen… you get pulled away).

Scripting

I asked ChatGPT about possibly scripting something to check if I was using the Mac, and after a certain interval of the computer being idle, run pmset. So maybe I’ll fart with that next.