How to stop Photos.app opening whenever you connect a memory card

Yo Apple, Photos.app is really great and everything, but those of us who use third-party photo production software for ingestion and processing don’t want to see it EVERY TIME WE PLUG A MEMORY CARD INTO OUR MAC. (We don’t want to see it when we connect our iPhone, either. We only do that when Facebook Too Much Very Important Work has killed our phone battery.)

A user-friendly toggle to disable this for all devices would be super. Perhaps under System Preferences > CDs and DVDs?

Meanwhile, fellow photographers, here’s a terminal command that will safely disable the automatic opening of Photos.app when you least expect it. Copy and paste everything after the $ into Terminal.app and press Return:

$ defaults -currentHost write com.apple.ImageCapture disableHotPlug -bool YES

Unlike some of the other workarounds on the Internet, this one works even when you regularly re-format your memory cards (as most of us do). And it doesn’t require you to delete Photos.app, which might potentially break something somehow. No reboot required, either.

Update (27-Nov-15): If, for some reason, you want to reverse this change and return to OS X’s default behaviour, here’s the command to run:

$ defaults -currentHost delete com.apple.ImageCapture disableHotPlug

Whipping horses for fun: another great Aussie tradition

This is post no. 3 in my November writing challenge series.

Another Melbourne Cup has come and gone, and most of Australia has had a fabulous time pretending not to notice that the centrepiece of their frocked-up outings / office sweeps / drunken gambling was a race in which humans used whips to force animals more athletic than themselves to run so fast they might die.

Here’s my Facebook post on the topic:

There’s no nice way to say this.

If you placed a bet on today’s race, or found some other way to actively participate in Melbourne Cup festivities, then you–yes, YOU–are complicit in the flogging and maiming and killing of beautiful animals for no purpose other than your own entertainment.

This unforgivably cruel industry only exists because it’s profitable, and it’s only profitable because of people like you.

I say this not to make you feel guilty, but in the hope that next time a day like this comes around, you will stand against cruelty and injustice.

Together, we can end this national disgrace.

Of course there’s more to Melbourne Cup Day than cruelty to horses (which isn’t limited to one day of the year anyway). There’s also the destructiveness of the gambling; the repulsiveness of the drunkenness / waste / rubbish; the barely concealed money laundering by criminals; and perhaps worst of all, the millions of dollars of government funding that subsidises the whole sorry mess.

Ah, Straya. The land of shameful parties too sacred to cancel.

At least we’re not as bad as ancient Rome.

NaNoWriMo: TL;CW

Halfway through October, I started feeling strangely compelled to participate in NaNoWriMo, otherwise known as National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as writing roughly 1666.67 words per day for an entire month.

Unfortunately no inspiration for my first full-length work of fiction had materialised by 31 October (much less an outline, developed characters or any of the other things novelists are supposed to have figured out before they start writing), so I’ve decided to reboot my writing with a more realistic challenge: one blog post per day in November. (Once upon a time, this was called NaBloPoMo.)

Paltry as it is, this introduction will have to do for 1 November. Thankfully 29 opportunities remain for more substantial content before this challenge is over.