Markus Zeller Blog » sleep

Closed lid with open eyes

Markus Zeller — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:32:56 +0000

A MacBook can close it’s lid and then it is going to sleep. On some situations it could be useful your Mac would stay awake instead of using it magic power LED hypnotizing you.

One of those moments could be

A party and your MacBook is serving some music, but you don’t want anybody to touch it and to see what is on your screen.
It is bedtime and you want to listen to my podcast or some other music and set your sleep timer, but the display is too bright.
You have a time intensive task like defragmenting harddrive, backup or downloading and want to prevent dust getting on the keys.
The screen is no longer used while watching a movie on an external monitor.
Just you want it!

A tiny freeware tool called InsomniaX puts some matches into the menubar to simply enable or disable the sleep functions.

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Safe Sleep

Markus Zeller — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 09:45:54 +0000

Safe Sleep on wake up

Usually, I do not turn off any of my Macs, because the sleep mode works so well. With a Mac Book it is just easy to close the lid.

But I ever wondered what would happen if the battery goes too low while beeing in sleep mode.

Since Tiger, there is a mode called “Safe sleep”. This is the pendant to the Windows hibernate mode. The content of the RAM is written to the harddisk, then the device is powered off.

To have this mode could be intersting if you travel a long time without using your Mac Book.

With help of the Terminal it is no big deal. You can enable the Safe sleep by entering

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 1

Then, if you close the lid or use the Apple menu bar it will safe sleep.

If you need secure and encrypted memory content stored, then take the 5 instead of number 1.

To reverse it to the normal sleep, where the RAM is still is active set the number to 0.

Have nice dreams!

Restart, Sleep and Shutdown

Markus Zeller — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 09:00:01 +0000

The mac can be restarted, shut down or sent to sleep. To achive that there are several ways.

If you own a MacBook or MacBook Pro you just can close the lid to make it sleep. But on a iMac or MacPro you would like to make it sleep, too.

All methods can be chosen by using the Menu bar clicking on the apple.

Restart options menu

The other geeky way is to use the keyboard. Hold down control and eject. Then you will get a dialog where you can easily select one option from.

CTRL+Eject

Restart Dialog

You can either use a direct shortcut to activate each function without a dialog:

Control-Command-Eject: Restart with asking for closing documents.
Control-Option-Command-Eject: Shut down with asking for closing documents.
Command-Option-Eject: Sleep