High CPU utilization just after display sleep in Hackintosh

I noticed that after a few seconds the monitors went sleep, the CPU utilization and iGPU utilization of my hackintosh went significantly high. This was clearly noticed in the Intel Power Gadget as well,

I kept a terminal session open redirecting the output of top command in terminal (top -o cpu > bla.txt). From the output I was able to find out that mediaanalysisd process was utilizing the CPU and iGPU.

After unloading mediaanalysisd, the issue went away.

Uload command I used,
launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.mediaanalysisd.plist

Restore Google Chrome and Firefox Bookmarks from a backup

I had an issue with my Hackintosh, so that it wouldn't boot anymore. However I was able to mount the disk of the machine to another newly built Hackintosh which helped me to access the files of the troubled Hackintosh.

First I plugged the disk to the new Hackintosh

For Google Chrome,

1. Navigate to below location of the disk,

/Volumes/<volume name> - Data/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default

2. There should be two Bookmark files in the directory:'Bookmarks' and 'Bookmarks.bak'

3. Check the latest by executing diff command

4. Copy the latest to below location of your new machine

/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default

For Firefox,

1. Navigate to below location of the disk,

/Volumes/<volume name> - Data/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/wzghbr3j.default/bookmarkbackups

2. There should be multiple files in the directory.

e.g.:

bookmarks-2020-02-08_744_<some-encoded-values>.jsonlz4

bookmarks-2020-02-09_744_<some-encoded-values>.jsonlz4

3. Pick the latest file and copy it to the desktop


4. Open Firefox, Select Bookmark and then Show All BookMarks


5. Click on Restore and then select choose file


6. Select the file from the Desktop

How to disable parsec-fbf which prevents Catalina Sleep functionality

1. Execute below command to find out which processes block sleep,

pmset -g assertions

2. Execute below command to disable parsec-fbf

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.parsec-fbf.plist

ext4 ext4lazyinit

Today I formatted a 3TB hard disk and mounted it with default options. However after mounting it I noticed that it periodically writes about 2 MB data. Initially I thought it was some journal information writing for the files I copied to the disk, but this 2MB data writing was not stopped when I mounted the disk after removing the journal.

Therefore I installed iotop to see what's going on. Aha, I was able to find the culprit immediately.
It was a process called ext4lazyinit.

Apparently when a partition is formatted with ext4, it does not initialize all inode tables in the file system during the file system creation time in order to speed up the process.  When the new file system is mounted, it starts ext4lazyinit process to initialize the inode tables leisurely.
Needless to say, it's really annoying to hear the sound of the disk is being accessed in every second indefinitely.

After searching about this ext4lazyinit process, I found out that all the inode tables can be initialized  passing lazy_itable_init=0 with the -E option when the  filesystem is created. Since I have already copied some files to the disk, I didn't want to reformat it. Therefore I followed another mechanism described in the articles I read. That is mount the partition with init_itable=0 mount option. This will speed up the inode table initialization. (https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt)

How to install youtube-dl on Mac OS

• Install youtube-dl,

sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

• Install ffmpeg which is useful to merge media streams,

• Download the static snapshot from https://evermeet.cx/ffmpeg/
• copy ffmpeg binary to /usr/local/bin,
• sudo cp ffmpeg /usr/local/bin/