Okay... so, I recognize that this is probably preventing my machine from sleeping, but it certainly felt a little simpler than running some program like caffeinate or un-plugging my display every time I walked away from the computer.
I initially did this because I was trying to trace how long my machine ran without crashing — turns out
this script mostly prevents my machine from ever crashing in the first place. I now only see ~1 crashes every 2-3 weeks (closer to 3, honestly)
I Just opened up a new crontab in terminal:
In the edit mode, I entered two lines: 1— a simple script that runs on the hour, every hour of every day, and 2— a simple script that runs at midnight every day. Both just pipe & append their respective strings of code into a text file. This way I've always got a record of "how long" the machine has been "up", and "when the last reboots were?".
Bash:
0 * * * * uptime >> /Users/Alex/Mac\ Pro\ Uptime.txt
0 0 * * * last reboot >> /Users/Alex/Mac\ Pro\ Last \Reboot.txt
oddly enough... by running this, I suppose I'm never letting the machine sleep the same way or at least
not long enough for the crash to occur, because I barely see crashes anymore with this code running. If I stop the scripts from running, then I get a crash every day or two during sleep.
I recognize there might be undesirable aspects of "keeping the machine busy" so that it doesn't crash, but I have a toddler, and I get pulled away during work CONSTANTLY, and I can't afford to lose progress/work just because I got drawn away for 45min. The above scripting has dramatically reduced my instance of crashing, and has allowed me to keep functioning with this machine as my primary work Mac.
That said — once some of the drivers & studio apps that I need become 12.3 compliant and/or M1 Native, I'm gonna be VERY likely to jump over to an M1-Ultra Studio Mac.
