Those Annoying Late Night Machine Wake-Ups

Apple OS X has all sorts of background 'daemons' running (processes that run without any visible windows). Some wake up the machine in the middle of the night quite at least every hour and sometimes twice every hour.

Hourly or bi-hourly wake-ups might not be noticed by those with laptops, or SSD-only systems, but they can be really annoying because the wakeup spins up all attached hard drives (displays stay dark fortunately). Sometimes this interrupts my sleep, so I am not a fan of having a useless check for new mail (or whatever) in the middle of the night. It has zero value. If I’m traveling for a week or two, I don’t need the machine waking up 500 times while I’m gone.

Apple geniuses seem to be hard at work on ways to waste energy and annoy users: why isn’t there a setting to stay in sleep mode with no useless nonsense happening in the middle of the night, a “Stay Asleep” option?

So here’s how to configure Energy Saver to minimize wake-up and other annoyances. It will not prevent all wakeups, but it reduces them:

I need more than 24 hours in a day, so the new Apple Overtime feature is going to be really useful (24:03, 24:05, etc). Yet another Apple Core Rot bug, albeit a small one.