My Little Pocket Universe
For some strange reason, with the new ARM based Macs with X11 xquartz from either the official download, or from Mac Ports, when a remote java (of course it’s a problem with java), when the mouse moves, the colors of the window(s) will invert, making them very difficult to see/read. Fortunately, there are a couple … Read more
With Ubuntu starting to push their snap architecture, more and more apps break using old school X11 remote display methods. With traditional applications, you can just ssh to a remote host with -X or -Y to get X11 forwarding. You just run the X11 command, and it’ll “magically” come back and display on your local … Read more
So you have your shiny new Mac, and you want to back it up to a Time Machine volume, but you don’t want to have it dangling from a USB cable, a great option is to back up to a linux host using Samba. In the past, you would have used netatalk over the AFP … Read more
If you have tried to export a filesystem from your Mac to be used on another host, you might have had problems getting it to connect. The problem turns out to be simple, though the errors are… obtuse. For me, when I set up a share in /etc/exports, and tried to mount it from a … Read more
Sometimes you need things in life to slow down. Modern terminal emulators are great tools, and they can render text very quickly. This is usually the desired effect. But there are times when you need things to come at you a little slower. I have some old vt100/ansi animations that essentially do nothing when they … Read more
For some dumb reason, Apple has decided that an admin cannot see useful information in the logs of the Mac. I’m sure there is some security justification they have, but when security becomes such that usability is not there, then it serves no purpose. There is no simple way to enable viewing of the private … Read more
One really nice feature of MacOS is the integration of ssh keys with the OS keychain. This allows you to put a password on your ssh private key(s) that will unlock when you log in. Using this feature, combined with the ssh agent, and you can have a password protected ssh key, and not have … Read more
Sometimes I use external programs to update my Music files; specifically, I like using MusicBrainz Picard to add extra information. Once you change the info externally, you need to tell Music to re-read the file and update. You can always “Get Info” on each file individually, if you only have a few files to refresh. … Read more
You have probably created nice icons for your volumes or folders, only have them get removed at some point that you cannot remember. To keep from losing it, you can easily keep a backup of it. You can keep it in icns format, or make a PNG out of it. From a command line (Terminal … Read more
Sometimes it’s nice to override the default icons for various folders and drives on your Mac. Fortunately, the Mac makes it trivial to do this, as you can just drag an image into the icon in the “Get Info” window of a file in the Finder. I used to just do that with empty folders … Read more