My Little Pocket Universe
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
Sometimes, especially with Monterey, I have had iCloud file syncing hang where it shows there are files that need to be uploaded, but for whatever reason it stops uploading the files; sometimes for a couple of hours, sometimes completely. And, of course it will do this when I have other projects open I don’t want … Read more
If you ever have an app that seems to be having problems launching, you can quickly check the integrity with the spctl command: spctl –assess -vv /Applications/<Application>.app As an example, if I wanted to check the integrity of Handbrake (a kick-ass video encoder), the command would be: spctl –assess -vv /Applications/HandBrake.app The output you should … Read more
MacOS has a nice facility as part of its DNS resolver that allows you to have a per-domain set of DNS servers. This is especially useful when using VPN services where you still need to use your local resolvers as well as the remote resolvers. Unfortunately, there is nowhere in the GUI to do this, … Read more
Unfortunately, since the last OS update for the Mac (Monterey), QuickLook has become especially unstable, especially on my M1 Mac Mini. It doesn’t cause crashes or anything, it simply stops working; especially with video files. However there is a simple solution to the problem. From the Terminal, just run the command (you do not need … Read more