My Little Pocket Universe
For posts related in some way to Apple products.
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
If you have the HashKnownHosts option for your ssh client set to yes, then you have a more secure known_hosts file so that a bad actor cannot easily get a list of the hosts you connect to, which is a good idea. However, it also hides it from you, so if you need to remove … Read more
You’ve got this shiny toy in your Mac that lets you use your fingerprint for authentication, and for some reason when you need to elevate your privileges, it doesn’t use that sensor. Epic Fail! Fortunately, the facility is there. Apple just chose not to enable it for some reason only they know. Since MacOS uses … Read more
One shortcoming of the native settings on the iPhone and the iPad is that you can’t easily set up on-demand or automatic VPNs. While there is no way to do it in the GUI, you can, however create a profile and install it with all the necessary information and logic. Profiles are just XML documents … Read more
I recently discovered the Blink SSH client for iOS, and am loving it. It finally makes the iPad actually useful as a mobile ssh workstation in an understated elegant way. However, I really don’t care for most of the popular fonts that are used by newer terminal applications. I am proudly old school, and decided … Read more
For some bizarre reason, the package management tools for MacOS do not have an option to uninstall in any easy way. However, if you drop into the Terminal, you can do all the steps by hand relatively easily. There is a command called pkgutil that will give you the information you need. To list all … Read more
Traditionally, on *nix systems, cron (or one of its derivatives) is used. It’s possible to use cron on the Mac, but it’s deprecated. launchd is the preferred method. The set up is a little more complex because it’s a bit of XML code, but it’s very straightforward. See the launchd.plist man page or the launchd … Read more
This is a simple, but useful one. If you hate ADs as much as I do, this is a quick solution that gets rid of most of the advertisements in the Apple News app on the Mac. All you have to do is add/modify a line in your /etc/hosts and send traffic for news.iadsdk.apple.com into … Read more
If you use a Mac and create SAMBA shares on linux hosts, you’re bound to find lots of .DS_Store files. They are, in and of themselves, harmless; they just store custom window information for the MacOS Finder. But if you prefer to have that information not saved rather than finding those files, you can prevent … Read more