For many years, I was using a hot corner to lock the screen of my Mac, but I always wished there was the equivalent of Windows-L in Windows to do it. I have no idea when this keyboard shortcut was added, but tapping the CTRL-CMD-Q shortcut will lock your Mac […]
Tech
Restore terminal access to Dropbox on macOS
Dropbox just updated and moved the Dropbox folder to ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox, a secure location. There is still a symlink from ~/Dropbox to that folder, so hopefully any local scripts will continue working. The first thing I did was open an iTerm2 and attempt to look in ~/Dropbox with cd Dropbox. As […]
Apple
HOW-TO: get rid of the screenshot preview in macOS
A good few years ago, Apple changed how their screenshot function (CMD+SHIFT+4) worked by adding a small preview before it was saved. This allows you to edit the screenshot before it’s saved and used. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I used that […]
Apple
HOWTO: Fix missing Thumbnails in Finder
I recently upgraded to macOS Monterey (yeah, finally) and immediately noticed that previews of new images weren’t showing up in Finder. Old images did have a preview image so something was wrong with how previews were generated. Searching online, I found a few solutions, including one that involved deleting the […]
Life
Your mouse is too small
Prompted by someone sharing this tweet at work I decided to try making the mouse cursor on my machine bigger. On a Mac go to System Preferences->Accessibility->Display->Cursor. I only bumped the size up one notch, but it’s made a nice change and really makes a difference to the “feel” of […]
Ireland
Putting Accents on Characters on Mac
Accents, everyone has one but some characters have more than one, and writing them on a Mac can be hard unless you know how. I really only need one type of accent, the “sine fada” in Irish that goes over the vowels. They look like this: á, é, ó, ú […]
Linux
Rsync between Mac and Linux
99.999999% of my readers can probably ignore this one, but if you are of the small minority who use Rsync and have Mac and Linux computers in your home you’ll want to read this. I have Plex running on a Raspberry Pi for my music. I have a large mp3 […]
Photography
HOWTO: Square Instagram images with white borders
I noticed that a lot of Instagram users, such as Alan Schaller to name but one, were posting images with thick white borders to make their images into the square images that Instagram favours. I like the striking look these images have in the Instagram gallery. I wondered for some […]
Apple
error: btn: invalid btn_btree.bt_key_count
I recognised the symptoms: Excessive disk trashing. General slow down. Backblaze and Time Machine causing the rainbow spinner. My filesystem needed first aid. I think I can trace this back to the latest macOS update. I swear that half the updates cause filesystem corruption of some sort, but it also […]
Apple
High Sierra and coreutils
Since MacOS High Sierra has been out for a long time this is probably old news to the tiny minority using coreutils. When you upgrade you might find that “df” and other commands don’t work properly. Every time I opened a terminal after upgrading I saw errors saying commands had […]