Pragmatism in today's world
I use bash's history all the time, via ctrl+r and also with the up and down keys; it's wonderful. Sometimes, I want to get back to the end of my history and I recently discovered that there's a shortcut for this: meta+>. It doesn't matter where you are in your history, pressing meta+> jumps you to the end and you have a blank prompt again. I use iTerm2 on my Mac and have my right… continue reading.
Following on from my earlier exploration of JWKS (RFC7517), I found myself needing to convert the JWKS into PEM format. This time I turned to Python with my preference of using uv with inline script metadata and created jwks-to-pem.py. The really nice thing about inline script metadata is that we can use the cryptography package to do all the hard work with RSA and serialisation. We just have to remember that the base64 encoded values… continue reading.
Recently, since getting a new computer, I've noticed that I've been losing bash history items and it took a while to work out what was going on, though I'm still not completely sure as it never seemed to be so much of a problem. I regularly use the up and down keys with context specific history. For example, I will type ma and then press up to search back through all the make commands I've… continue reading.
One project that I'm working on uses RFC 9457 Problem Details for HTTP APIs for its error responses. In the OpenAPI spec, we can define this as a component and use in the relevant paths as appropriate: components: schemas: ProblemDetails: type: object properties: type: type: string format: uri-reference description: A URI reference that identifies the problem type default: about:blank example: https://example.com/probs/out-of-credit title: type: string description: A short, human-readable summary of the problem type example: You… continue reading.
Inspired by John Gruber mentioning on the Cortex podcast that he has a shortcut that saves links to a note in Tot, I thought I'd do something similar for saving to a note in Apple Notes. I want to store as a bullet item containing the name of the page, the link and the date. Something like this: (Funny that the spellchecker doesn't know that Thu is the short form for Thursday) The Save Links… continue reading.
One app that I find incredibly useful is SwiftBar and one use I have is to display track info for the currently playing song in Apple Music. SwiftBar plugins work as shell scripts that execute on a timer and echo specially formatted text which SwiftBar then turns into an item on the menu bar with an attached menu I use a heavily modified Now Playing plugin that was originally written by Adam Kenyon, so all… continue reading.
I run Apple Music on my Mac desktop and send the output to my HomePod minis. To control the volume, you need to manipulate the Apple Music volume slider rather than the global volume controls for the Mac. It's easier to press buttons than use a mouse, so I used Keyboard Maestro to respond to two buttons on my Stream Deck instead. This is possible because Keyboard Maestro has a Stream Deck Plugin, so you… continue reading.
I'm working on a NestJS project that uses monorepo mode. It consists of a number of separate microservice applications that each have their own Docker container that are managed in development using Docker Compose. I like step-debugging in my IDE and so needed to set it up for this application. This is what I did. The application setup Each service in our project has its own container in docker-compose.yaml and we use a reverse proxy to… continue reading.
Back in 2016, I wrote about using QuickGrab to take a screenshot of the active window via a single key press with no mouse use required. It's now 2025 and I'm still using this and Apple has announced that Rosetta 2 will be phased out in a couple of years. As QuickGrab is one of the few Intel-only apps I still use, I thought I'd recompile for Apple Silicon and it was then that I… continue reading.
I've been writing a simple Swift command line tool called QuickSS. It's a single file swift file, that I compile to a standalone binaryusing: swiftc quickss.swift -o quickss To distribute it on modern Macs, I need to sign it and then get Apple to notarise it. Signing the binary To sign the binary, you need a "Developer ID Application" certificate from your paid developer account. If you don't have one there already create a new… continue reading.
