Pragmatism in the real world
With the release of macOS 18.4, Safari no longer shows a padlock when you visit a website that uses https. I assume there's a reason for this but I was scratching my head trying to work out how to view the SSL certificate when I went to a new-to-me website domain that my bank asked me to go to. This is what the address bar now looks like when you're on a secure connection to… continue reading.
I'm using Signal more now and as it's fully end-to-end encrypted, if something goes wrong with your phone or you lose it, you will lose your entire message history. Signal on Android has an official backup method, but there isn't one for iPhone or desktop. As a result, a number of backup tools have been written by various people. The one I've had most luck with on my Mac desktop is signalbackup-tools. Note that the… continue reading.
By default, the first user that you create on macOS is an administrator and has more power over the system than a normal user account. The reason it does this is obvious as you need this power to create other users, to install software and so on. However it also means that the computer is slightly more vulnerable to attack via a vulnerability in the software I use day to day. To combat this, I… continue reading.
I was helping a friend set up a new website and hit a problem where the website was in an infinite redirect loop: I could see this in curl quite easily: $ curl -I https://myfriendswebsite.example.com/ HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Location: https://myfriendswebsite.example.com/ To debug, we turned off Cloudflare by setting the Proxy status on the DNS record in Cloudflare's admin to "DNS only" and the problem went away. Further investigation led to the SSL/TLS setting in… continue reading.
One very minor thing that's been bugging me since macOS Sequoia came out is that if you launch an app that lives in your menu bar, but also has a hidden Dock icon a second time, then the Dock icon will re-appear. This happens to me a lot because I use Alfred to launch apps and also to bring an app to the front. This works because opening a running app will bring it to… continue reading.
My preferred calendar app for the Apple ecosystem is Fantastical as I've found that it meets my needs well. One minor irritant is that the editor popover defaults to a collapsed view and I have to expand it to see everything, in particular the notes field which I use frequently. I recently discovered that there's a hidden preference to change this. It's set via a custom url of x-fantastical3://defaults?key=AlwaysShowAll&value=1&type=bool&group=1. Just click this link to set… continue reading.
One thing that I've found helpful is to add a set of patterns to my global git ignore file (config/git/ignore for me) that allow me to create temporary files that are automatically excluded from git. The patterns I use are these: # Ignore a file by renaming it with ignore its name *.ignore ignore.* *.ignore.* This lets me create a file with a prefix ignore., a postfix of .ignore or add .ignore. somewhere in the… continue reading.
When I'm on a Zoom or FaceTime call, I want stop all notifications on my Mac so that I'm not distracted by them and would like this automated. It's not easy to tell when a call is happening, so I simplified the problem to stopping all notifications if the Zoom or FaceTime is running as I only run these apps if I'm on call. To do this, I created two Shortcuts to turn the Do… continue reading.
I recently discovered the /usr/libexec/corebrightnessdiag command line tool on macOS. In particular, /usr/libexec/corebrightnessdiag nightshift-internal will give information about when the Mac's nightshift settings, including when sunrise and sunset are! $ /usr/libexec/corebrightnessdiag nightshift-internal Night Shift Status { AutoBlueReductionEnabled = 1; BlueLightReductionSchedule = { DayStartHour = 7; DayStartMinute = 0; NightStartHour = 22; NightStartMinute = 0; }; BlueReductionAvailable = 1; BlueReductionEnabled = 0; BlueReductionMode = 0; BlueReductionSunScheduleAllowed = 1; Version = 1; } Night Shift Sunset/Sunrise {… continue reading.
I recently acquired an Elgato Prompter which acts as an additional screen on my Mac. It does this using DisplayLink and the DisplayLink Manager app needs to be running. A new security feature of the newer macOS versions is that when your screen is being recorded, an icon is displayed in your menu bar. It looks like this and cannot be disabled: Certainly unmissable! This icon is displayed nearly all the time DisplayLink Manager is… continue reading.
