Running DisplayLink Manager on Mac without the purple icon

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.

Posted on 3 December 2024 in Computing, Software Leave a comment

Testing internal network speed with iperf3

I've been playing with different Ethernet network adapters to see if I can maximise the throughput to my Mac as my ethernet didn't seem particularly faster than WiFi. To test the speed, I want to use my internal network only as going onto the Internet will create too many variables. iperf3 is the solution for this. Running the test To run a speed test with iperf3, you need two computers: one to act as the… continue reading.

Posted on 26 November 2024 in Computing Leave a comment

Prepending to the terminal's prompt

For some work I'm doing, I have been given access to a Linux box that is part of a legacy production system. The first thing I have done is updated the terminal prompt to include the word PRODUCTION in red, by adding this to .bashrc: export PS1="$(tput setaf 1)PRODUCTION $(tput sgr0)$PS1" The nice thing about doing it this way is that I don't have to worry about whatever is in PS1 already. Not the most… continue reading.

Posted on 19 November 2024 in Computing Leave a comment

Selecting the correct iPhone to mirror in macOS Sequoia

There's a new feature in macOS Sequoia that allows mirroring of your iPhone to your Mac. This is a nice feature that allows you to fully interact with your iPhone as an app on you Mac's desktop. When I upgrade to Sequoia and run the iPhone Mirroring app, it selected Victory, my old iPhone 14 Pro Max which is running an older version of iOS. This didn't work and there is no way within the… continue reading.

Posted on 29 October 2024 in Computing Leave a comment

Scripting News is 30 years old

Last week, Dave Winer posted that Scripting News turned 30. That's an amazing milestone and Dave's still writing daily. 1994 seems like quite a while ago; the web was only 3 years old! I started blogging in 2003 on a personal domain and added this blog in 2005. I don't write daily though and I tip my hat to Dave. His writing is also really really good. Scripting News was the catalyst for the creation… continue reading.

Posted on 15 October 2024 in Computing One comment so far

UUID v7

It's common to use a UUID when you need a primary key for your database records. Unlike incrementing numeric keys, it has the advantage that it's not tied to a specific database instance and can be created before insertion into the database. Usually, people use version 4 UUIDs, which contains a lot of randomness to ensure that it's going to be unique and not clash with any other id. Recently, I became aware of version… continue reading.

Posted on 20 August 2024 in Computing, Software

Keyword substitutions make life easier

I'm a huge fan of making my life easier and one thing I have found really helpful is automatic text substitution. The Mac has a built-in solution, but it's slightly clunky as it uses a popup to confirm that you want to substitute, so I use Keyboard Maestro, however there's many alternatives out there. My personal preference is to prefix all my substitutions with a semicolon as there are no real words that start with… continue reading.

Posted on 13 August 2024 in Computing

A short primer on SPF, DKIM and DMARC

I use FastMail for my email and as I control my own domain, I needed to set up SFP, DKIM and DMARC on it. These are DNS records that help the email servers put the emails that I send into my recipient's inbox and to mark any forged emails as spam. These are my tidied up notes so that I can find them again when I next need them. SPF SPF is a DNS record… continue reading.

Posted on 9 July 2024 in Computing

macOS tips and tricks

It's been over a decade since I last updated my article for new users to the Mac, so time for a new one that I can point people too. This article is intended to give a quick and easy introduction to some key things that I think you should know when you move to using macOS. Basics There’s one menu bar for all applications. That is, you can only see the menus for the currently… continue reading.

Posted on 14 May 2024 in Computing

Command line access to GitLab & GitHub

I've always been a huge fan of the command line and have been using the gh command line tool to access GitHub for a while. My current client uses GitLab and I was delighted to discover that there is a glab CLI tool. As you can imagine, both tools do essentially the same thing: operate on GitHub/GitLab from the command line. The two main uses of gh & glab that I have is creating and… continue reading.

Posted on 7 May 2024 in Command Line, Computing

Category: Computing