Dark and light mode blog images with MarsEdit

As dark mode is more popular than ever now that the iPhone supports it, I've been working out how to get the browser to render a dark image in dark mode and a light image in light mode. It turns out that the way to do this simply is to use the <picture> element like this: <picture> <source srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/example-image-dark.png" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)" /> <source srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/example-image-light.png" media="(prefers-color-scheme: light), (prefers-color-scheme: no-preference)" /> <img src="/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/example-image-light.png" alt="Description of example image… continue reading.

Posted on 4 December 2019 in Computing, MarsEdit, Software, WordPress

HTML encode selected text on Mac

When writing blog posts, I write directly in HTML, mostly from habit and because I've not set up mark-up text processing on WordPress. I'm comfortable enough with simple HTML that it's never seemed important enough to sort out, especially with MarsEdit's macros for common HTML tags. One thing that I need to do relatively regularly is to HTML encode code snippets for use in <tt> and <pre> tags. I have been doing this via a… continue reading.

Posted on 23 October 2019 in Computing, Keyboard Maestro, MarsEdit

Automatically mounting a network drive on Mac

I have so many photos that I can't store them all on my hard drive and keep them on my NAS. While on my home network, it would be convenient to automatically mount the NAS folder onto my Mac as I keep forgetting before I open Lightroom. Usually I would use automount to do this, but Lightroom cannot see automounted folders, so I decided to use a combination of AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro. Mount a… continue reading.

Posted on 28 August 2019 in Computing, Keyboard Maestro

Keyboard shortcut to Save as PDF on Mac

I regularly print to PDF on my Mac, This is done from the print dialog by selecting Save as PDF from the drop down in the bottom left of the dialog which is a bit of a pain to get using the mouse. I recently discovered that I could create a keyboard shortcut to make this much easier. In System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts you can create a keyboard shortcut to… continue reading.

Posted on 12 June 2019 in Computing, PDF, Software

Keyboard control of macOS notification alerts

I use Apple's Reminders app to remind me about things that I need to do. It has the useful feature of syncing across my Mac, iPad and iPhone and I can add to it via Siri in my car. When I am notified on my Mac, a notification alert appears with two buttons: Complete and Later. Clicking Later offers a set of options to dismiss the alert and have it reappear in 5 minutes, in… continue reading.

Posted on 9 January 2019 in Computing, Software

Upgrading to Bash 4 on macOS

Incredibly, macOS Mojave comes with Bash 3.22 by default still. Apparently this is due to licensing reasons, however Bash 4 has lots of lovely features including associative arrays that I'd like use. Hence, after reading the Internet for a bit, I've installed it on my Mac. This turned out to require just 3 commands: $ brew install bash $ sudo bash -c 'echo /usr/local/bin/bash >> /etc/shells' $ chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash Close the terminal and open… continue reading.

Posted on 14 December 2018 in Computing

Pretty print curl -i

My favourite tool for working with APIs is curl, though I recognise that lots of people like HTTPie and seem very keen to tell about it every time I mention curl… With curl, I particularly like using the -i switch to view the status line and headers too without the additional cruft of -v: This generates an output that looks like this: $ curl -i https://api.joind.in HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2017 09:51:46… continue reading.

Posted on 11 October 2017 in Computing, PHP

Autocomplete Composer script names on the command line

As I add more and more of my own script targets to my composer.json files, I find that it would be helpful to have tab autocomplete in bash. I asked on Twitter and didn't get an immediate solution and as I had already done something similar for Phing, I rolled up my sleeves and wrote my own. Start by creating a new bash completion file called composer in the bash_completion.d directory. This file needs executable… continue reading.

Posted on 15 May 2017 in Computing, PHP

Automatically converting PDF to Keynote

I use rst2pdf to create presentations which provides me with a PDF file. When it comes to presenting on stage, on Linux there are tools such as pdfpc and on Mac there's Keynote. Keynote doesn't read PDF files by default, so we have to convert them and the tool I use for this is Melissa O'Neill's PDF to Keynote. This is a GUI tool, so I manually create the Keynote file when I need it… continue reading.

Posted on 30 March 2017 in Computing, rst2pdf

Keyboard shortcut to resize Finder columns

I like to use Finder in Column mode (⌘+3). i.e. this view: One feature of this view is that you can resize all the columns to fit by alt+double clicking on the move handle between each column. There doesn't appear to be a keyboard shortcut for this operation though, so I created one using Keyboard Maestro. Keyboard Maestro can move the mouse around the screen and click with it which is exactly what I need.… continue reading.

Posted on 22 February 2017 in Accessibility, Computing, Keyboard Maestro

Category: Computing