Pragmatism in today's world
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.
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'm a member of a number of groups that publish a magazine, either paper-based or PDF. I prefer the PDF version, so download from the website and then move to the relevant directory. Recently, I realised that I could use Hazel to do this for me. To take one example, the filename of the PDF that I download is of the format PE-{issue number}-web{some random characters}.pdf, for example: PE-123-web9j45s3gd.pdf. There's sometimes a hyphen after web,… continue reading.
I've had a few cases recently when I wanted to know the number of words that I had written. To do this, I've copied the text to BBEdit which displays the word count in its status bar, but this is a bit of a faff. I finally sat down and created a Shortcut for it that took 10 mins. This is the shortcut: The idea is that I want to select the text and run… continue reading.
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.
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.
