Pragmatism in the real world

Global word count on Mac using Shortcuts

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.

No SSL padlock on Safari on macOS 18.4

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.

Privileges app: sudo for macOS

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.