macos

Most people likely already know and use the voice dictation feature in iOS and macOS all day, but I’ve only now seen the light. Yesterday, I discovered I could dictate text notes to my iPhone, even offline. It works with Obsidian, WhatsApp, and any other app where I need to enter text, like the Safari search box. I suck at entering text on the phone. I also hate WhatsApp audio messages, but I often recur to them as, again, I suck at typing text on the phone....

Today I learned about a precious little macOS command line tool, networkQuality. The networkQuality tool is a built-in tool released in macOS Monterey that can help diagnose network issues and measure network performance. Usage: networkQuality -v Example output: ==== SUMMARY ==== Uplink capacity: 44.448 Mbps (Accuracy: High) Downlink capacity: 162.135 Mbps (Accuracy: High) Responsiveness: Low (73 RPM) (Accuracy: High) Idle Latency: 50.125 milliseconds (Accuracy: High) Interface: en0 Uplink bytes transferred: 69....

No matter how long I’ve possessed a Mac and how hard I try, there will always be a helpful keyboard shortcut hidden somewhere that I don’t know about. Today I learned about holding the Option key while clicking on the Copy command in Finder. It activates the super-useful (and super-secret) “copy as pathname” feature. I spotted this trick on Jamie Smith’s website, where other handy shortcuts (and the pretty gif above) reside....

Pardon me while I’m venting out my frustration. I am so tired of Homebrew messing up with my stuff. It used to be the perfect tool for the right job until they decided to auto-brew-update-and-cleanup at every new install. Another day another issue, today with vim not running anymore: dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/opt/lua/lib/liblua.5.3.dylib Referenced from: /user/local/bin/vi Reason: image not found Lua has suddenly gone missing. Ah, but of course. I installed something with Homebrew this morning....

I never see my macOS desktop. It’s always cluttered with way too many open windows. When I spot those fantastic, tidy and clean Desktops on the internet, I envy their owners. I wonder if and how they manage to keep those desktops tidy like that the whole workday. It must feel so good. I try to keep my windows well arranged. The typical setup might be two windows, from two different apps, tiled side by side....

So today, I was setting up a cronjob on my trusty MacBook Pro. The goal was to backup some folders from a remote Linux server via rsync. The script is simple. It goes something like this: rsync -avz -e "ssh -i ~/.ssh/my_rsa_keyfile" myuser@myserver:remotedir/ ~/localdir/ Launched by hand, it works seamlessly. Call it from a cron job via crontab, and I get a permission denied error. I then enabled ssh -v option to gather a little intel on what was actually going on....