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. I can instead dictate those messages, and they will render as text as if I typed them; what a revelation!

It’s not entirely a discovery; I knew I could do that and did it occasionally, primarily for quick lookups. However, I underestimated how good and valuable the feature is.

This morning, I discovered the obvious: I can do the same on the Mac. The MacBook keyboard has a microphone function key, and guess what? It’s for voice dictation, and it works seamlessly. I can even start typing on the keyboard, switch to dictation on the fly, and then go back to typing without interruption. It works offline and has built-in multi-language support, just like iOS. Voice dictation will likely change how I take notes, send messages, and perform other tasks. Take notes, for example; until today, I rarely write them down when away from the keyboard.

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: 69.921 MB
Downlink bytes transferred: 278.340 MB
Uplink Flow count: 16
Downlink Flow count: 12
Start: 13/05/2023, 15:04:13
End: 13/05/2023, 15:04:27
OS Version: Version 13.3.1 (a) (Build 22E772610a)

It supports Apple’s Private Relay, offers some configuration options and allows setting up your own server. More info here.

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.

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. The fix is to brew reinstall vim, which then leads to the following error:

Error: python@3.9 the bottle needs the Apple Command LIne Tools to be installed.
You can install them, if desired, with:
xcode-select --install

An xcode-select install and another brew reinstall later, vim is back home. It’s only a minor annoyance —only a few wasted minutes, but the point is, they didn’t need to be wasted. If you’re frequently installing stuff via Homebrew, this is quite a common, unpleasant occurrence (python virtual environments being hit with alarming frequency).

I know that one can disable automatic cleanups by setting the HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_CLEANUP environment variable. I will end up doing that out of frustration sooner or later. Again, the point is I should not need to do that. It all adds unnecessary friction, especially for someone who’s been religiously running manual cleanups (I concede that an un-maintained brew cache can grow to very sizable dimensions).

Homebrew is still an essential tool; just not so enjoyable anymore. It’s not like we have a valid alternative at hand, anyway.

I try to keep my windows well arranged. The typical setup might be two windows, from two different apps, tiled side by side. Maybe the browser, or Postman, on the right, and my favourite editor on the left. Stuff like that.

Hookshot is excellent for doing just that. I discovered this tiny little app a few weeks ago, thanks to Robin Rendle. Before, I was using Moom, which is also good. I like Hookshot’s dead-simple keyboard shortcuts. Once the single modifier key combo Control+Command clicks, you’re done. Rearranging windows becomes a no-brainer. In a way, the experience reminds me of Vim and its unique muscle-memory superpower. The ten days trial ended today, and I purchased the license right away.

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. As it turns out, the exact error was:

`read_passphrase: can't open /dev/tty: Device not configured`

Quite puzzling. Long story short, the error message was misleading. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what the real problem was. The identity file I was using has a passphrase, which is saved in macOS Keyring. When the ssh -i command is launched via cron, no Keyring is used. Not unless you explicitly instruct ssh to do. See, my ~/.ssh/config file was something like this:

Host *
    ServerAliveInterval 360
    AddKeysToAgent yes

[...]

Host myserver
    HostName 123.123.123.123
    User myuser

See, in myserver section there was no Usekeychain option. Launching the script interactively worked because of AddkeysToAgent in the general section. It enables the ssh-agent for the current terminal session, for all hosts. But cron jobs, well, they don’t run in the same session, and certainly don’t run the agent. I could eval the agent in the script, of course, but the simplest solution was to update myserver section:

Host myserver
    HostName 123.123.123.123
    Usekeychain yes
    User myuser

Now ssh knows it should use the keychain when resolving myserver RSA key, even when no agent is running. I am not sure why I did not have Usekeychain there; I do have it enabled for other hosts in the same file. As said, I wasted way too much time on this issue. At least, I hope my experience will be useful to someone else, or, more likely, to my future self in a few months or years.