Really Apple?
Tag Archives: macOS
Pen and Paper
For the last 6 to 10 months, I’ve been trying to find the proper digital tools to manage my life. Spoiler alert: I keep failing to do that.
In the last 5 years, my main and only job was to do one thing and one thing only, run illuria, Inc., a company that I co-founded with my friends. At some point, specifically when your team has more than three people, you need some kind of task management tool. And I’ll be honest here, I don’t care which one that is, most of them do the same thing anyway. We ended up using Notion, and we like it very much. I like the database feature and my team loves the Kanban boards. Half of the team does development and the other half does development-related things (release engineering, infra) and business-y stuff, such as sales, marketing, what have you, so we never had any issues with Notion.
(To be clear, while I like Notion and any other tool would do the job as well, I have to say that I never liked Jira’s UI/UX. That one is, indeed, enterprise-y, but that’s a story for another day).
But last year I started taking some more responsibilities (kind-of-)outside of work. Co-hosting and producing a podcast, running a community of Armenian hackers, teaching cybersecurity (I actually end up teaching Unix + Networking + how computers work, but turns out that’s what actually 80% of cybersecurity is anyway), contributing more to open-source (specially since we open-sourced our little utility, Jailer) to name a few.
Which meant that I needed a digital tool to manage the non-work part of my life as well.
The obvious choice was to use Notion, since I know it anyway. That ended up being a disaster for a very weird reason: It only works online. Even if you have the desktop app, it’s still just a wrapper around the website with some nice things like desktop notifications and such.
I know, this sounds strange to many people, but I don’t like being online all the time. Sometimes I enable iOS/macOS’s DnD, to get some work done, but sometimes I go completely offline with no distractions at all.
Unlike most other developers, I work completely locally. From my development environment to my infrastructure tools, everything is synced local/prod. This is actually a good reason to not use the fancy features of the cloud, but again, that’s a story for another day.
I have been told, by my friends, that my options are the following:
Go as basic as possible and use Notes.app. Well, I like this option, but I had two issues.
First, it’s Apple only. Yes, you can actually connect the Notes.app to your IMAP account and sync that with other Unix machines using clients like Evolution, but now the features are limited to text only. Not even tables :/
Second, the iCloud sync has some weird issues. not always, but from time to time, I was shouting “WHERE ARE MY NOTES???” just to see them appear minutes later.
Apple Notes.app? tested, liked it overall, but it’s not for me.
My friends’ second option? Go as deep as Obsidian!
I fired up Obsidian and I fell in love immediately. It was like love at first sight. Vi keybindings? it’s there. Plugins? it’s there. Run shell commands on your notes? it’s there!
After couple of days, I had everything ready. I had my folders (please, let’s call them directories!), my notes all migrated, all the plugins I needed for my weekly and daily notes (similar to what we had on Notion at work), etc etc.
And then days passed, and then weeks passed. What happened? I totally forgot that Obsidian even exists. I noticed that my wall had… sticky notes (FreeBSD branded!), my Mac had… sticky notes!
This made me so frustrated for multiple reasons.
Not that I only had two types of sticky notes (analog and digital), I also could not “search” in them!
I ended up turning the analog notes into digital, and tagging them at their title, so I could at least search using the macOS Window API.
And then I saw something awesome. Cortex Podcast released the Sidekick Notepad!
Wait wait wait, are you thinking that I bought the Sidekick Notepad? Nope, I did not 🙂
But what I ended up doing is putting all of our office’s legal pads next to me at home, we were not using them in the office anyway!
Two weeks later and I’m writing everything as needed. I take notes, I write my todo lists. I made my legal pads horizontal, similar to the Sidekick Notepad and woof is was awesome!
For a moment there I started using the Moleskine Classic Notebook, since it was more portable than yellow/white legal pads, but that didn’t work as well. I guess I needed something that can be teardown on the fly and no very-hard cover.
Why am I telling you about all of this? Well, uncle Dexter has asked on Mastodon “500 reMarkable ads later… Is anyone using one? Would you recommend it?”
I have used reMarkable (the first one), and I loved it. Not because it was an awesome technology or such, but because it made me think the same as if I was writing on paper with a pen.
So, if you, like me, have suffered for a long time to find the best “digital time/notes/todo management tool”, then you’re probably an analog person, like me.
Just take a sheet of paper, start writing on it with a pen.
That’s all folks…
P.S. I might actually end up buying the reMarkable 2 and check how that goes, or even the Sidekick Notepad. But with my writing speed, I’d need at least 4 Sidekicks every 3 months. Let’s wait and see 🙂
More macOS Display Resolutions
I assume that this feature has been around for a while, maybe it came with Ventura, but I noticed it just today.
Turns out, if you have a MacBook Air and you want more resolution in the expense of sharpness, you can go to System Settings → Displays, Click on Show all resolutions and get more options.
I just moved from 1680×1050 to 2048×1280. While I don’t recommend this for most people, it it useful if you do development in your terminal (like I do) and want to see more context.
Light & Dark Wallpapers for iOS: Solving a problem that Apple created
One of the best features of macOS is the ability to have Light and Dark, as well as Dynamic Wallpapers. You’d think that Apple has done some Apple-y way to implement that, but not at all.
It’s actually part of the High Efficiency Image File Format that allows sequences which are multiple time-related images.
Here’s an example of Ventura’s default wallpaper.
As you can see, it’s multiple images.
So a while back, I thought hey, I can make a Light & Dark wallpaper for myself, which I did.
For some reason, I forgot to use these wallpapers on my iPhone and iPad. Days ago I tried, and oh boy, Apple messed up again.
Here’s how the image looks like on iOS/iPadOS.
It just loops over the images and if you try to set it as a wallpaper it sets the first one. That’s it…
Anyway, now that I’ve complained about Apple, let me show you how to use “Dynamic” wallpapers. Again, this is just a hack, it would’ve been easier if Apple just tested their own wallpapers on iOS/iPadOS.
Let’s start with iOS first.
Setup two identical wallpapers using the new iOS lock screen customization thingie.
After that, setup a Shortcut automation to set the wallpaper based on time. In this case, I use sunset and sunrise.
The automation itself looks like this.
Fun fact: Apple messed up again. You know how your iPhone changes appearance automatically between Light and Dark mode based on sunset and sunrise? Well, it doesn’t match with Shortcuts automator! the Shortcut automator will set your wallpaper sooner than iOS changes its appearance. I guess they each have their own “calculation” of when sunset/sunrise is.
Okay, but this wasn’t that hard.
How about iPadOS. Well, that’s more complicated.
First, you need to have a copy of each wallpaper (light and dark), and then you have to put them into an Album.
After that, you need a Shortcut automation that looks for these images and sets them as a wallpaper. Another inconsistency that we really didn’t need between platforms…
Here’s an example.
Here’s the automation itself
Fun fact: Sometimes iPadOS will forget to set the wallpaper and you’ll get a notification that says “Missed automation” or something like that. I forgot to screenshot that, but if you have an example, please do send me an image.
Congratulations, now you have Dynamic Wallpapers on iOS/iPadOS.
That’s all folks…
You’d think that macOS would have a Mission Control shortcut that does “Switch to last used Desktop”, but no, it does not. And this makes macOS very hard to use for people like me, who have 10 Desktops.
On the other hand, WindowMaker, the window manager that “reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NeXTSTEP user interface”, which macOS also was based on, had that shortcut for almost exactly 10 years.
Someone PLEASE add this simple and powerful feature.
Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS
I saw this post on Mastodon, and it got me thinking.
Are there any other hardcoded folder names in macOS? Where would I even start looking?
Well, based on what I know, every program on macOS is a directory that ends with .app, which means all I have to do is to find Finder’s location.
That should be pretty easy!
antranigv@zvartnots:~ $ cd /System/ antranigv@zvartnots:/System $ find . -type d -name Finder.app 2>/dev/null ./Library/CoreServices/Finder.app ./Volumes/Data/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app
Well, that was easy to find! Don’t worry, /System/Library is the same as /System/Volumes/Data/System/Library, Apple has a weird way of doing mount points, and I’m not here to judge. Well, at least not today!
Next I have to dig into Finder.app’s content, let’s see what we have.
antranigv@zvartnots:/System $ cd Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/ antranigv@zvartnots:/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app $ find . -type f -name 'Developer*'
Weird. Nothing at all?
I wonder what type of files we have here? I already know that I wanna see all the file types except Mach-O.
$ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I% -L 1 file -b "%" | sort -u | grep -v 'Mach-O' ASCII text, with no line terminators Apple binary property list IFF data, AIFF audio Mac OS X Code Directory version 20100 - 203 bytes Mac OS X Code Directory version 20100 - 213 bytes Mac OS X Code Directory version 20100 - 215 bytes Mac OS X Code Directory version 20100 - 217 bytes Mac OS X Code Requirement Set - 76 bytes Mac OS X Code Requirement Set - 84 bytes Mac OS X Code Requirement Set - 88 bytes Mac OS X bill of materials (BOM) file Mac OS X icon, 114423 bytes, "ic13" type Mac OS X icon, 1162872 bytes, "ic12" type Mac OS X icon, 23712 bytes, "ic13" type Mac OS X icon, 30805 bytes, "ic13" type Mac OS X icon, 37834 bytes, "ic13" type Mac OS X icon, 72729 bytes, "ic13" type Mac OS X icon, 76602 bytes, "ic13" type XML 1.0 document text, ASCII text XML 1.0 document text, Unicode text, UTF-8 text data
Okay! we’re getting somewhere!
According to Magic file directory on FreeBSD, the filename is usually .icns
I think the rest will be easy, let’s try this again!
$ find /System/Library -type f -name 'Developer*.icns' 2>/dev/null /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/DeveloperFolderIcon.icns
Bingpot!
What else do we have there?
$ find . -type f -name '*Folder*.icns' ./UsersFolderIcon.icns ./DocumentsFolderIcon.icns ./SidebarHomeFolder.icns ./ApplicationsFolderIcon.icns ./PrivateFolderBadgeIcon.icns ./GenericFolderIcon.icns ./PicturesFolderIcon.icns ./SidebarDesktopFolder.icns ./PublicFolderIcon.icns ./SidebarGenericFolder.icns ./SystemFolderIcon.icns ./ServerApplicationsFolderIcon.icns ./LibraryFolderIcon.icns ./ReadOnlyFolderBadgeIcon.icns ./SidebarBurnFolder.icns ./OpenFolderIcon.icns ./SmartFolderIcon.icns ./BurnableFolderIcon.icns ./SidebarDownloadsFolder.icns ./SidebarMoviesFolder.icns ./SidebarPicturesFolder.icns ./UtilitiesFolder.icns ./SidebarSmartFolder.icns ./HomeFolderIcon.icns ./SidebarApplicationsFolder.icns ./MovieFolderIcon.icns ./SidebarDocumentsFolder.icns ./DropFolderBadgeIcon.icns ./DownloadsFolder.icns ./GroupFolder.icns ./SidebarUtilitiesFolder.icns ./SidebarMusicFolder.icns ./DeveloperFolderIcon.icns ./NewFolderBadgeIcon.icns ./MusicFolderIcon.icns ./DesktopFolderIcon.icns ./SitesFolderIcon.icns ./SidebarDropBoxFolder.icns
These are good! Let’s look at them!
I wrote a script that converts all these .icns files to proper PNGs using the iconutil program.
#!/bin/sh
for icns in *.icns;
do
iconutil -c iconset "${icns}"
done
for iconset in *.iconset;
do
cp "${iconset}/icon_512x512@2x.png" "${iconset}-icon_512x512@2x.png" ||
cp "${iconset}/icon_32x32.png" "${iconset}-icon_32x32.png"
done
Here are the ones that we see basically every day!
Here are some of the exotic ones that we don’t always notice, in an alphabetical order.
The Burnable folder! Still supported even on macOS Ventura!
The Developer folder! If you don’t know where you should put your code, this is the right place for it!
The Group folder!
The Library!
The Public folder! Want to share something with your local network? Put it here!
The Server Applications Folder! Wait, what? I’ve never seen this before. If you know what this is, please leave a reply 🙂
The Sites folder! If you’re new to macOS, this is a kindly reminder that macOS ships with Apache2. Yes, and ~/Sites is the default UserDir, i.e. http://localhost/~yourusername
$ grep '^UserDir' /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf UserDir Sites
The System folder!
The User folder!
And finally… the Utilities folder which lives inside the Application folder!
As sad as it is, these are the old icons, i.e. pre-Ventura (I think). I wish if there was a way to click on a switch and change it back, since it’s all here anyway!
That’s all folks…
Apple updated macOS’s date(1)!
In 2020 I blogged that
[…] macOS is becoming less Unix-y every year,
date(1)is outdated […]
While I was coding, I thought that I’m (SSH’d to) on my FreeBSD machine but I was on macOS, I noticed that the -I flag suddenly works.
I wondered if Apple has updated the date(1) command in macOS Ventura.
Luckily, I have macOS Monterey at home as well.
Here’s the date(1) command on macOS Monterey
Here it is on macOS Ventura
Ah, so it works!
Did Apple update something? I’m pretty sure it’s mentioned in the history section of the man page.
Here’s the man page of date(1) on macOS Monterey
Wait, what?
What about the man page on macOS Ventura?
Well… Either someone forgot to update the man page on macOS Ventura, or someone forgot to merge the code properly on macOS Monterey
In either cases, I’m happy that Apple noticed the change and pulled the updated code from FreeBSD!
That’s all folks…
Could this be a timezone math issue? No wait, I think it’s just bad written software issue!
Personally, I would prefer if it said “Currently doing XYZ” and ideally if it just printed the output of ^T (SIGINFO) somewhere in the window.
Software Review: #MarsEdit version 5
I haven’t done anything like this before, so please, be gentle 🙂
I first heard of MarsEdit when I was browsing Gruber’s website and I saw it listed in his Essential Apps. At the time I was using Hugo as my “content manager” for my blog, so I moved on. Fast forward a year-or-two, I migrated to WordPress.
A week-or-so ago Gruber blogged about MarsEdit 5.0, so I decided to give it a go.
After 10 days of using it, here is my feedback.
First Impressions
I downloaded the app from Red Sweater Software’s website, at the time I didn’t know that it was also available on the App Store. A simple Zip file which contained the App, I moved it to the application folder and I started it.
Right from the start, it asks you two simple questions: Your blog’s name and the address.
I entered my Armenian blog’s name “Ազատութիւն Ամենեցուն” and address “անդրանիկ.հայ”. As you have noticed, it’s a unicode domain 🙂 This info will be important later.
MarsEdit automatically figured that I’m running WordPress and that it should use the WordPress API!
The interface is nice and intuitive. At first, you will see information about your blog, It’s made of two “parts”
At the top is list of your posts and pages
At the bottom is a live preview of your selected page/post
The live preview doesn’t actually fetch things from your server, instead, you can have a template. Luckily, you can edit the preview settings and download your template. Unfortunately, there was (is?) a bug and MarsEdit was not able to download the template of my blog. First thing that came to my mind “I’m using a unicode domain, that might be the issue!” and turns out I was right. As soon as I added my English blog with its domain (the one that you’re reading right now!) the “Download Template…” button worked like a charm!
The Editor
This is, easily, the best editor I’ve seen for blogging.
You start with selecting your blog (1) and the post type (2), you can give your post a title (3), but turns out that’s not mandatory at all. As you start typing in the input box (4), you will notice the toolbar at the top (5), which has the basic formatting buttons such as Bold, Italic, Underline. There’s “adding a link” and paragraph formatting. For example —
This is a plain paragraph style
This is a quoted paragraph style
And this is a preformatted paragraph style
Depending on your theme, it will look different in preview/website and in the editor.
You can (and should!) also add tags (6), which MarsEdit will autocomplete while typing and select Categories (7). There is also the option to specify a “Featured Image”, I’ve never used this in MarsEdit nor in the WordPress editor, so no comments from me!
Finally, you can specify the server settings (9), such as the status of the post (Published, Draft, etc), Password protection, author (I actually DO run a multi-author blog!), comments and TraceBacks!
But the most impressive feature for me is the ability to save things locally, hence the Edited (10) at the title bar! I’m mostly on the move (well, not these day, it’s cold outside), while I don’t travel a lot, I do have daily work-things, such as going to a government office, a bank, a notary office, etc., which means I’m either commuting or waiting for my turn. While I have a mobile internet with me, we all know how old buildings are not built for the wireless era, so it amazes for me that I can just ⌘S and save my post locally to continue later.
All the local drafts are available in the… Local Drafts 😅
Amazing Niceties
The first nicety that I noticed was in the editor and it’s called “Typewriter Scrolling”. It does exactly what it says. The input box’s cursor will always be at the middle of the editor.
The second nicety is that everything is customizable, and I mean everything! For example, I blog a lot with coding samples, so I need a code tag. All I had to do was to go to Format → Customize… and I was able to create a new HTML tag for my code formatted text. Like this:uname -a
And the final nicety that I noticed was the editor’s integration with TimeMachine-style restore points. I wish if every software had a feature like this!
Common (Personal?) Issues
I wasn’t planning on writing this review, at all, but since I wanted to try out MarsEdit before purchasing it, I wanted to use it intensively. In the last two weeks we had a Capture The Flag hacking competition and an Armenian InfoSec conference, so I blogged every details of these two events using MarsEdit. Actually, I was an organizer of the CTF competition, so I used MarsEdit to blog about everything from server installation, platform setup to “the food is here!” status updates 😄
That’s where I had my first issue! I set the Paragraph Style to Preformatted and I pasted some code, here’s how it looked like, if the code was multi-line;
It took me a while to realize, that I had to 1) set the Paragraph Style to Preformatted 2) Paste the code by doing Edit → Paste HTML Source. I’m not sure if this is an issue with my theme or not, but in case you get a similar issue, that’s how to solve it! Now, the code looks perfect 😇
The only other issue that I had was with the microposting feature, which is new in MarsEdit 5. It looks like a “status update” on Twitter or Mastodon.
When I first used this on MarsEdit 5, MarsEdit crashed. So finally, I’d like to talk about how
Daniel Jalkut is Amazing!
Like I said, I used MarsEdit 5 as soon as it came out, and the “New Micropost” feature crashed every time. Just 6 days after its initial release, Daniel released MarsEdit 5.0.1 which fixes the Micropost issue that I was having.
Finally, I send an email to Daniel saying
Greetings Daniel! how are you?
Looks like that MarsEdit is not crashing after upgrading to Version 5.0.1 (10611), however, a small question (feature request?):
In MarsEdit -> File -> New Post, I can set the Kind (Post Format) to Post, Aside, Status, etc.
I was wondering if there was a built-in way to make sure that my micro-posts are always set to Status? Microposts with no title look silly on WordPress, but in Status mode they look like a twitter/social-media status update!
I was wondering if I can implement that by using the Custom Fields tab in Blog Preferences.
Let me know!
Daniel replied to me just an hour later saying
Hi Antranig – this is a great idea and I’ll try to get it added as a preference ASAP. I’ll let you know when I have it in there!
Daniel
Conclusion
MarsEdit 5 is amazing. Currently it costs $59.95 for a Single User license and $89.95 for a Family Pack license (5 people in a private household), and let me tell you, it’s totally worth it!
MarsEdit 5 is my Christmas gift to myself.
If you are also a blogger who uses one of the platforms that MarsEdit supports (WordPress, Micro.blog, Tumblr, TypePad, Movable Type, and any blog that supports a standard MetaWeblog or AtomPub interface) and don’t want to open your browser every time an idea comes to your mind, then MarsEdit is for you.
P.S. WordPress’s Block Editor is also amazing. The WordPress team has done an amazing work with Gutenberg. And while I’ll be using MarsEdit for my personal blogs while writing from my Mac, Gutenberg has been amazing with my other WordPress blogs while writing from my FreeBSD laptop! Give that a try too! 😉
FreeBSD arm64.aarch64 on QEMU/UTM with better (but not perfect) graphics
A week ago I posted about Running arm64.aarch64 FreeBSD on QEMU/UTM.app on Apple Silicon, and looks like
- Many people liked that post
- Everyone asked about running graphics (Xorg)
It took me a while but in the end it was, again, a simple change.
All you have to do is to add this single line to /boot/loader.conf
efi_max_resolution="1920x1080"Now, QEMU’s display will not be 1080p, but it will be the following
VT(efifb): resolution 1024x768Here are some screenshots
Here’s also Firefox doing an HTML5 test. As you can see, it passed the exam!
However, I’d like to get more resolution out of this. If you know how, please let me know.
That’s all folks…