I recently encountered a situation where Safari would not play background videos in web pages! I initially assumed the page was broken... until I realized mine was the only iPhone with this behaviour, yet I am on the latest iPhone and iOS version. I finally figured what was different with my setup, and how to solve this issue.

As promised in my last post, today I am testing out Thibaud Zamora’s SDXL-controlnet: OpenPose (v2) model using ComfyUI. I keep saying I’ll keep my posts short but never do...

Recently I tried Fooocus by Lyumin Zhang (Illyasviel) which fulfills its promise to allow one to “Focus on prompting and generating” - it is certainly easy to use! But shortly after its release, someone has “ported” the code to ComfyUI as a Custom Node! So of course it’s time to test it out...

A short post about setting up a mouse on macOS to mimic trackpad gestures.

In my previous post, I managed to get Whisky, with Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit, working on macOS Ventura without Homebrew. Here I manage to get Steam running after jumping through hoops.

Did you know the macOS Printer service (Common UNIX Printing System, or CUPS) keeps a copy of every single print job ever? Here’s how to change this default behaviour.

Did you know it is possible to run x86_64 Docker containers on an ARM-based M1 mac? It’s quite staightforward with Multipass and Docker (if you are new to Multipass, check out my Multipass for Docker containers on macOS post from a few months ago).

In my last post, “Re-mapping physical function keys on MacBook Pros” I used the hidutil tool to re-map the function keys on a Mac without a touchbar. I’ve since created a script to more easily apply changes.

One common ask from M1 (Apple Silicon / ARM) MacBook Pro users is to be able to re-define what the top row of physical function keys do, for example, to change the Dictation (F5) key to decrease the keyboard backlight brightness and DND (F6) to increase it, similar to other Macs. Here’s how to do that... and more!

There are a couple of things I don’t like with the feeds produced by the standard Grav Syndication Feed Plugin. Fortunately, the feeds are generated via Twig templates that can easily be customized!

While waiting for macOS Universal Control, I wanted to try AirPlay Receiver. Unfortunately, it is not supported (“locked”) on my older macBook. But recently I stumbled upon Mr. Macintosh’s “Airplay BLOCKED on Monterey? How to unlock it!” video on YouTube!

Recently a number of emails sent from one of our domains was getting tagged as spam by the receipent. Here are some things I learnt trying to fix this problem...

I suddenly experienced a strange issue today - the row of number keys on my 1stPlayer DK 5.0 Lite mechanical keyboard, i.e. the keys from 2 to 9, would output the wrong number! Specifically, hitting all numeric keys in order would output 1678923450 instead of 1234567890. This happened while gaming and I have no idea what caused it.

I found that Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.1 was running very slowly on my brand new Windows 10 PC.

Initially I thought it was to do with VirtualBox, e.g. insufficient cores or memory, the display controller (VBoxSVGA), insufficient video memory, etc. And then I thought it might be an AMD thing, so had a look at BIOS, e.g. nested AMD-V, etc.

The Apache and PHP bundled with macOS Catalina 10.15 does not include the PHP ZIP extension. Grav (specifically, the Problems Plugin) detects this issue, and Grav will not run! Here is a workaround.

I recently installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) (dated 23 April 2020), with the intention of creating a VM using VirtualBox 6.0.22 (released 15 May 2020). I had issues with VirtualBox guest additions, and this is how I solved it.

On my MacBook Pro with retina display, when I take a screenshot, the image is saved with a DPI of 144. But, using ImageOptim to compress the image with Strip JPEG/PNG Metadata enabled will remove (or reset) the DPI setting to 72 DPI - resulting in a double sized image when displayed in Preview and Quick Look. Here is how I correct this.

Grrr, to no one’s surprise, my MacBook Pro with butterfly keyboard is experiencing keyboard issues. In my case, a keypress on “j” is often triggered twice, resulting in “jj”. And with the lockdowns, I don’t want to risk a repair! So, here is a quick workaround using Karabiner-Elements v12.9.0.

While testing out Grav, it’s quite easy to setup a local instance on a macOS computer, since macOS already comes with a suitable web server (Apache 2.4.x and PHP 7.x). I never realized I didn’t actually describe how I set it up, but just wanted to point out one important change.

I just spent hours trying to figure out and fix a Windows 10 machine that was taking 100% disk, 100% RAM and about 50% CPU with absolutely nothing running. Of course, I initially blamed the user... then, a misbehaving (hidden, background) app... then, malware / virus... the, a runaway Windows Defender... then, a hard disk / hardware failure... but ultimately discovering the culprit is - drum roll - Microsoft Windows itself! As usual!