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.

I sometimes test randomly downloaded code on macOS in a Sandbox that has limited and network access. I posted about this way back in Jan 2017, Creating a macOS Sandbox to run Kodi, and this is a short refresher for me...

When I export photos or videos from Photos.app, I want the file’s Created Date (Created Date in Finder) to be the time the photo or video was taken. Alas, this is not the way Photos works, and setting the date turned out to be more challenging than expected.

A short one today: here is a function to “delete” (read: move) a file to the macOS Trash (Bin), as a safer alternative to rm.

Did you know that macOS has a built-in game performance HUD with a frames per second (FPS) counter, similar using RivaTuner Statistics Server (RTSS) to display a GPU performance overlay in Windows? Here’s how to enable the Metal Performance HUD.

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!

I previously setup Lima as a replacement for Docker Desktop on macOS. A while ago I tried Multipass by Canonical, which makes it really easy to spin up a Ubuntu VM (using Hyperkit) without all the setup and installation typically required with Virtual Box or QEMU.

I stumbled upon a post entitled “Piping stdout and stderr to Preview” by Erica Sadun - the cool bit that caught my attention was about redirecting man pages (UNIX help) to Preview on macOS. But this got me thinking... to redirect the output to Visual Studio Code instead!

I have a plethora of Bash scripts littered throughout my filesystem, many written for one specific purpose and promptly forgotten about (often, just named go.sh!) I thought I share one today - a script to extract embedded ZIP files from Microsoft Office documents created in Windows.

I setup Firefox on macOS to automatically download files to my “Downloads” folder without prompting (under Preferences... > Downloads, and select Save files to... instead of Always ask you where to save files). If there is an existing file with the same name, Firefox appends (1) to the filename (then (2), (3) and so on). Over time, I land up with files with similar file names, which may or may not be identical. This shell script finds and moves duplicate files to a different folder... for subsequent manual deletion.

I recently wanted to migrate from a Bash 3 shell script to Python 3. This is nothing but a brain dump comparing a few bits and bobs.

In the Windows 10 Start Menu, I used Pin To Start to a medium sized tile for Firefox - and the icon is nice and large - but is not the case for other shortcuts. I was wondered why... and how to make all the icons have a more consistent look.

From macOS Catalina 10.5 onwards, zsh is the default shell, instead of bash. I have a lot to learn about this shell, and so far, this is how I configured zsh... There is an overload of snippets on-line, but I’ve not seen a post doing what I do, so hopefully this helps someone!

I recently had a bunch of screen shots that I wanted to OCR, so that I could search for text content in the future. I found an open source solution called OCRmyPDF (created by jbarlow83 over on GitHub) to be very simple to use. It’s also very well documented with many usage examples, including my preferred option - from a Docker container.

Just sharing some Automator scripts I use for Touch Bar Quick Actions showcasing three different methods - using pre-defined Actions, using AppleScripts and using Shell scripts.

Here’s are a few short tips - to toggle Dark Mode on macOS without opening System Preferences. Useful when designing your Dark Mode enabled web site using prefers-color-sheme Media Query, like I did.

For a while now, I’ve been posting about compiling Wine on macOS, starting with Wine 1.9 in October 2016, then automating the compile for Wine 2.9 32-bit in May 2017. Now it’s July 2019, and this is probably my last post on the subject - a fully automated script to download and compile Wine 4.12.1 (released 7 July 2019) 32-bit and 64-bit on macOS.

I sometimes need to search a huge CSV file (13 MB), containing 21,000 rows and roundabout 40 columns, which Numbers takes half a minute to open. All I need to do is search and display the results of a few columns only... so I wrote a bash script to do this for me - and I was quite specific in that I wanted the results in color!

I got a new 2 TB external disk - "yay" - and wanted to use it for both on my Windows desktop and for Time Machine backups. Immediately thought to format it as exFAT but quickly came to realize Time Machine does not support exFAT! Fortunately, there is a workaround...