shards mvr

  • strange: when adding a link to an (Apple) Notes document: if the URL has a comma, everything up to the comma is silently stripped (permanently; editing the URL afterward, is too late) - one solution is to encode commas (the first time) as %2C

  • $14 / month - and you better believe you’re still the product 🤮
    arstechnica.com/tech-poli…

  • got my first pension check; nice. retiring, is the best (work-related) decision I ever made - LOVING it.
    (BTW: kudos to Cox Auto, for continuing to offer a pension.)

  • reminder:
    that thing you opened you phone/computer for - to be immediately distracted by other notifications? do the first thing FIRST - those notifications will still be there.
    (otherwise, you’ll likely forget the first - likely more important - thing.)

  • Uninstall is sometimes not so simple

    Drat; I’ve been meaning to try the Smile AppleScript editor, but waited too long, and it’s incompatible with modern macOS - HOWEVER:

    I trashed the /Applications/Smile directory (no uninstaller in there), and then re-opened Script Editor to get back to work - but it hung; never completed startup and showed no error messages. Strange.

    After a bit of debugging, I recalled that when I’d installed Smile - since I luckily already had Apple’s built-in Script Editor app open - the Installer told me it had to quit that first. Interesting - and seemed maybe relevant now.

    So I started hunting for evidence of just what had been installed - likely something conflicting with Script Editor (at least).

    /var/log/install.log did have some info, and so did /private/var/db/receipts - which led to the solution (in my case anyway), which was also deleting these directories:

    /Library/Application Support/Smile
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/FITS.osax
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Numerics.osax
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Satimage.osax
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/XMLLib.osax

    After which, Script Editor was able to finish startup - and even showed the unsaved script that I’d been working on. Nice.

  • ugh: in a dir within iCloud Drive, replacing a regular file, with a symlink of the same name, apparently breaks sync’ing 😟 - and good luck trying to find that via brctl log -w. (only reason I knew it broke: a periodic check of sync status)

  • oh; weird: if you happen to have /tmp open in a Finder window, brew install wget fails with dir_s_rmdir - apparently due to a “.DS_Store” file, a few levels below /tmp

  • Google - the company whose motto WAS “Don’t be Evil”: arstechnica.com

  • Apple Savings: % ain’t bad & it looks like xfer between a linked external account, is much more pleasant (fee-free) than with most others: www.apple.com/newsroom/…

  • are you in the cloud majority? twitter.com/Grady_Boo…

  • macOS Login Items, and other "Allow in Background"

    There are lots of Login Items and other “Allow in Background” items in macOS these days (especially if the Mac is managed…) so it can be useful to get a list of them all - especially when names shown in the GUI, are not clear. The dumpbtm tool is verbose - though generally all you need is this abbreviated list:

    sfltool dumpbtm | grep -E '^([[:blank:]]{0,1}[^[:blank:]]|[[:blank:]]*(Name|URL):)'

  • how to convert macOS clipboard RTF (ex: from Notes.app), to Markdown? this’ll get you 95% of the way there: osascript -e 'the clipboard as «class RTF »' | tr -d '«»' | sed 's/^data RTF //' | xxd -r -p | /usr/local/bin/pandoc -f rtf -t markdown

  • the new legit slacking excuse - and not just for programmers!

    with thanks / apologies to the amazing Randall Munroe - his original: xkcd.com/303

  • How strange: On one Mac I use, when I paste (cmd-V) into the filename field (has focus) in a Save dialog, it suddenly jumps to the Documents folder. On another Mac, it simply pastes, leaving the folder as-is. It apparently does this jump, on any keyboard equivalent (ex: cmd-A).

  • The macOS Weather app can notify for severe weather - it’s Settings window, directed me to Settings > Notifications – but Weather was mising. I stumbled on a solution: Open Notification Center & open Weather from there - it immediately prompted to enable. (C’mon Apple :/ .)

  • I started a Note, with lists of of word / term associations - which make sense to me. Since Spotlight indexes Notes.app, the results come up in that context with everything else, so it’s already started to help me find things more quickly. Might try to integrate with Quicksilver…

  • How strange: I just got a “Magic Keyboard” for my M1 MacBook Air - and its Globe key works (to show Character Viewer) – only when not in clamshell mode. It works in either mode, for other things like Dictation.

  • Apparently it's time for M1 users, to migrate their Homebrew config. Like right now.

    Drat; that was an unpleasant surprise:

    For some reason, when I tried brew upgrade today, the response was: Cannot install in Homebrew on ARM processor in Intel default prefix.

    Weird; it’s been working fine, via Terminal in Rosetta, on my M1, for quite some time. Last I saw, that was required, on Apple Silicon.

    I don’t see any warning logged from past “brew update” runs. And I couldn’t find any announcement or release note, that Homebrew is now ready for prime-time on M1 - but apparently someone felt it necessary to force the issue. :/

    So, since I depend on brew and several tools installed that way - including some automation - I dropped what I was supposed to be doing, to sort this out. Here’s what it took for me:

    1. Run brew bundle dump - this will create a Brewfile in the current directory.
    2. May or may not be necessary: Quit & relaunch Terminal, without Rosetta.
    3. Install Homebrew - let it go to the new dir, /opt/homebrew/ - AKA ${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}.
    4. Run brew dump - which uses the previously-created Brewfile, to (hopefully) install what you were using (as much as it can) in it’s new structure, in ${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}.
    5. As long as this succeeded, delete / archive the Brewfile. If not, debug…
    6. If you haven’t personalized $PATH etc.: Follow the directions (in the output above) for updating that.
    7. If you have (personalized $PATH etc.): Update that to also include ${HOMEBREW_PREFIX} (using the ouput as a guide) - note that there are some new environment vairables here, to consider adding to your shell’s config. You’ll likely want to make sure the new dir is before the old one (so any tools not yet updated are still accessible - and new tools take precedence over the now stranded ones).
    8. Update any needed configs that live in /usr/local (ex: for clamav), into the correct place in the new ${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}.
    9. Now find wherever you might have references to brew tools, which are hard-coded for /usr/local, and update instead, to ${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}. Suggestions of places to look: /etc/crontab, user-specific crontabs (ex: crontab -l), LaunchItems and such. And scripts that might be hard-coded for /usr/local. (Yes; hard-coding is “bad” - and sometimes useful to, for example, be sure to use the tool installed via brew, vs. a built-in tool by the same name.)
    10. Repeat on any other systems you need to.
    11. Set a reminder to clean out the stuff in /usr/local, once it’s no longer needed. (It might be sufficient to which each tool, and confirm when they’re all found in ${HOMEBREW_PREFIX} vs. the old /usr/local.)

    Whew! That seemed a bit more difficult than necessary - especially since it was (as far as I could tell) forced without warning.

  • did we really need more evidence that Elon is a terrible human being? really?? “demanding workers show up for at least 40 hours a week in the office or find another employer”
    www.ft.com/content/f…

  • Leah Elliot’s remix of Scott McCloud’s 2008 discussion of Google Chrome - should be required reading for anyone using it. And the rest of us, too.
    “What are you going to do about it?” contrachrome.com/comic/pag…

  • Wow; the new Spatial Audio feature (AirPods) is cool - though rather disorienting in some situations; here’s how to control it: support.apple.com/guide/air…

  • Oh for the love of… Zoom on Mac may be recording you even when you’re not using it. How many “oops” does one org get?!

  • Poor form, folks - from the Ladders Privacy Policy

    Our Services do not respond to Do Not Track signals.

    Sure; thanks for being honest - even better, to actually show some respect.

  • brava, gail.com - well done indeed

  • of course it is ;)

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