I don’t know if this is a glitch in my system — I see it in a couple of machines, though both have the same config — but under macOS Catalina, Finder has an annoying habit of ignoring the size of windows. Pop up a new Finder window and it’s just a small quarter-of-screen panel at the top left of the desktop, not the much larger panel that the most recently closed window was.
Continue readingTag Archives: Mac OS X
MNU 1.2.2 released
Download and release notes for this handy macOS menu bar utility here.
Give macOS’ Terminal a better ‘ls’
Anyone who uses Terminal will run the ls command to get a listing of files and directories. It’s built in to macOS’ BSD Unix foundation layer. It has one key limitation for me: it has no option to list directories before listing files. Read on to learn how to deal with this issue.
How to quickly package macOS apps for distribution outside the App Store
Preparing a macOS app for distribution through the App Store is fairly easy using Xcode, but to do so for apps that you plan to distribute as a binary by other means — as a download from your own website, for example — isn’t straightforward, and it has got more complicated over recent macOS releases.
Make a Mac ‘Task Done’ NeoPixel notification light
Update There’s now a new post containing revised, working instructions for this project.
Note This article was written some time ago, and the libraries used do not work with recent versions of macOS.
I regularly back-up my Raspberry Pi storage card because it’s so easy to damage the card with an improper shutdown or some such. I back up to a Mac, and you can read how I do it here. This wasn’t much of a chore in the early days when I was working with 4GB cards, but now I use 16GB Micro SDs and I know of folks who have much, much larger storage capacities thanks to never-cheaper cards. All this means the back-up takes a long time. So I wondered if I could create a gadget to tell me the task was done, allowing me to get on with other jobs in the meantime.
Continue readingBack-up a Raspberry Pi SD card using a Mac
I’ve re-installed my Pi’s SD card storage more times than I care to recall. New cards, programming glitches, messing with Linux’s settings files – all of these reasons have forced me to go through the process of re-flashing the Pi’s storage card. That’s bad enough – what’s worse is having to re-download the applications I’d added since the previous install, applying updates and choosing again all of my system preferences.
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