It's the last day of 2016... Time for a bit of nostalgia! Over the years, I posted bits and pieces on Blogger, myByways.net (Microsoft), Google Pages and others. For posterity, I've transferred selected information about a HP notebook and desktop I used to have, but I doubt any of this information is relevant any more.

Want to extract files from a macOS installer package with a .pkg extension?

Wine 1.9.22 development (dated Oct 28, 2016) has been released! See the release notes for changes. Alas, I encountered errors trying to compile it "on top" of the Wine 1.9.21 installation, following the steps from my post Compiling Wine from scratch. I spent a whole day searching for the problem, and resolved it as below.

So a couple of days ago, I documented how I compiled Wine 1.9.21 with Retina Mode from scratch on macOS Sierra. After that I though I might as well figure out how to bundle all these files into a .app bundle, which Finder presents as if it were a single file.

I have been using WineBottler to run my favorite Windows applications in macOS. Here, I describe how I compiled Wine from scratch and configure for my MacBook Pro's Retina Display.

Here is my list of free, macOS apps that I have installed and use often. Many are also open source! When I first got my Mac I searched the internet for lists of useful apps but found most outdated. I decided to compile this list as part of a cleanup and "audit" of what's useful IMHO.

Recently I realized that the latest macOS Sierra 10.12 upgrade also updated Apache and PHP to newer revisions (2.4.23 and 5.6.24 respectively), but reverted to the default configurations. My previous post on Enabling Apache and PHP on OS X 10.11 needed a slight change too.

My Time Machine backups have started to take longer and longer to process and complete. I realized that excluding folders containing temporary, frequently changing and large files would quite dramatically speed it up.

I've been a long time iOS 1Password user, but recently started looking at alternatives. I discovered KeePass, KeeWeb and MiniKeePass, all open source.

I recently discovered an alternative to remote control my Windows 7/10 desktop PC, instead of using Microsoft Remote Desktop. This method requires a computer with a modern NVIDIA graphics card with GameStream and works with iOS and macOS using a client called Moonlight!

Safari 10 on macOS Sierra has a useful Picture-in-Picture (PiP) feature to playback HTML5 videos in a small "always-on-top" window, just like on iPads with iOS 9+. To activate, just right-click a playing video and select Enter Picture-in-Picture. However, not all web videos seem to allow this, as they pop up their own menus without the PiP option. Here are two ways to try to enable PiP.

I've updated my MacBook to macOS Sierra, and it's rather underwhelming and half-hearted IMHO. And yes, dear eagle-eyed reader, Apple capitalizes the Mac in MacBook but not the Mac in macOS - what a confusing naming (lack-of-)convention. Still, macOS is a better name than OS X (can you say OS 10 10.X instead?)

I've stumbled on another "feature" that iOS 10 has mangled - Spotlight Suggestions in Look up. What does this double speak even mean? Worse, I can't even get rid of "Look Up" and revert my beloved "Define".

The Magnifier seems like it'd be useful. Here's how to setup the Home button Triple-click with multiple Accessibility Shortcuts and to avoid physically triple-clicking the Home button with the AssistiveTouch floating Home button.

I have updated to iOS 10, and so far, I'm really not impressed, since it brings so few features that I care about that work on my iPhone 6 and in my region.

On my Mac, by default, the keyboard cannot be used to navigate and trigger dialog box buttons. To “fix” this shortcoming - enable Full Keyboard Access to use the tab key to navigate controls! But beware of downsides too...

I was recently at an office using a Ricoh Aficio multi-function printer. I downloaded the PPD Installer version 2.2.0.0 (dated 17/09/2014) for OS X 10.11 from the Ricoh Aficio MP 2510/3010/2590/3090 driver page. But no matter what I tried, the printer either could not be found or would print blank or garbled pages...

I just updated Grav to 1.1.1!

I wanted a simple stock portfolio monitoring tool. I failed to find a simple and free app, but happily discovered that Google Sheets does what I need perfectly!

About a month ago, I discovered Apple had imposed new limitations on the free Apple Developer account. This limits the period that an app can run on your phone to 7 days (due to Provisioning Profiles) and the number of changes you can make to the project (not the source code, but Capabilities like App Groups).