Ah, just as I post my method of creating a shortcut with an icon of my choice on the iPhone home screen - which I demonstrated with Firefox - along comes a browser that allows a choice of icons out-of-the-box!

Here’s how I “changed” an app’s home screen icon on iPhone. I’m so OCD that I want my home screen dock icons (the tray at the bottom) to be all of the same colour! Actually, changing an icon is not possible, but creating a new shortcut with an icon of my choice is!

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!

For me, Microsoft PowerShell is hard! I can’t wrap my mind around data pipelines (|). Instead, I keep reverting to if/then, loops and other traditional programming paradigms, similar to what I’d do in UNIX shell!

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.

I previously kept Grab.app on Mojave 10.14 by simply copying it over from High Sierra 10.13. I prefer the simplicity of Grab over the new Screenshot.app, and I hate that Screenshot adds a drop shadow.

Every time Apple releases a new version of macOS, I have to go in and re-configure Apache with PHP the way I want it. So this time, I thought I’d automate the configuration changes with a single command.

I was building a single page website using Bulma, and I wanted to achieve effects similar to what I was familiar with using Bootstrap’s Creative one page theme. As you know, Bulma (mostly) does not provide any JavaScript code, so I had to code the Smooth Scrolling and Scroll Spy features I missed. I intentionally avoided jQuery! So I present my solution using plain-old JavaScript.

I previously played around with MongoDB in a few containers. Recently, I tried IBM Db2 Community Edition and learnt a few new things about containers along the way. The challenge was rolling my own Db2 Data Server Manager container, working around the background process that the startup script kicks off.

I really don’t know how to explain today’s post. In short: I want to copy drawings and images out of Microsoft Office in PNG format. On macOS, copy-and-paste seems to prefer the TIFF format, resulting in large Office files. I’d rather the images be converted to PNG, preserving transparency but providing high compression. However, this is more complicated than it seems, because of limitations in Office and PowerPoint in particular...

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.

In a previous series of posts, I described how I set up Node.js in a Docker container for development on my macBook. It’s quite a lot of steps!

Well, there is a much simpler way - introducing Appsody.

Starting with Windows 10 May 2019 update, there is a new Windows Sandbox feature, which, despite its name, is based on Windows Containers.

This isn’t a food blog, but I can’t help myself. Just last week, I had The Impossible™ Burger (emphasis on The)!

Most Mac users would use at least a few keyboard shortcuts (if not, check out Apple’s Mac Keyboard Shortcuts list), but here are a few additional key combinations that I find useful. These are less well-known and many are not in Apple’s list.

A few posts ago, I described how to set Dark Mode with the prefs-color-scheme Media Query. The browser will detect the OS Dark Mode setting (set in the Windows Control Panel or macOS System Preferences) and use the appropriate CSS Media Query rule. But what if you want to programmatically set either Dark or Light mode irrespective of the OS setting?

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.

Dark Mode is all the rage with desktop and mobile OS’es right now. Interestingly, modern browsers can detect the OS dark mode preference, and use a different set of CSS styles respectively for light or dark modes! Here’s how I updated My custom Grav theme.

I recently wanted to test a web app written in Node.js and exposed via fixed port. The instructions asked me to install Node.js locally, which I resist! So, here is how I built my Docker container to run the code.