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-shemeMedia 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.

I re-designed my blog template using a new CSS framework called Bluma, re-developed all JavaScript without jQuery and customized some plugins. This was quite a journey, so this post is going to be quite long too!

If you've had fun with Docker containers, I now introduce you to Kubernetes and wish you the best of luck. I'm still learning myself! I decided to install IBM Cloud Private Community Edition following the Installation guide at IBM's Knowledge Center.

If the preceding posts on Node.js and MongoDB have been too complex for you, let me introduce you to a simpler drag-and-drop “flow-editor,” Node-RED.. It was developed and open-sourced by IBM, and is now hosted by the OpenJS Foundation (the same foundation that hosts projects like jQuery, and Dojo). I’ve used Node-RED for quick prototypes and demos, as it’s easy to explain each step of the flow. It saves a lot of coding effort and reduces errors buy providing built-in and pre-built third-party “nodes”.

Previously, I described my development environment setup using Docker containers. I do it in a totally different way from most tutorials, which I don’t believe leverage containers and complicate things by having to build images for development.

Here I explain how I wire up (i.e. network) a few containers - a MongoDB database, a Mongo Express User Interface to manage the database, and a Node.js container using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to authenticate users against the database.

In this post I share with you how I set up a simple Dockercontainer for Node.js development. I’ve never found a simple tutorial for beginners that meets my needs!

My requirement is to do all development debugging in a container, so I am assured of consistent behaviour in any environment. I do not want to install Node.js or npm locally on my mac! I cannot be bothered to use a Makefile or Dockerfile to build images - this is only required in the final stage for production!

I’m usually quite pedantic when it comes to minimizing code and optimizing web page performance. I was a bit surprised to find that this blog’s page speed was far from ideal! Google PageSpeed Insights returned a very low score for this blog. Back when I started this blow, I must’ve neglected optimization, as I was too busy learning Grav, modifying my template, etc.

If, like me, you use Parallels Desktop Lite, then I have bad news for you. It's no longer free to run macOS or Linux, so DON'T update it if you still want to use it!

Want to remove macOS services (a.k.a. daemons)?

Recently, I posted about my Karabiner-ElementsComplex Modification Rule to map a key to Escape. Here, I make a small tweak to use it to launch an application too!

Today I tried to copy files and folders off a USB hard disk (NTFS formatted) on my Windows 7 desktop. I encountered multiple files with permission problems. The manual method to change permissions is very tedious, so I created a script (DOS batch file) to do the same.

As in my previous guides for enabling Apache and PHP on Sierra 10.12 and El Capitan 10.11 before that, this post will update the instructions for macOS Mojave 10.14.2 which comes with Apache 2.4.34 and PHP 7.1.19.

So you miss the physical Escape key on your brand new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar? Here's my fix to re-map a seldom used key to Escape.

I know this is very late, but I wanted to post two things I noticed with macOS Mojave regarding the new Screenshot.App tool and Dark Mode.