A short 2-in-1 post of two things I’ve been meaning to try out on macOS - first, to try the new macOS Container framework on macOS 15.5... and second, to spin up Kokoro Text-to-Speech (TTS) in a container.

I have been using UTM on M1/M2 macs for all my virtualization needs for a while, but never posted much because it practically works out of the box. Since around October 2022, UTM v4.0.9 on macOS Ventura allows Apple Hypervisor Virtualization Virtual Machines to use Rosetta 2.

Almost a year ago, Tencent researchers released their GFPGAN Face Restoration, an AI model which is trained specifically on faces, to better upscale and restore details in low-resolution or damaged portrait photos. I thought I’d give it a whirl.

Did you know it is possible to run x86_64 Docker containers on an ARM-based M1 mac? It’s quite staightforward with Multipass and Docker (if you are new to Multipass, check out my Multipass for Docker containers on macOS post from a few months ago).

I previously setup Lima as a replacement for Docker Desktop on macOS. A while ago I tried Multipass by Canonical, which makes it really easy to spin up a Ubuntu VM (using Hyperkit) without all the setup and installation typically required with Virtual Box or QEMU.

Today’s post will be a long one - recently, Docker announced some changes to the Docker Desktop license, so I figured I’d check out the Lima for macOS instead. As always, I end up complicating things by doing everything my way...

Here is how I configure Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). I do things a bit strangely: by changing the mounts, by running a GUI Desktop, and by running Docker in WSL2 and not on the Host...

When I first used Grav, “a modern open source flat-file CMS,” to host this site, I setup a local development environment using macOS’s built-in Apache and PHP. But this is getting harder with each macOS release, so it’s time to use a Docker container instead.

In the Windows 10 Start Menu, I used Pin To Start to a medium sized tile for Firefox - and the icon is nice and large - but is not the case for other shortcuts. I was wondered why... and how to make all the icons have a more consistent look.

There are multiple ways to run Linux GUI applications in a Docker container, but today I’ll highlight a method that I found interesting: using Xpra to forward X11 screens from containers to a web browser. This post is based on Eugene Yaremenko’s docker-x11-bridge, which I simplified.

I’ve been putting of this post for too long. I use Bulma as the CSS framework for this site. I previously used Bulma Customizer to customize some settings but this does not seem to work anymore. So here is how to customize Bulma CSS yourself.

Here is how to create a Docker container on macOS to “compile” Sass stylesheets to CSS. In my case, I wanted to (re)compile my Bulma-based theme with the latest version 0.9.0 with my variable overrides.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 Docker container 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!