Some time ago, I explained how I setup “Global hotkeys for macOS with skhd”. I mentioned running it automatically upon login via the macOS Launch Daemon but did not detail the steps. So here they are...

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.

I was recently researching external storage for my Mac, looking for the “fastest” and most “reliable”. There are so many options, and of course, so many different price points! It’s all very confusing: NGFF M.2? NVMe M.2? USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5 Mbps)? USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps)? USB 3.1 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps)? Thunderbolt 3? Thunderbolt 4? USB 4.0?

Recently (around 14 December 2022), Apple’s Machine Learning Research team published “Stable Diffusion with Core ML on Apple Silicon” with Python and Swift source code optimized for Apple Silicon (M1/M2) on Github apple/ml-stable-diffusion. Here I’m trying it out on a MacBook (though the code also works on iPhones and iPads)...

Did you know the macOS Printer service (Common UNIX Printing System, or CUPS) keeps a copy of every single print job ever? Here’s how to change this default behaviour.

Following from my previous post, AI-generated images with Stable Diffusion on an M1 mac: This time, using the image-to-image script, which takes an input “seed” image, in addition to the text prompt as inputs. In this case the model will use the shapes and colors in the input image as a base for the output AI-generated image.

There has been a lot of buzz about Stable Diffusion for text-to-image synthesis, which saw its Public Release around 22 Aug 22. You can read more on the Stability.AI blog and try it at Hugging Face. What’s groundbreaking is is that is open source, with a pre-trained downloadable model and modest system requirements, so anyone can try it on their own computer... anyone... like me!

Here is a macOS Automator script to watermark a PDF, and also set metadata like author and title. Followed by a more advanced script to do all that an also set an owner password and access permissions... auto-magically.

Something totally different today... As an AFOL, I created a simple Lego MOC, combining 70821 “Emmet and Benny’s ‘Build and Fix’ Workshop!” and 70841 “Benny’s Space Squad”.

I’m never quite satisfied with the various methods of creating keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys) on macOS... Here I go again, this time using a small open source utility called skhd - a simple hotkey daemon for macOS.

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.

It’s been over a year (or two) since three major browsers enabled HTTP/3 using the QUIC protocol over UDP. Chrome and Edge enabled HTTP/3 by default in April 2020 and Firefox followed “shortly after” in April 2021. I am not sure - does Safari in macOS Monterey 12.5, released July 2022, enable HTTP/3 by default?

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’ve known that it is possible to create snippets in Visual Studio Code. Recently, I discovered a few tweaks to help me when taking notes. Here, I share a snippet for inserting the date and time in the format of my choosing in a Markdown note.

I’ve not posted anything in a long time, so I thought I’d dig up something from a long time ago. Once boring day, many moons ago, I stumbled upon a simple console-based Solitaire game, tty-solitaire by Murilo Pereira.

Ever wonder how to create a custom theme for both fonts and colours (a.k.a. designs) in PowerPoint on macOS? In PowerPoint for Windows, is a GUI to do this, but this is lacking in the macOS version. However, it is still possible via custom XML configuration files.

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.

I accidentally added an incorrectly spelt word to the macOS spelling dictionary via an Add to Dictionary menu item. Surprisingly, there was no inverse “remove from dictionary” option to undo this! Additionally, I realized there is no System Preferences page to to edit the custom dictionary. There are two ways to fix this with macOS (but none for iOS).

I was not satisfied with my last macOS Shortcut to convert image format and paste. The simple version forced me to choose between PNG and JPEG, and the complex version was too slow - specifically, the Find All Windows action. So here we go again...

I recently wanted to convert an Windows Enhanced Metafile (EMF) to SVG. I used an open source conversion library called libemf2svg by Carpentier Pierre-Francois (Kakwa).