Creating Windows and macOS VMs
Just a bunch of un-related findings that may help when creating Windows and macOS VMs using VirtualBox.
learnings
Just a bunch of un-related findings that may help when creating Windows and macOS VMs using VirtualBox.
On my new Windows 10 desktop I wanted an on-screen display (OSD) of system performance overlay while gaming - similar those benchmarking videos one finds on YouTube. While I don’t overclock my CPU or GPU, I still do want to know the utilization and temperatures, as these give me a hint as to whether the system is thermal throttled or bottlenecked.
Here is a quick iOS Shortcut to join Cisco WebEx personal rooms by email name. In my organization, once logged in to Cisco WebEx, we can join a colleague’s personal meeting room just by his or her email name. Here is a shortcut to either:
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.
Wondering how to download a video from YouTube, with audio and subtitles intact? Here are a couple of methods I’m documenting in case I ever need to use them.
From macOS Catalina 10.5 onwards, zsh
is the default shell, instead of bash
. I have a lot to learn about this shell, and so far, this is how I configured zsh... There is an overload of snippets on-line, but I’ve not seen a post doing what I do, so hopefully this helps someone!
I recently needed to setup a Kubernetes cluster without an external DNS and without Internet access. In the old days, static IPs could be mapped to FQDNs by creating entries in the hosts
file, but that won’t work with Kubernetes. With Internet access, the typical solution would be to use a wildcard DNS like xip.io or nip.io. Instead, the workaround is by hardcoding the mapping in the CoreDNS configuration.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
Want to remove macOS services (a.k.a. daemons)?
Recently, I posted about my Karabiner-Elements Complex Modification Rule to map a key to Escape. Here, I make a small tweak to use it to launch an application too!