One common ask from M1 (Apple Silicon / ARM) MacBook Pro users is to be able to re-define what the top row of physical function keys do, for example, to change the Dictation (F5) key to decrease the keyboard backlight brightness and DND (F6) to increase it, similar to other Macs. Here’s how to do that... and more!

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).

In the macOS Monterey Shortcuts Gallery, there are Shortcuts to “Tile Last 2 Windows”, “Tile Last 3 Windows” and “Tile Last 4 Windows”. This is my single combined version for any window (not just the last x).

While waiting for macOS Universal Control, I wanted to try AirPlay Receiver. Unfortunately, it is not supported (“locked”) on my older macBook. But recently I stumbled upon Mr. Macintosh’s “Airplay BLOCKED on Monterey? How to unlock it!” video on YouTube!

I have a hangup about Microsoft Office on macOS - it often elects to paste images from the clipboard in TIFF format, instead of PNG or JPG, which results in massive files, be it PowerPoint .PPTX presentations, Word .DOCX documents or Excel .XLSX spreadsheets. Enter: A new macOS Shortcut to convert clipboard images to (lossless) PNG or (lossy) JPG.

This is an opinion piece on Shortcuts v5.0 (1144.2) for macOS Monterey v12.0.1. Readers of my blog know I use Automator, AppleScripts, and shell scripts to get stuff done. So I was curious to see if I could replace all these with just Shortcuts. TL;DR: no, no I can’t.

Here is a macOS Shortcut to take a screenshot and extract text from it using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). I find this useful to copy text from e.g. a presentation or video during a virtual call, etc.

I’ve been trying out Shortcuts on macOS 12 Monterey! I have written about Shortcuts on iOS/iPadOS in the past, so was keen to migrate my automation scripts from Automator or osascript to Shortcuts. Here is the first one: A Shortcut plus global hotkey to an application, leveraging AppleScript/JXA.

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...

A few posts back, I described my no-code approach to customizing my MacBook touch bar in Visual Studio Code, where I used Apple’s SF Symbols 3 Beta icon library. Now, Apple has release a new beta of SF Symbols that makes the process easier!

I stumbled upon a post entitled “Piping stdout and stderr to Preview” by Erica Sadun - the cool bit that caught my attention was about redirecting man pages (UNIX help) to Preview on macOS. But this got me thinking... to redirect the output to Visual Studio Code instead!

I have a plethora of Bash scripts littered throughout my filesystem, many written for one specific purpose and promptly forgotten about (often, just named go.sh!) I thought I share one today - a script to extract embedded ZIP files from Microsoft Office documents created in Windows.

A couple of posts ago, in my (rather unique, if I may say so myself) zero-code VS Code Touch Bar Extension for Markdown, I used the standard Apple icons in the SF Symbols set. I found them a bit too large for the touchbar, and wated to shirink them slightly by padding them with extra pixels around the image.

This is part two, deploying a Visual Studio Code touchbar extension for Markdown notes, using the normal “correct” development method. I’d suggest referring to part one, for my much simpler, zero-code method.

This is the first part of a two part series on deploying your own touchbar extension for Visual Studio Code, designed mainly to work with Markdown notes. This post gives you a shortcut method with zero code! The next post will details a more “correct” method. If you don’t already realize - this applies to MacBooks with Touch bars running macOS only.