AirPlay Receiver on an unsupported mac with Monterey

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! ...

17 Nov 2021

Shortcut to convert image format and paste

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. ...

13 Nov 2021

Shortcuts on macOS: A review

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. ...

6 Nov 2021

Extract Text from a Screenshot with Shortcuts

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. ...

2 Nov 2021

Sending keystrokes to an application using Shortcuts for macOS Monterey

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. ...

29 Oct 2021

Enable the Globe key on external keyboards for iPad

If you use an external keyboard on iPad, this is the most important thing to do - remap a key like the fn key to the globe 🌐 key. Here is how I do it for an older Apple wireless keyboard like the second generation A1255 or third generation A1314. ...

16 Oct 2021

Minuscule Lima setup to replace Docker on macOS

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… ...

7 Oct 2021

New SF Symbols for VS Code Touch Bar

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! ...

24 Sep 2021

Viewing man pages in Preview or VS Code

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! ...

6 Sep 2021

Extracting embedded ZIPs from Office documents

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. ...

10 Aug 2021