Padding VS Code Touch Bar Extension Icons

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. ...

7 Aug 2021

The correct way to create a VS Code Touch Bar Extension

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. ...

24 Jul 2021

A zero-code VS Code Touch Bar Extension for Markdown

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. ...

23 Jul 2021

Customizing VS Code for Markdown note-taking

I’ve been using Visual Studio Code for all my notes. I have used Typora, Obsidian, and Zetlr, but I keep coming back to VS Code, because of its extensibility, customizability and integrated terminal. Here is how I set it up for note-taking. ...

18 Jul 2021

Shell script to move duplicate files

I setup Firefox on macOS to automatically download files to my “Downloads” folder without prompting (under Preferences… > Downloads, and select Save files to… instead of Always ask you where to save files). If there is an existing file with the same name, Firefox appends (1) to the filename (then (2), (3) and so on). Over time, I land up with files with similar file names, which may or may not be identical. This shell script finds and moves duplicate files to a different folder… for subsequent manual deletion. ...

9 Jul 2021

Enabling AMD Ryzen 5600X fTPM for Windows 10

You might have read that Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 11 requires a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). More recent AMD CPUs support Firmware TPM (fTPM) which implements TPM in software on the CPU instead of requiring a dedicated (discrete) chip. This is how I enabled fTPM. ...

25 Jun 2021

CoreSimulator Crash Loop

Last month, one morning, my MacBook (still running Catalina) started behaving strangely - though I was not running anything, it was sluggish as the CPU was too busy and the fans were on high. I traced it to the iOS Simulator service that comes with XCode. ...

19 Jun 2021

VS Code Override Terminal Color Theme

I have been too very quiet! I wanted a mash-up of a two Visual Studio Code themes - a light color theme for the main editor area, and a dark theme for the terminal, which I usually keep open. Here is an easy way to achieve this. ...

17 Jun 2021

3600 MHz RAM on AMD B550

Up until a couple of weekends ago, I’d been running my Corsair Vengeance LPX 2x8 GB RAM at 3600 MHz on my ASRock B550M Steel Legend and AMD Ryzen 5 5600X. In fact, I did even better than XMP settings, with a stable system even though I pushed RAM timings by reducing CAS 18 to CAS 16. Then, I upgraded my motherboard BIOS to AMD AGESA AM4 v2 1.2.0.2… and now I can no longer run at 3600 MHz! ...

11 May 2021

AppleScript to change clipboard image format

For the longest time, I’ve struggled to get the macOS version of Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) to paste images as PNG or JPEG, instead of the default TIFF. TIFFs make the files far larger than they need to be! I’ve resorted to macros, shell scripts, Quick Actions… all paste PNGs (lossless) into MS Office! But I just found another method with AppleScript. ...

24 Apr 2021