Apple Game Porting Toolkit with Whisky

A long time ago, I compiled Wine from scratch on 32-bit macOS Sierra. I lost interest because I never used it. Now after WWDC 2023, everyone is talking about the happy side effect of Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit (GPTK) which uses Wine under the hood to run Windows 10 DirectX 12 games on macOS! ...

12 Jun 2023

Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad battery level

Want to check your connected bluetooth device battery level on a mac? Here is one way: using xbar (I am aware there are a bunch of other xbar plugins to do something similar, but I’ve been using my own script before I ever used xbar). ...

30 Apr 2023

Enabling the macOS Metal Performance HUD

Did you know that macOS has a built-in game performance HUD with a frames per second (FPS) counter, similar using RivaTuner Statistics Server (RTSS) to display a GPU performance overlay in Windows? Here’s how to enable the Metal Performance HUD. ...

28 Apr 2023

skhd RunAtLoad launch agent

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… ...

18 Mar 2023

Using Rosetta in a UTM Linux VM with Docker on Apple Silicon

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. ...

12 Mar 2023

Fast external storage for M1/M2 Macs

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? ...

5 Mar 2023

Fast Stable Diffusion using Core ML on M1

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)… ...

18 Dec 2022

Disabling macOS Print Job History Files

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. ...

11 Nov 2022

Stable Diffusion image-to-image mode

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. ...

17 Sep 2022

AI-generated images with Stable Diffusion on an M1 mac

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! ...

16 Sep 2022