Shell on myByways

Running Steam in Game Porting Toolkit

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In my previous post, I managed to get Whisky, with Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit, working on macOS Ventura without Homebrew. Here I manage to get Steam running after jumping through hoops.

Run code in a macOS Sandbox

Sun, 11 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I sometimes test randomly downloaded code on macOS in a Sandbox that has limited and network access. I posted about this way back in Jan 2017, Creating a macOS Sandbox to run Kodi, and this is a short refresher for me…

File Date Created = Photo / video metadata

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When I export photos or videos from Photos.app, I want the file’s Created Date (Created Date in Finder) to be the time the photo or video was taken. Alas, this is not the way Photos works, and setting the date turned out to be more challenging than expected.

“Delete” (Move) to Trash in macOS Shell

Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A short one today: here is a function to “delete” (read: move) a file to the macOS Trash (Bin), as a safer alternative to rm.

Enabling the macOS Metal Performance HUD

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Script to re-map MacBook Pro function keys

Sun, 19 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post, “Re-mapping physical function keys on MacBook Pros” I used the hidutil tool to re-map the function keys on a Mac without a touchbar. I’ve since created a script to more easily apply changes.

Re-mapping physical function keys on MacBook Pros

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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!

Multipass for Docker containers on macOS

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Viewing man pages in Preview or VS Code

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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!

Extracting embedded ZIPs from Office documents

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Shell script to move duplicate files

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Migrating from bash shell scripts to Python

Thu, 11 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I recently wanted to migrate from a Bash 3 shell script to Python 3. This is nothing but a brain dump comparing a few bits and bobs.

Custom icons in Windows Start Menu Medium Tiles

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In the Windows 10 Start Menu, I used Pin To Start to a medium sized tile for Firefox - and the icon is nice and large - but is not the case for other shortcuts. I was wondered why… and how to make all the icons have a more consistent look.

macOS zsh configuration

Thu, 07 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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!

OCRmyPDF: searchable text from images

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Touch Bar Quick Action Scripts

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Just sharing some Automator scripts I use for Touch Bar Quick Actions showcasing three different methods - using pre-defined Actions, using AppleScripts and using Shell scripts.

Three Ways to Quickly Toggle Dark Mode

Sun, 04 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Building and packaging Wine 4.12.1 (32-bit and 64-bit) automatically

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

For a while now, I’ve been posting about compiling Wine on macOS, starting with Wine 1.9 in October 2016, then automating the compile for Wine 2.9 32-bit in May 2017. Now it’s July 2019, and this is probably my last post on the subject - a fully automated script to download and compile Wine 4.12.1 (released 7 July 2019) 32-bit and 64-bit on macOS.

A bash script to search a CSV file

Sat, 19 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I sometimes need to search a huge CSV file (13 MB), containing 21,000 rows and roundabout 40 columns, which Numbers takes half a minute to open. All I need to do is search and display the results of a few columns only… so I wrote a bash script to do this for me - and I was quite specific in that I wanted the results in color!

Using an exFAT drive for Time Machine backups

Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I got a new 2 TB external disk - “yay” - and wanted to use it for both on my Windows desktop and for Time Machine backups. Immediately thought to format it as exFAT but quickly came to realize Time Machine does not support exFAT! Fortunately, there is a workaround…

Converting JSON into CSV

Fri, 29 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I needed to analyze some JSON data. Now, I’m no data scientist, so I wanted to convert my JSON data to comma separated (CSV) and “flatten” the data… just so I could use the data in Excel.

And Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Fixing PowerPoint TIFF images and fonts

Fri, 25 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 for Mac (aka version 15) has a strange quirk - when I copy and paste images from Preview or most other applications, the image gets copied in Tagged Image File Format (TIFF). The image is practically uncompressed (or possibly minimally compressed), resulting in very, very huge PPTX files! Plus: Removing unwanted font references.

Text Manipulation Cheat Sheet

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I recently had the “opportunity” to perform some text manipulation to get data from a huge log file into a spreadsheet. I had done this sort of work a long time ago as a developer, but had forgotten over the years. So I decided to compile a text manipulation cheat-sheet for macOS.

Automated script to compile Wine 2.9 from scratch

Sun, 28 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Following up on my posts, Compiling Wine 1.9 from scratch on macOS with Retina mode and Creating a wine.app bundle manually, here’s my script to automatically download and compile pre-requisite libraries, then download and compile Wine 2.9 32-bit, build the .app bundle, and even include a registry tweak to enable Retina Mode.

Verifying downloads with a SHA-256 checksum

Wed, 24 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I recently downloaded an update to VLC, an open-source media player. The VLC download page, displayed it’s SHA-256 checksum - here’s how to quickly validate your download by comparing the checksum using the built-in macOS tools.

Extract files from a macOS installer .pkg

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Want to extract files from a macOS installer package with a .pkg extension?

Finding application files in OS X

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Apps, even after being removed from the Launchpad or Applications sidebar in Finder, do leave preferences and other files scattered around. Where are they, typically, and how does one find them?

OS X Terminal color prompt

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

My previous Terminal Tweaks post had an incorrect prompt (PS1) setting, that caused lines to wrap on themselves! This is now corrected, with more details on the color options…

Screen capture script for retina display with PNG optimization

Mon, 19 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Forget the complex or manual steps, or costly tools to get screen shots scaled down from a retina display. I have a shell script that triggers an interactive window screen capture, saves the screen shot (assumed to be 2x retina display), re-sizes it to 1x and compresses the PNG further! Best of all, it does not require paid software or Automator.

OS X Terminal Tweaks

Fri, 16 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Some tweaks to my OS X shell (Terminal.app) that I’ve found useful.