John's macOS / Mac OS X tips

It's been discovered that Dropbox bases its file dates on exif data in images, which is bad, because the image exif data is sometimes written by old-style point-n-shoot cameras which may or may not have had their date/time clock set correctly. In my case, I'm too lazy to bother as the UI on those old cameras is awful. Why use an old camera? well the latest polaroid cameras behave like that. Anyway. This script fixes the exif date as well as the file create, modify and open dates. #!/bin/bash # Check if both date and filename are provided if [ -z "$1" ] || [ -z "$2" ]; then   echo "Usage: $0 <date: yyyyMMdd or yyyy-MM-dd> <filename>"   exit 1 fi # Extract and clean inputs DATE=$(echo "$1" | tr -d '[:space:]')  # Trim any spaces FILENAME="$2" # Debug: Display received inputs echo "DEBUG: Received date: '$DATE', Filename: '$FILENAME'" # Check if the date is in a valid format (YYYYMMDD o...

By default Mac OS X does not copy the menubar and dock to a new screen if you have additional monitors. One workaround is to allocate "spaces", ie set the second monitor to be a "space". They should then follow you when you work on that space. However if you want the menubar displayed and the dock displayed on both at the same time, OSX can't do it. Unless: 1. Install uBar . This lets you get a dock-like thing (actually a copy of Windows Tray). https://ubarapp.com/ ..advantage to this one is it gives you an app launcher menu plus clock and battery status. 2. Install MultiDock . This is the closest I've found to what I want plus it runs on older OSes. https://noteifyapp.com/multidock/  3. Install SecondBar . This duplicates the menubar (albeit not that well - doesn't show battery status, wifi etc... just the menu items - File, Edit, View etc.). https://secondbar.apponic.com/mac/ The combination above is ok.

Netflix (specifically) on Chrome (specifically) on Mac OS shows invert colours Solution: Disable Hardware Acceleration in Chrome Hardware acceleration in Chrome sometimes causes graphical anomalies, especially on older operating systems. To disable it: Open Chrome. Click the three-dot menu (⋮) in the top-right corner. Go to Settings > System. Toggle Use hardware acceleration when available to off. Relaunch Chrome. Why This Happened Hardware acceleration offloads rendering tasks (like video playback) to the GPU. On older systems, the GPU drivers may not fully support Chrome's methods of video decoding or DRM (like Widevine). Disabling it forces Chrome to handle rendering through the CPU, bypassing these GPU-related issues. Potential Drawbacks of Disabling Hardware Acceleration While it solves the Netflix issue, you might notice: Reduced Performance: Complex web pages or animations may not render as smoothly. Increased CPU Usage: Your CPU might work harder during video playback or...

ZFS is cool because it allows pooling of drives (more than one drive per volume), as well as compression and deduplication on the fly. Download and install from: https://openzfsonosx.org/  They do support older Mac OSes as well so that's good news too. To Format a disk, e.g. disk3, you type as follows on Terminal. It should automount after erasing. Bear in mind that if you turn on compression and deduplication the copying process is significantly slower. sudo diskutil eraseDisk HFS+ tempdisk /dev/disk3 sudo zpool create -f -o ashift=12 -O compression=lz4 -O dedup=on mypool /dev/disk3

# MKV to MP4     ffmpeg -i movie-file.mkv  -codec copy movie-file.mp4 # MKV to MOV (compressed)     ffmpeg -i movie-file.mkv  -f mov movie-file.mov # MP4 to MOV (compressed)     ffmpeg -i movie-file.mp4  -f mov movie-file.mov # MKV to MOV (raw/uncompressed: warning huge file):     ffmpeg -i movie-file.mkv -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 3 -c:a pcm_s24le movie-file.mov

 Not my script, but it works: paste this into Script Editor, and choose save as app: use scripting additions property valid_kind : {"Pages Document"} property imageBest : false property fileCnt : (0 as integer ) -- property dx_icon : "/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/MultipleItemsIcon.icns" on open dropped_items tell application "Pages" to set itsversion to its version considering numeric strings if itsversion > "5.6" then set imageBest to true end considering repeat with anItem in dropped_items try tell application "Finder" if kind of anItem is equal to "Folder" then set docList to ( every item in entire contents of folder anItem ¬ whose kind is in valid_kind ) as alias list repeat with afile in docList my export_file ( afile ) end repeat ...