Posts

Multiple monitor setup

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.
Read more

Netflix on Chrome shows invert colours

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...
Read more

ZFS on Mac

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
Read more

Convert MKV to MOV or MP4 to MOV

# 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
Read more

applescript to bulk convert Pages files to PDF

 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 ...
Read more

Converting media formats on the command line

1. Install Homebrew 2. Install ImageMagic and FFMpeg:      brew install ImageMagick      brew install ffmpeg 3.  Where  $i  is the original name and  $nn  is the new name: Animated gif to mp4: ffmpeg -i $i -movflags faststart -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf "scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2" $nn.mp4 WAV to mp3: In case you have to deal with windows 3.11 users. Just kidding, any windows users. ffmpeg -i $i -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -b:a 192k $nn.mp3 Any video to mp4: This is useful if you get MOV files from your phone as they are 3x bigger than mp4: ffmpeg -i $i $-vn -acodec libmp3lame -ac 2 -ab 160k -ar 48000 $nn.mp4 PNG to jpg: This is useful if you get lots of screenshots on your phone as the screenshots are 10x bigger than jpg:     convert $i $nn.jpg
Read more

Mark an app as secure to run on Mac on command line

 sudo xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Theapp.app 
Read more