Option-dragging while defining the bounds of a screenshot

I’ve been taking screenshots on Macs for more than thirty years. I thought I was pretty much a power user. I’ve known forever that you can do not just the whole screen (⇧⌘3) but a specific target area (⇧⌘4), and of course the space trick for capturing a window (including menus!). But what I didn’t know is… Read more

Zsh has neat shortcuts for decomposing file names & paths

I only just learned that the venerable basename and dirname are no longer necessary, let-alone the horrible string splitting required for teasing apart names from file extensions. Zsh has some awesomely convenient expansion modifiers which do it all! e.g. given the path “/Users/me/Documents/Work.zip”: $file:t → Work.zip $file:h → /Users/me/Documents $file:r → /Users/me/Documents/Work $file:e → zip… Read more

Attention trumps experience

It’s always bemused me that I did better in electronic engineering than computer science. I studied them simultaneously, receiving degrees in both after five years (some classes counted towards both, thus why it wasn’t seven or eight years). I grew up playing on, dabbling with, and programming computers. From BASIC II to Hypercard to RealBasic… Read more

ffmpeg can produce pseudo-corrupt audio when ‘copy’ing to an MP4 container

I’ve been using ffmpeg to trim clips from a trail camera, as most of the time there’s only a few seconds of anything interesting in frame out of the 30+ seconds of video it records each time, but I don’t want to re-encode them and lose video quality as a result (or balloon file sizes… Read more

Apple Mail crashes on launch if connection logging is enabled

This was a fun one.  Mail started crashing on launch for absolutely no apparent reason – nothing had changed to its config or similar in a long time.  The crash logs were all fingering an identical culprit – -[IMAPTaskManager secondaryIdleMailboxName] called on the wrong GCD queue: Process: Mail [19884] Path: /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail Identifier: com.apple.mail Version: 11.3… Read more

Things you find googling yourself

In no particular order. The Hotline File Transfer Protocol v1.1.1.  I presume I was interested in, or actively doing, a third party Hotline client.  I did tend to make lots of data transfer clients back then (e.g. HTTP, FTP, even POP3 & SMTP). My little gallery of childhood toys & memorabilia.  I hadn’t forgotten about this… Read more

Encrypted RAID volumes in El Capitan

Apple crippled Disk Utility in El Capitan, in their usual name of making good functional things pretty & pretty useless. Luckily I’m far from the first person to need to create RAID and/or encrypted CoreStorage volumes, in El Capitan.  Florian Knapp has a concise summary of how to set up an encrypted RAID volume.  Tom… Read more