A Geek and his Dad...
To delete all old versions of a document, open the document, navigate to File Revert To Browse All Versions… (opens Time Machine type versions view), select the most recent non-current version on the left, move the mouse into the menubar region to reveal the menubar (it's hidden in full screen view by default), navigate to File Revert To and notice that your choice is now Delete This Version….…
A developer on Mastodon posted a query: I want to use some C++ code from a Swift Package, so I: 1) Added a target with the C++ code2) Added an umbrella header3) Added this new target as a dependency to the client target4) Import the new module in the client target But now when I Continue reading "How to make a Swift Package that includes a library target in C++ and a Swift target that calls into…
I saw a thread by Dr. Drang about automating a macro, and then a reply by John Gruber about a Keyboard Maestro macro he uses that opens the Services menu so you can just type the name of the service and go. That made me think, that sounds very useful, but I use Alfred. Today Continue reading "Alfred Workflow to activate the services menu in any application"
Priced out the impressive looking Mac Studio Apple just released and wow it adds up fast when you max out the RAM and get the max processor 🙂 The top of the line new Mac Studio M3 Ultra (32-core CPU, 80-core GPU) with 512G RAM (!) and a 4TB SSD is an impressive and tempting Continue reading "New 2025 Mac Studio is impressive but $$$?"
Yummy shortbread cookies - especially the spicy chocolate variant :)
A post I made on Mastodon as advice to a younger indie app developer based on my three decades of experience working for smaller software businesses mostly as a freelance software engineer and watching which ones succeeded and which ones did not: A good product idea: You have to spend time speaking with Continue reading "A good product idea…"
Recently wanted to make a better version of an irrigation part I bought that just doesn’t work well and so diving into 3d printing again. As usual, the CAD hurdle remains painful. Background (feel free to skip) FreeCAD is super powerful, but confusing, and, more importantly, buggy. Spent a long time drawing the Continue reading "OpenSCAD"
A poem that influenced my life, though I knew it naught until today when I read an email from my step dad and just now read it. You see, he read this during his college years and took it to heart. Influenced his life and his architectural practice and, perhaps, why the house I grew Continue reading "A poem that influenced my life, though I knew it naught."
Some may remember stories of the bus conversion of a 1980s transit bus (Gillig Phantom, if you re into that sort of thing) I did (with some help) and how our family (Geek was only a year old! my how time flies…) lived in it for about 8 months traveling about 25,000 miles around the continental Continue reading "Bus conversion trip accessing the internet on the road in 1997"
Context: Making a new bootable backup of my 13 M1 MBP before upgrading macOS and taking advantage of the fact that SuperDuper! 3.7 now supports bootable clones (yay!). However, one unfortunate fact of creating them is that SuperDuper! docs say you have to boot from that drive and turn on File Vault manually if you Continue reading "Getting disk background encryption status"
Looking for the exploded view of an electric saw I need to take apart and found some design sketches for a desk I made myself has dimensions for a Macintosh IIci for the computer area 🙂 The other funny thing is the sketches are on the back of ImageWriter II (dot-matrix) printout of Pascal Continue reading "Some funny finds from the previous millennium…"
The Feedback Assistant iOS app is visible and acts like a normal app on beta builds of iOS, but it’s hidden in release versions of iOS. On release builds the app icon is hidden on the Springboard/Home screen, it doesn’t come up in Spotlight searches, Siri can’t find it, and the process is hidden in Continue reading "iOS Feedback Assistant on non-beta iOS accessing visibility"
I told someone I’d just eaten half an ice cream sandwich and they said they were impressed. 🤔 It wasn’t trivial, because I do enjoy sweets, but wasn’t that difficult. Here’s how to successfully eat half an ice cream sandwich (or anything else your body craves), from easy to difficult: 1) [Easy] Take an ice Continue reading "How to eat half an ice cream sandwich"
When you use AirDrop to move an image from your iOS device to your Mac macOS adds some metadata that made me uncomfortable. In particular, the com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms metadata is a binary property list which includes the name of the device it came from. The default name is often your name, as in, “Dad’s iPhone 12 Pro”. Continue reading "Quick Action shortcut to clear metadata from a…
I have too many windows open in Safari (416 tabs in 133 windows currently yah, I wrote an AppleScript to count those 🙂 ). Got tired of not being able to find something I knew I had open so I wrote an AppleScript to search the text content of all Safari tabs in all Continue reading "AppleScript to search the contents of Safari Windows Tabs"
Had occasion to use a SwiftUI ScrollView today and ran into the issue where the SwiftUI team decided to use one of the two most sensible defaults for initial presentation when the content is too large to fit in the container center the content. This makes sense for images or maps, but not for Continue reading "SwiftUI Simple ScrollViewReader use to get ScrollView to start at the top left."
Here so I can find it again 🙂 from:username to:username // to username @username // mentioning @username keyword // can be a #hashtag -keyword keyword OR keyword min_retweets: x min_faves: x min_replies: x filter:links filter:images // any image filter:twimg // twitter pic.twitter.com image filter:video filter:native_video filter:periscope filter:vine filter:media // image or video…
So I was sad the WordPress macOS “app” is just an Electron app that wraps the website with a few macOS menu items to jump to specific pages on the site. Thought I’d give MarsEdit a try. But the Mac App Store glitched 😦 Worked after I quit and restarted the App Store. Continue reading "Taking Mars Edit 4 for a spin!"
PSA: For a great macOS app experience, the details matter. As an example, if you implement a custom macOS window titlebar for a document based app* don t forget to implement the feature whereby you display a menu with the folder hierarchy for the document if the user right clicks, control+clicks or command+clicks the document title Continue reading "macOS custom window titlebar don t forget to…
Chatting with one of my sisters and she remarked upon our mother’s Amazon book buying … addiction? compulsion? Orders way more books than she can or does read. Hear or read a book review that sounds good? Go order the book. Etc. I opined that this was probably a form of shopping therapy and given Continue reading "Psychology hack: Convert shopping therapy urge into donation urge"