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ngyikp ∙ Ng Yik Phang

ngyikp ∙ Ng Yik Phang

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Legacy Intel games on macOS 27 Golden Gate

Mac apps/games that are only available as Intel binaries and no native Apple Silicon support are a ticking time bomb as Rosetta is going to be deprecated . The first developer beta of macOS 27 Golden Gate is released today, and I tried it out on a test machine to

Reduce Little Snitch connection alerts when launching Steam games

Little Snitch is an application firewall for macOS and I find it useful to audit outgoing network connections from my computer. The Alert mode prompts can be a bit annoying when setting up a new app, but this is usually one-time and not a hassle on day-to-day

Fix Google Pay not working on Chrome

I encountered a weird problem that clicking a "Buy with Google Pay" button flashes a Processing dialog and immediately closes/fails. Stranger that Safari was working fine, while Chrome remains broken for me for several weeks. Opening the browser console reveals a hint: NotSupportedError: The payment method "

Fix constant UAC prompts whenever launching a Steam game

Sometimes when you launch a Steam game, there will be a User Account Control prompt from Windows asking about Steam Client Service. This is to install any prerequisites such as Visual C++ or DirectX (why are these not preinstalled on Windows 11 already) User Account Control prompt However, I am

Reading stdout/stderr output of Windows GUI apps

There are various solutions suggesting program.exe > output.txt or program.exe > output.txt 2>&1 to view stdout/stderr, but this doesn't seem to work for me. What worked for me is to use Git Bash or Cygwin Terminal to execute the EXE

Prevent Parallels VMs from opening in tabs

Virtual machines in Parallels Desktop may open in native macOS tabs , I personally don't like this as it shifts the desktop resolution when the tab bar appears. This behavior can be disabled with this Terminal command: defaults write com.parallels.desktop.console AppleWindowTabbingMode manual

Random network disconnects on macOS Sequoia

macOS Sequoia 15.0 seems to have random network connectivity issues causing various apps to randomly disconnect. Some people advise disabling network extensions (the only one I had is Little Snitch), completely turning off the system firewall (System Settings > Network > Firewall) fixes the issue on my 2019 Intel

UVFSService randomly hanging and hogging CPU

For some bizarre reason, downloading certain Steam games on macOS to an external disk can hang UVFSService with 100% CPU and cause system instability when any app tries to interact with the same external disk. Activity Monitor showing UVFSService is on 100% CPU When the hang happens, the only way

Evernote Web Clipper for Chrome extension injects _dd_s cookie to every website

I was building a new webapp and realize that somehow that there is a _dd_s cookie being injected. Then I realize that this cookie is still injected on blank websites such as https://example.com and feared that it might be Chrome extension malware... plus the cookie isn'

Trying macOS Monterey on virtual machine

Software Update screen offering macOS Monterey Beta Host machine is macOS 11.4 and the latest and tested software versions as of the time of writing: Parallels Desktop version 16.5.0 (49183) VMware Fusion version 12.1.2 (17964953) Parallels and VMware don't know how to handle

WebExtensions on Safari 14

Safari 14 now supports WebExtensions, in addition to Safari App Extensions and after killing off Legacy Safari Extensions (.safariextz) The official guides provided by Apple (a bit buried): https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/safari_web_extensions A couple of notes: Safari's WebExtensions implementation isn't feature-

Trying macOS Big Sur on a virtual machine

The developer beta of macOS Big Sur is now available for download and experimentation. Installing Mac betas inside a virtual machine doesn't provide the full experience, but it's still useful to get a first look and try out app compatibility. Software Update screen offering macOS Big

How to find the Unity build version for a compiled game

For Windows games, the most straightforward approach is to check the properties of the game EXE, however, this doesn't give the actual Unity build version. Fe's actual Unity build version is 2017.1.2p4, but you won't be able to know just by looking

How to hide Final Cut Pro X/Motion Supplemental Content updates on macOS Catalina

Note: This is no longer applicable starting from macOS Big Sur as softwareupdate --ignore has been removed :( Starting from macOS Mojave, Apple moved the system update functionality from the App Store to the Settings app, but they ‘forgot’ to implement the Hide Update function that existed on the

Enable the under-development dark mode on Chrome

Dark mode is currently being developed on Chrome for Mac, but if you want to try out the first unfinished bits, here's how to do it: Quit Chrome Open Terminal Copy and paste open -a "Google Chrome.app" --args "--force-dark-mode" and press