A short one today: here is a function to “delete” (read: move) a file to the macOS Trash (Bin), as a safer alternative to rm.

Want to check your connected bluetooth device battery level on a mac? Here is one way: using xbar (I am aware there are a bunch of other xbar plugins to do something similar, but I’ve been using my own script before I ever used xbar).

Did you know that macOS has a built-in game performance HUD with a frames per second (FPS) counter, similar using RivaTuner Statistics Server (RTSS) to display a GPU performance overlay in Windows? Here’s how to enable the Metal Performance HUD.

Not long ago, I was reminded of one of my favourite digital artists, Linda Bergkvist a.k.a. Enayla. I love her macabre yet stunningly beautiful and evocative art, but alas, she’s not posted her art since around 2007. This post is a departure from my usual techie stuff -- it’s just appreciation post!

Some time ago, I explained how I setup “Global hotkeys for macOS with skhd”. I mentioned running it automatically upon login via the macOS Launch Daemon but did not detail the steps. So here they are...

I have been using UTM on M1/M2 macs for all my virtualization needs for a while, but never posted much because it practically works out of the box. Since around October 2022, UTM v4.0.9 on macOS Ventura allows Apple Hypervisor Virtualization Virtual Machines to use Rosetta 2.

I was recently researching external storage for my Mac, looking for the “fastest” and most “reliable”. There are so many options, and of course, so many different price points! It’s all very confusing: NGFF M.2? NVMe M.2? USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5 Mbps)? USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps)? USB 3.1 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps)? Thunderbolt 3? Thunderbolt 4? USB 4.0?

Epic Diffusion recently came to my attention, a high-quality merge of various models by John Slegers: “Epîc Diffusion is a general purpose model based on Stable Diffusion 1.x intended to replace the official SD releases as your default model. It is focused on providing high quality output in a wide range of different styles...” Figured I’d give it a spin.

I recently tried Lite XL v2.1.0, a forked and updated version of the original rxi/lite, “A lightweight text editor written in Lua”, on MacOS ARM. Here are some findings.

Recently (around 14 December 2022), Apple’s Machine Learning Research team published “Stable Diffusion with Core ML on Apple Silicon” with Python and Swift source code optimized for Apple Silicon (M1/M2) on Github apple/ml-stable-diffusion. Here I’m trying it out on a MacBook (though the code also works on iPhones and iPads)...

iOS 16 introduced new lock screen widgets! Rather that installing various third party widdgets, I want to create my own using Scriptable. Here is a simple “universal” widget to launch an application or a Shortcut (bonus: or even the home screen too!)

Did you know the macOS Printer service (Common UNIX Printing System, or CUPS) keeps a copy of every single print job ever? Here’s how to change this default behaviour.

I refactored my previous Stable Diffusion code, to clean up, OO it a little, and add new features like tiling, upscaling, PNG metadata. As I mentioned before, I don’t understand AI/ML... but I do understand programming! So here is my new, more elegant Simple-SD v1.0 Python script.

I have more ideas for Stable Diffusion. My nights and weekends are consumed! This time: For inpainting, why create a mask image manually, when A.I. can automatically build a mask from a text prompt? Someone much smarter has already published a paper (arXiv:2112.10003 [cs.CV]), with source code, to do just this!

More Stable Diffusion! This time attempting to add inpainting / masking based on my previous code, to merge both txt2img.py and img2img.py capabilities, disregarding the out-of-box inpainting.py code, which does not have parameters for positive or negative prompts. Keyword being attempting...

I’ve been playing around with the Stable Diffusion scripts a little (to be exact, Ben Firshman’s version). To help me understand the script, I decided to re-write it the way I prefer to use it... either breaking or optimizing it in the process :P

Following from my previous post, AI-generated images with Stable Diffusion on an M1 mac: This time, using the image-to-image script, which takes an input “seed” image, in addition to the text prompt as inputs. In this case the model will use the shapes and colors in the input image as a base for the output AI-generated image.

There has been a lot of buzz about Stable Diffusion for text-to-image synthesis, which saw its Public Release around 22 Aug 22. You can read more on the Stability.AI blog and try it at Hugging Face. What’s groundbreaking is is that is open source, with a pre-trained downloadable model and modest system requirements, so anyone can try it on their own computer... anyone... like me!

Last Wednesday, August 31^st 2022, Apple released iOS 12.5.6. This Security Update fixes a WebKit vulnerability that “may have been actively exploited.” Users of newer devices will not care, but I cannot overstate how significant this is as a demonstrable commitment to security.

Here is a macOS Automator script to watermark a PDF, and also set metadata like author and title. Followed by a more advanced script to do all that an also set an owner password and access permissions... auto-magically.