I have a hangup about Microsoft Office on macOS - it often elects to paste images from the clipboard in TIFF format, instead of PNG or JPG, which results in massive files, be it PowerPoint .PPTX presentations, Word .DOCX documents or Excel .XLSX spreadsheets. Enter: A new macOS Shortcut to convert clipboard images to (lossless) PNG or (lossy) JPG.

This is an opinion piece on Shortcuts v5.0 (1144.2) for macOS Monterey v12.0.1. Readers of my blog know I use Automator, AppleScripts, and shell scripts to get stuff done. So I was curious to see if I could replace all these with just Shortcuts. TL;DR: no, no I can’t.

Here is a macOS Shortcut to take a screenshot and extract text from it using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). I find this useful to copy text from e.g. a presentation or video during a virtual call, etc.

I’ve been trying out Shortcuts on macOS 12 Monterey! I have written about Shortcuts on iOS/iPadOS in the past, so was keen to migrate my automation scripts from Automator or osascript to Shortcuts. Here is the first one: A Shortcut plus global hotkey to an application, leveraging AppleScript/JXA.

If you use an external keyboard on iPad, this is the most important thing to do - remap a key like the fn key to the globe 🌐 key. Here is how I do it for an older Apple wireless keyboard like the second generation A1255 or third generation A1314.

Today’s post will be a long one - recently, Docker announced some changes to the Docker Desktop license, so I figured I’d check out the Lima for macOS instead. As always, I end up complicating things by doing everything my way...

A few posts back, I described my no-code approach to customizing my MacBook touch bar in Visual Studio Code, where I used Apple’s SF Symbols 3 Beta icon library. Now, Apple has release a new beta of SF Symbols that makes the process easier!

I stumbled upon a post entitled “Piping stdout and stderr to Preview” by Erica Sadun - the cool bit that caught my attention was about redirecting man pages (UNIX help) to Preview on macOS. But this got me thinking... to redirect the output to Visual Studio Code instead!

I have a plethora of Bash scripts littered throughout my filesystem, many written for one specific purpose and promptly forgotten about (often, just named go.sh!) I thought I share one today - a script to extract embedded ZIP files from Microsoft Office documents created in Windows.

A couple of posts ago, in my (rather unique, if I may say so myself) zero-code VS Code Touch Bar Extension for Markdown, I used the standard Apple icons in the SF Symbols set. I found them a bit too large for the touchbar, and wated to shirink them slightly by padding them with extra pixels around the image.

This is part two, deploying a Visual Studio Code touchbar extension for Markdown notes, using the normal “correct” development method. I’d suggest referring to part one, for my much simpler, zero-code method.

This is the first part of a two part series on deploying your own touchbar extension for Visual Studio Code, designed mainly to work with Markdown notes. This post gives you a shortcut method with zero code! The next post will details a more “correct” method. If you don’t already realize - this applies to MacBooks with Touch bars running macOS only.

I’ve been using Visual Studio Code for all my notes. I have used Typora, Obsidian, and Zetlr, but I keep coming back to VS Code, because of its extensibility, customizability and integrated terminal. Here is how I set it up for note-taking.

I setup Firefox on macOS to automatically download files to my “Downloads” folder without prompting (under Preferences... > Downloads, and select Save files to... instead of Always ask you where to save files). If there is an existing file with the same name, Firefox appends (1) to the filename (then (2), (3) and so on). Over time, I land up with files with similar file names, which may or may not be identical. This shell script finds and moves duplicate files to a different folder... for subsequent manual deletion.

You might have read that Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 11 requires a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). More recent AMD CPUs support Firmware TPM (fTPM) which implements TPM in software on the CPU instead of requiring a dedicated (discrete) chip. This is how I enabled fTPM.

Last month, one morning, my MacBook (still running Catalina) started behaving strangely - though I was not running anything, it was sluggish as the CPU was too busy and the fans were on high. I traced it to the iOS Simulator service that comes with XCode.

I have been too very quiet! I wanted a mash-up of a two Visual Studio Code themes - a light color theme for the main editor area, and a dark theme for the terminal, which I usually keep open. Here is an easy way to achieve this.

Up until a couple of weekends ago, I’d been running my Corsair Vengeance LPX 2x8 GB RAM at 3600 MHz on my ASRock B550M Steel Legend and AMD Ryzen 5 5600X. In fact, I did even better than XMP settings, with a stable system even though I pushed RAM timings by reducing CAS 18 to CAS 16. Then, I upgraded my motherboard BIOS to AMD AGESA AM4 v2 1.2.0.2... and now I can no longer run at 3600 MHz!

For the longest time, I’ve struggled to get the macOS version of Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) to paste images as PNG or JPEG, instead of the default TIFF. TIFFs make the files far larger than they need to be! I’ve resorted to macros, shell scripts, Quick Actions... all paste PNGs (lossless) into MS Office! But I just found another method with AppleScript.

I have a few Javascript bookmarklets that I thought I’d share. Bookmarklets are short snippets of JavaScript code that run in the context of the current web page in the browser. I prefer them over extensions since I can see what the code does. There are plenty on the web, here are a few of mine.