Tag: osx

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Remap F14 & F15 on macOS

Here’s a fun one. On some Macs the screen brightness keys are actually recognized as the F14 and F15 function keys. Which means when you build your own keyboard with those keys they change the screen brightness. Yuk. I found a post that explained how to change that, which involved going into System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> Display, except… it’s not there. (See the image above? Not there.)

But wait, it is there after you plug in a device you built that has F14 and F15 keys. (See below.) So once you plug in a device you built that has F14 and F15 keys, the Display option will appear and you can disable the brightness thing by deselecting things. And yes, you can still totally adjust the screen brightness by using the keys on your normal keyboard.

This post is about 95% for future me, and 5% for someone who needs to figure it out and finds this post. You’re Welcome!

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Spect Image Browser

As I continue to move away from Adobe products (I mentioned Affinity Photo a few months ago) I’ve still been using Adobe Bridge because it’s installed and it works fine, but will break in the future, so… replacement time!

I looked at a few Mac OS X based image browsers and found Spect. There’s a free trial so I gave it a whirl, and then shelled out $4.99 for it. So far I think I’ve got my money’s worth. I like that it can browse a top-level folder and also do a deep scan into sub-folders and show them all in one view.

My only concern is that it may not see updates and may die. There’s a bug where it does not seem to know about Recent Folders, it doesn’t really show any metadata, and the author is probably a little busy with other things.

Still, it works well for now… until I find something better.

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finding, not finding, find $PWD

Spotlight

Typically if I need to find a file while my Mac is connected to a network volume, I can easily search that volume using the Finder. This usually works well, and I can find what I need. This doesn’t work at all for the Windows shares I have to use at work.

It’s a full-on Windows environment at work, and everyone has a Windows machine on their desk. I’m the only one who uses a Mac as their primary computer. I do all my own support, which is fine. I just have to find my own workarounds sometimes.

ls -laR

Since I often have to look through one of the Windows shares for old files, I’m stuck browsing since I cannot search, so I originally went into the terminal and did a ls -laR and dumped it to a file so I could easily search for specific files. This sort of worked, but since the listing via ls lists the directory and then all the files in the directory, I had to look at more than a single line of text to find the path to the file I wanted.

find $PWD

I then found the power of combining find with $PWD for find $PWD. This allowed me to list every single file on the Windows share, and dump it all to a file (which is 18MB) that I can easily grep in about a second.

The file’s information isn’t real-time, but I’m typically not looking for new files, but old files that someone else created years ago. I can always refresh my local store every week or so.

If I need to find every Arduino sketch, it’s now as easy as egrep -i '\.ino' ~/WindowsShare.txt

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MsgViewer views .msg files

MsgViewer

Occasionally I save an email message from Thunderbird to a file, and when I do that the file has an .eml extension. For those new to this concept, the .eml file extension is usually applied to files in the MIME RFC 822 standard format used by email applications. You can open that .eml file using Thunderbird (which is available on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux) or using Mail.app on Mac OS X, and I’m sure using many other applications that adhere to the standards. I can even open .eml files in a text editor and easily read the text/plain portion of a multi-part email message.

Unfortunately I recently came across some emails with a .msg extension. It seems that Microsoft Outlook saves emails files to disk as .msg files, which is probably not the MIME RFC 822 standard format, and is some weird format you can’t easily read without Outlook… (It’s actually based on the “Compound File Binary Format” and require a MAPI-aware application to view them.)

Luckily MsgViewer is an application (well, a JAR file) which (as long as you’ve got Java installed) can open these .msg files. You can grab MsgViewer from SourceForge.

And seriously, why does Microsoft do this kind of stuff??

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*nix is the new *nix

*nix

Hey there… Dan Gillmor moved to Linux and it’s even better than he expected!

As for me, I’ve been using Mac OS X pretty much since it came out, and before that I used System 9, 8, 7, etc… Operating systems created by Apple. I’ve also used FreeBSD in the past (though mainly on servers) and I’ve been using Linux in some form or another for close to 20 years. Along the way I’ve also used Windows, though always for work, never for fun.

I’m going to call out a few things Dan mentions, just so I can comment on them.

…here I am, writing this piece on a laptop computer running the Linux* operating system and LibreOffice Writer, not on a Mac or Windows machine using Microsoft Word. All is well.

Luckily you can use LibreOffice on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. You can also use OpenOffice on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. And hey, you can also run NeoOffice on Mac OS X (sorry Windows and Linux users) which is what I did years ago before OpenOffice ran on Mac OS X.

This brings up a point I’d like to expand on, that even if you run Mac OS X (or Windows) you can almost always lean towards the open alternative that is available. This might mean LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office, and it may mean Thunderbird instead of Mail.app, or Firefox instead of Safari.

Other software I use includes jEdit, Arduino, Processing, Fritzing, Inkscape, Audacity, OpenSCAD, and yes… those are all available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. You might also notice that (almost) all of the websites listed end with .org, which is telling.

The applications you use all depend on what you do with a computer, and what you use a computer for. I tend to use computers to make things, and luckily the specific things I like to make fit in well with the software I use.

Some of the applications listed above rely on Java. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Java, but it does help a lot of software run on multiple platforms. One of the applications listed relies on an X11, or more specifically, XQuartz. X11.app used to be distributed by Apple, but they abandoned it, but that’s okay because XQuartz exists.

One application I use that is not available for Linux is Evernote. I should say “not officially available”, since there is Nevernote and Geeknote. Yeah, often you can find an unofficial client for Linux that might work.

Of course if your work demands you use specific software, you may not be able to exclusively run Linux. Oh well…

Now…

No one should ever have to open a command-line window and type “sudo apt-get update” or other such instructions.

I tend to cringe when I see things a computer user should never have to do. I mean, if you want to do X, you may have to learn Y, right? Now, personally, great power comes from being able to open a command line window and type commands. It’s not always the easiest thing to do, though sometimes it is the easier thing to do, if you have the knowledge. If you don’t want to open a command line window and type things, chances are good you won’t have to. (But you should anyway, if you really want to harness the power of your computer. As long as it’s running *nix, I mean. Sorry, Windows users!)

And then…

It’s almost certainly too late for Linux to be a hugely popular desktop/laptop operating system, at least in the developed world.

Maybe, I don’t know… I have seen Linux change over the last two decades, and I’m still excited about what I see.

Dan did say “desktop/laptop operating system”, but let’s look elsewhere. Linux is used on servers, and appliances, and things. What do I mean by “things”? Well, every Raspberry Pi project runs Linux. Here’s 400+ projects running Linux. Here’s a few more projects and some tutorials, all using Linux. I even use Linux computers at work (building exhibits) that just play sounds. Using Linux on a Raspberry Pi makes sense for this, and lots of other things.

Anyway, Dan’s post is good (though it’s strange it’s posted on Medium instead of his own web site, because, freedom and all that) and I’d urge anyone who is not familiar with Linux to take a look at it. It’s pretty awesome. So is open source, and freedom, and the command line.