Simon Willison: TILs on macos

macos Accessing 1Password items from the terminal - 2024-07-09

I save things like API keys in 1Password. Today I figured out how to access those from macOS terminal scripts. …

macos Transcribing MP3s with whisper-cpp on macOS - 2024-04-26

I asked on Twitter for tips about running Whisper transcriptions in the CLI on my Mac. Werner Robitza pointed me to Homebrew's whisper-cpp formula, and when I complained that it didn't have quite enough documentation for me to know how to use it Werner got a PR accepted adding the missing details. …

macos A script to capture frames from a QuickTime video - 2024-04-16

I was putting together some notes for a talk I gave, and I wanted an efficient way to create screenshots of specific moments in a video of that talk. …

macos impaste: pasting images to piped commands on macOS - 2024-04-04

I wanted the ability to paste the image on my clipboard into a command in the macOS terminal. …

macos Editing an iPhone home screen using macOS - 2023-12-11

My iPhone has a weird bug: I can no longer re-arrange the app icons on the home screen (or in the dock) by dragging them around on my phone. It lets me get into edit mode (where the icons wiggle) and drag them around, but when I release they go back to where they came from. …

macos Grabbing a transcript of a short snippet of a YouTube video with MacWhisper - 2023-11-30

I grabbed a quote from a transcript of a snippet of a YouTube video today for my blog. …

macos Downloading partial YouTube videos with ffmpeg - 2023-08-26

I spoke at WordCamp US 2023, and wanted to grab a copy of the video of my talk. I always try to keep my own copies of these because I've seen some conferences eventually take these offline in the past. …

macos Local wildcard DNS on macOS with dnsmasq - 2023-06-30

I wanted to get wildcard DNS running on my Mac laptop, for development purposes. I wanted http://anything.mysite.lan/ to point to my localhost IP address. …

macos Syncing slide images and audio in iMovie - 2023-06-15

I found an MP3 recording of an old talk I gave and decided to use the slides from that talk to create a video using iMovie. …

macos Using fs_usage to see what files a process is using - 2023-06-15

Today I wanted to figure out where the vercel CLI tool on my Mac kept its authentication tokens. …

macos sips: Scriptable image processing system - 2023-02-18

I wanted to convert some .webp images to .png on my Mac. I asked ChatGPT: …

macos Browse files (including SQLite databases) on your iPhone with ifuse - 2022-09-13

I spotted an intriguing note in the release notes for osxphotos 0.51.7: …

macos Driving an external display from a Mac laptop - 2022-09-10

For a friend's wedding I needed to run a Google Photos slideshow on some large televisions. …

macos Atuin for zsh shell history in SQLite - 2022-04-26

Atuin (via Rhet Turnbull) "replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database". Obviously I had to try this out! …

macos Seeing files opened by a process using opensnoop - 2022-04-26

I decided to try out atuin, a shell extension that writes your history to a SQLite database. …

macos Trick Apple Photos into letting you access your video files - 2022-04-12

I had an 11GB movie in Apple Photos (sync'd from my iPhone) and I wanted to upload it to YouTube (actually via AirDrop to another laptop first). …

macos Installing Python on macOS with the official Python installer - 2022-02-28

I usually use Homebrew on macOS, but I decided to try using the official Python installer based on this Twitter conversation. …

macos Using lsof on macOS - 2021-12-11

lsof stands for "list open files". Here are some very basic usage notes for the version that ships with macOS. …

macos Running Docker on an M1 Mac - 2021-05-25

TLDR: Use platform: linux/amd64 in docker-compose.yml and your containers will probably work! …

macos Shrinking PNG files with pngquant and oxipng - 2021-02-07

I usually use Squoosh.app to reduce the size of my PNGs, but in this case I had a folder with nearly 50 images in it so I wanted to do it using the command-line. …

macos Finding the largest SQLite files on a Mac - 2020-08-19

This runs using Spotlight so it's really fast: …

macos Fixing "compinit: insecure directories" error - 2020-04-26

Every time I opened a terminal on my new Mac running Catalina with zsh I got the following annoying error: …

macos Close terminal window on Ctrl+D for macOS - 2020-04-21

I always forget how to set this up. It's hidden in Preferences -> Profiles -> Basic -> Shell: …

macos Get Skitch working on Catalina - 2020-04-21

I really like Skitch for taking screeshots, mainly because I like to snap a quick shot and then drag the icon onto a Google Doc or similar without saving the file anywhere. …

macos Running pip install -e .[test] in zsh on macOS Catalina - 2020-04-21

macOS Catalina uses zsh rather than bash as the default shell (apparently because Apple don't like GPL 3). …