Simon Willison: TILs on macos

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). …