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With macOS Tahoe, Apple came with quite a few cosmetic changes in the UI.
Some love the changes, some hate it, and some do not care either way.

The one thing that really annoyed me, besides Tahoe feeling a little sluggish and some of those cosmetic bugs, was the “squircle jail” applied to application icons that do not seem to match Apple’s new icon design desires, where a grey squircle was drawn behind the icons that used to look great.

To fix this, there is not a single option in the OS to be found to undo this unwanted change.
So I ended up figuring out the “new” icon, and how to override it, is all controlled with Extended Attributes and created a little application, SquircleNoMore, to strip those ugly icons and reset applications to their native icon.

As of today, there is (finally) a new version of Rename My TV Series available for Windows (64bit), macOS (Universal binary), and Linux (GTK and QT5 for x64).

It has taken several years for me to find time to finally complete the implementation of most feature requests and bug fixes.
Some of the major ones are the update to the TVDB API 4, support dark theme for Windows (kind-a), Universal binary for macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), and much more.

You can find this beta version on the Rename My TV Series page.
On this page you will also find a detailed list of the implemented changes.

miniWOL is a small and efficient macOS application designed to send Wake-on-LAN (WoL) signals, allowing users to remotely power up their network devices over the local network. Tailored for both home and professional environments, miniWOL provides a reliable solution for managing and controlling networked devices with ease. Well … I guess ChatGPT nailed that one pretty good 😊

Some may already be familiar with miniWOL, as previous versions have been downloaded approximately 50,000 times by the time that I’m releasing this version.

This is now version 3 of miniWOL, which I’m making available only through the Apple App Store as a learning exercise for myself.
Obviously this means that this is a macOS only version, completely fine tuned tuned, modified, and sandboxed, for macOS users, and meeting Apple’s security rules.

As with pervious miniWOL versions, it boasts an intuitive and straightforward interface, making it easy for users of all technical levels, to setup and wake up their network devices with just a few clicks, straight from the menubar of your Mac.

These days where everything has become very expensive, most of us become more and more conscious about the amount of electricity we use. This is where Wake-on-LAN comes in play as quite a few devices that are network connected, can be woken up, or resumed, remotely with the so called “Wake-on-LAN” feature – think of some of the obvious devices like a NAS or server, or printer-servers, but do not forget devices like a regular computer, media players etc.

As a macOS fan I keep being surprised that Apple still hasn’t implemented some obvious improvements, like a dual pane Finder or … an easier way to mount network shares. The latter is what ConnectMeNow tries to address, which is nothing new to those familiar with previous versions of ConnectMeNow (CMN).

We are more network connected than ever before – at home, in school and at work. We have network shares on our computers, want to access company network shares, or have a dedicated file server or NAS (Network Attached Storage) to store our information or make our backups. Unfortunately, it is still cumbersome under macOS X to connect to those “shares” (also known as mounted network “Volumes“).

For this reason I created ConnectMeNow – initially just for personal use.
Its sole purpose being to mount network shares quicker and easier, and have easier access to SSH connections.
ConnectMeNow supports protocols like SMB, CIFS, FTP, SSH, WebDAV, NFS and AFP.

Note: if “mounting” doesn’t mean anything to you, then know that mounting (in this case) refers to making network drives, for example from another computer or NAS, appear on your Mac so you can access them quicker and easier.

Besides this being a fully from scratch build version, this version now is available as 64bit application for Intel and Apple Silicon – signed an notarized.

While exploring a suggestion of a visitor here, I wanted to find a solid way to retrieve the IP Address of the Default Gateway in a given network.
The most common reason is probably so you can access the modem or router and do some verifications or configurations.

So in this article I’ll show you how to determine the IP address of the default gateway of your network, on several platforms (Window, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android).

Every now and then I find myself in need of converting an image to another format, especially when the application I’m working with does not support the file format I have at hand. Recently I find myself needing to convert several webp formatted files, a format developed by Google as a replacement for PNG, JPEG and GIF. Unfortunately quite a few applications still do not support this new(er) format.

There are a bunch of tools out there that can do this for us, like Pixillion from NCH Software (free version available), or online services like CloudConvert. MacOS however already comes equipped with a suitable tool that can help us with that – and can even handle a batch – called “macOS Preview“.

In this article:
How to convert images, to different file formats, with Preview that comes with macOS – one at a time, or in batch.

When using Terminal under a recent macOS version, you’ll most likely will be using Z-Shell (zsh) –  a quite common Shell found under Linux as well.
This used to be Bash, but Apple moved to Z-Shell early 2019 (some users may see a message when opening Terminal, requesting them to migrate to zsh).

I do tinker in Terminal quite often and always found the prompt kind-a boring.

In this article: how to customize the Z-Shell prompt.

Note: most of these tricks/settings may work the same way for different shells as well, like Bash and even Linux shell variants.

For those who need a cheat sheet on XTerm colors, here a quick and short reference overview.
These colors should work for anything that supports the XTerm color-scheme, so this includes several Terminal emulators and several Shell variants like Z-Shell.

I needed this while customizing my Z-Shell prompt, and I hope this is useful to others as well as a reference sheet.
I’ve split it up in the 16 basic colors, 24 greyscale “colors”, and 256 colors.

Having been tinkering with LED strips for quite some years now, I do occasionally get the question: “What do the IP ratings mean?”.

There is a short answer for that question: It indicates its protection level against water and dust.

Obviously this doesn’t say much, and things are a little more advanced that that.
So in this article I’ll go briefly into the details on what kind of IP ratings you can run into and what they mean.
This way you can consider in what kind of environment you’d like to use your LED strip and find a matching IP code.

In certain scenarios, it can be a timesaver, and avoid mistakes, to have one or more templates for common emails.
Unfortunately, Apple Mail, that comes with macOS, doesn’t have a template mechanism … or does it?

With a simple trick we can use “templates” in Apple Mail under macOS and in this article I’ll show you how …

MovieScanner2, the successor of MovieScanner, is a small utility which analyzes your video file and stored the detected streams in a database.
The detected streams include all embedded video streams, audio streams, subtitle streams, and most common external subtitle files.

For each file details are being collected with ffProbe (from the ffMPEG project), like for example resolution, 3D, HDR, codec types, audio channels and layout, audio and subtitle languages, etc.

MovieScanner2 is completely free, and available for Windows, Linux (GTK and QT5) and MacOS X.

Unfortunately, the registration at our forum didn’t quite work as hoped.
A small bug made it that new users would not get an activation email – which makes it hard to complete registration of course.

I did manage to find what caused this issue; a minor bug in the forum software.
The issue should now be resolved, and the fix has been shared with the developers of the forum plugin.

For those that have tried to register before: Feel free to contact me, mentioning the email address you used to register.
I can then either activate your account, or remove the account so you can register with the same email address again.

Apologies for the inconvenience, and thanks to all that reported this issue.

My little script to resize images straight from Finder, and optionally attach them right away to a new email, has been updated to fix some issues that surfaced with the release of Big Sur.

This version provides a fix for the “Image Events got an error: image “<imagename>” doesn’t understand the “save” message” error message, and resolves the issue with Apple Mail freezing up when trying to attach images to a new email.

You can find the download, and ask questions, with the original article: MacOS X Image Resizer – Right click images to resize and/or email.

Sometimes we need a Certificate so we can encrypt and decrypt network communication, for example for all kinds of network devices (eg. NAS, IoT devices, local web server, etc).

Unfortunately, for some of these applications, we cannot obtain a legit certificate from a CA (Certificate Authority), due to certain limitations.
In this article I’ll show you how to create such a free Self-Signed (self-created) certificate yourself, for Windows, macOS and Linux.

I’ll also briefly point out limitations and potential problems that come with a Self-Signed certificate or CERT.

For those familiar with Beat Saber mods: Beat Saber is the most fun when you add your own songs.

Unfortunately, when you download some of these custom songs, for example from beatsaver.com or beatsaber.com, you’ll find that the filenames can be a bit messy. For example filenames like: “8e7e553099436af31564adf1977a5ec42a61cfff.zip” or “141 (Gangnam Style – greatyazer).zip”.

This is where this simple little tool can be helpful allowing you with a few clicks to rename these files to a filename in this format “Artist – Title (supported levels).zip”.

The application is free and available for macOS, Linux (64bit) and Windows (32bit).