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ConnectMeNow v4 – Mounting Network Shares Quick and Easy on a Mac

ConnectMeNow v4 – Mounting Network Shares Quick and Easy on a Mac
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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 SMBCIFSFTPSSHWebDAVNFS 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.

How to find the IP Address of your Default Gateway

How to find the IP Address of your Default Gateway
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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).

Batch Image Conversion with macOS Preview

Batch Image Conversion with macOS Preview
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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.

How to Customize Z-Shell Prompt (zsh – macOS, Linux)

How to Customize Z-Shell Prompt (zsh – macOS, Linux)
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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.

XTerm Color Cheat Sheet

XTerm Color Cheat Sheet
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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.

IP Rating codes for LED strips

IP Rating codes for LED strips
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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.

How to use Email Templates in Apple Mail (macOS)

How to use Email Templates in Apple Mail (macOS)
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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 – Get an overview of Video File Details

MovieScanner2 – Get an overview of Video File Details
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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.

Forum Account Activation issue has been resolved!

Forum Account Activation issue has been resolved!
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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.

MacOS X Image Resizer – Big Sur Update

MacOS X Image Resizer – Big Sur Update
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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.

 

How to create a Self-Signed SSL Certificate

How to create a Self-Signed SSL Certificate
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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.

Beat Saber – Custom Song Renamer

Beat Saber – Custom Song Renamer
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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).

How to Download YouTube videos

How to Download YouTube videos
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In this article, I’ll show how you can easily download a video from YouTube on Windows, macOS or Linux.
All you need is the Free VideoLAN VLC and your Web Browser.
So no need for any sketchy third party websites or commercial tools.

Caution: Keep an eye on the YouTube Terms of Service rules, as well as your local laws!
According to the YouTube Terms of Service policy, you will need to ask for permission from either YouTube and/or the respective Copyright holder(s).

How to Flush your local DNS (Mac, Windows, Linux)

How to Flush your local DNS (Mac, Windows, Linux)
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Flush DNS – Sometimes we do run into network issues, and sometimes this is caused by a corrupted DNS cache on your computer.

In this article a quick and easy overview on how to flush the DNS cache on your computer for several operating systems:

  • Windows (Windows 95 up to Windows 10)
  • macOS (10.6 Snow Leopard up to 11.0 Big Sur)
  • Linux (several methods)

Windows 10 – Testing applications safely in Windows sandbox

Windows 10 – Testing applications safely in Windows sandbox
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Sometimes you just want to try a new application without messing up your Windows setup, or maybe you found an application online, and you’re not quite sure how sketchy the application is (with all the malware, viruses etc. these days).

In this article, I’ll show you how to use the sandbox functionality found in Windows 10, to safely test applications in a shielded (sandbox) environment.

Note: This only seems to be available for Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise, as of version 1903, (it first became available in the Insider build 18305).

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