Tweaking4All.com - macos Archives

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.

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.

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).

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).

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)

With the arrival of support for third party game controllers in macOS Catalina (10.15), we can now connect most certain game controllers to our Mac. In this article we look at Bluetooth enabled XBox One controller.

Once such a controller is paired with your Mac, you can use it with games that support controllers, like certain games on Steam, nVidia Geforce Now, Apple Arcade and potentially many more.

Note: Some of you may have read my older article on how to connect a XBox 350 controller to you Mac (2015). This method, and the XBox 360 controllers, are still working of course, but it is time for an update now that Catalina offers native support for certain controllers. Personally I like the newer XBox One controllers better anyway (especially the Elite models, even though these are not exactly cheap).

In this short article I’ll show how I implemented a cross platform (Windows, Linux, macOS) function for Lazarus Pascal to move files or directories to the TrashCan or Recycle Bin.

Since it took me some figuring out, I figured; why not write it down so others may benefit from this as well.
For your convenience: You can also download the Lazarus Pascal unit here, which holds the function for macOS, Linux and macOS.