Tweaking4All.com - macosx Archives

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.

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 …

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).

I’m very excited to announce that ApplePi-Baker now supports shrinking and expanding of Ext2, Ext3 or Ext4 Linux partitions on a Mac!!
This is something I wasn’t able to do before and is commonly seen as a challenge on a Mac (since MacOS does not support these Linux File Systems).

This update can only shrink or expand Linux partitions on a MBR partitioned disks (very common format used for the Raspberry Pi).

Keep in mind: I’ve done quite a lot of successful tests, but by lack of beta testers, I’m still marking it as experimental.

During backup, if the option has been enabled, ApplePi-Baker will locate a Linux partition and if found shrink it to it’s minimal size, and update the IMG file and it’s partition table (the source will not be affected). This will result in a much more compact IMG file, and offers a restore to a device of a different capacity.

On Restore, this same option will expand that Linux partition to the maximum available size on the target disk.
Obviously, the target device needs to be able to accommodate at least the minimum size of the IMG file.

Since quite a bit needs to be done (find partition, check file system integrity, resize partition, etc), this will naturally slow down the backup and restore process, but it will help restoring to different sized target disks/SD-card.

Not only that, version 2.1.0 is much faster than 2.0.0 – I’ve seen speed increases up to 300% during backup.

You can find the latest version of ApplePi-Baker in the original article (please place comments there).

Apple has done a pretty good job with the Dock in MacOS. There is just one thing that I do not like though; the way it stacks icons when you add a folder to your Dock.

A smart guy from Japan (2007 – Yasushi Chida) actually came with a neat idea for that, by introducing “buckets” (or better said: Stack Overlays) placed over the folders in your Dock. All that without the need to install any extra applications!
Unfortunately, his website at Yahoo!/Geocities has been gone for quite a while now.

The few steps you have to take can be a little bit challenging for MacOS beginners (even though it is pretty easy – as usual; once you know how it works). So in the article I’ll show you how to use buckets (a.k.a. Stack Overlays) in your MacOS Dock. This seems to work as of MacOS X Leopard and still works in Mojave (and I do expect this to work in future versions as well).

In this article I’ll describe what I have used to create a “Press Any Key to Continue” in a Bash script (Linux/MacOS X).

Working with scripts in Bash (Terminal or Shell) isn’t what I do daily. The day I had to create a script to help me do an SVN update followed by a massive recompile. I wanted to see the SVN result first before proceeding with recompile, so I had to add a “Press Any Key To Continue” option in the script.

Since it took me a little effort, I figured; let’s describe this in an article. After all, it may be good reference for myself and for others.
These methods work for Linux and MacOS.

Waking up devices that are network connected, can be done with the so called “Wake On LAN” feature provided by certain devices (like for example a NAS, FileServer, or even a PC). A while back I created a simple application for this – miniWOL – keeping in mind that the user may not be too familiar with all the configuration details (see: previous miniWOL versions).

I wanted just a simple menu in the System Tray (Windows: next to the clock, usually the lower-right corner of your screen) or Menubar (MacOS X – top of your screen, Linux often at the bottom of your screen). Well, after a bit of searching I could not find anything suitable or to my liking and I decided to just write something myself.

The old miniWOL has been good so far, and plenty folks seem to have a good use for it privately and professionally. However, Apple had to change a few things (moving to 64 bit, using Cocoa instead of Carbon, and the need to sign and notarize applications – I suspect Microsoft will probably follow soon) so while revamping the Mac version, I revamped the Windows version as well, and added a 64-bit Linux version as well (by request).

I’m not sure about other developers, but I occasionally like to use my own custom font for my Lazarus Pascal applications. Typically I do this so I have access to better icons and symbols available in my application, instead of semi blurry bitmap icons. If you use this the right way, your icons and symbols will look much better and will scale really great.

Usually, I use a TTF font for this which I generate at IcoMoon.
IcoMoon is an awesome website where you can compile your own TTF font (or SVG or PNG images of symbols) for use with your website (Tweaking4All uses it as well) or … in your applications.

Since there are plenty examples out there how to do this in Lazarus Pascal for Windows, here an article that shows you how to do this in Lazarus Pascal under macOS.

Previous miniWOL versions proved that just reading the specifications of Wake on LAN and testing with your own equipment is not going to result in a 100% perfect application, as it seems that certain machines prefer to see a broadcast over the network instead of a specific IP address.

In this new version, you can still retrieve the Mac Address based on IP address, and use a broadcast mask (255.255.255.255 is the default). This should help with certain setups like Synology devices.

This update applies to Windows and MacOS versions of miniWOL.

Note: I have just uploaded a revised v1.2 (Friday Dec. 9 2016) which fixes sending a WOL when miniWOL starts for those servers that have been tagged as such.

Read the original MiniWOL article. Comments, bugs, question etc, can be posted there as well.
You can also download it from our Downloads page.

ConnectMeNow, a small application for Mac OS X to quickly mount network shares, has been updated to version 1.7.9 – yes i’ts an odd version number, but this has to do with a lot of testing by Steffen and others.

Some of the changes include:

Support for separator lines in the menu, buttons to move items up and down in the list, support to save the config file anywhere you’d like (they can even be shared with other computers, for example through DropBox etc.), option to backup/restore your config file, “Execute AutoMount” function, menubar fix for macOS Sierra, fixed bug which would reset the number or shares to zero (= loosing all settings!), standard preferences are now stored per Apple Guidelines, and a minor bug in WOL has been fixed.

For  download of the latest version, please read the original article (Quickly connect Network shares on a Mac with ConnectMeNow), where you can also ask questions or report issues. Or … find the application on our Downloads Page.

For most of us, working in Linux or in a shell is not necessarily a daily activity, and that’s totally OK.
I’m not daily working with it either, but occasionally I use one of those funny commands to set the access rights to certain files and/or directories.

This command, chmod, is not super complicated to work with, and is commonly used when working in a shell or terminal on both the MacOS X and Linux platforms. But we need a “magic number” to set these rights. The “magic number” for chmod is also commonly used with FTP programs.

Whenever I use this command, I need to refresh my mind on how to calculate the “magic number”, and I find myself looking for a chmod calculator.
Since I’m lazy at times, I figured: why not have one on my own website?

So I started playing with JavaScript and created this chmod calculator.

With the arrival of the new MacOS Sierra, a user (Steffen – thanks man!) discovered a small bug with the icon in the menubar.

This version/update fixes this issue for Mac users.

Read the original MiniWOL article. Comments, bugs, question etc, can be posted there as well.
You can also download it from our Downloads page.

A new version of Name My TV Series is available, version 1.8.0, with quite a few new features.

For those who followed the comments and forum posts, you will have seen some new features popup. This is the main reason why I ended up skipping the 1.7.x version numbers – thank you Collin for taking the time to test and thank you CDRSteve for the motivational beers!

Some of the new features include folders, setting airdate for folders, detection of video resolution (720p, 1080p, etc), video codec, and audio codec, and history drop-downs for file-naming, directory naming, and previously loaded shows.

For the most recent version, go to the original Name My TV Series article, or our Download-page.

When running Windows on your Mac through BootCamp, you might be searching for the CD/DVD Eject button every now and then, and back in the day (2009) I wrote a little application for that for my own use: BootCamp CD Eject.
This application works with all Windows version as of Windows XP – and you can use this without BootCamp as well.

This little application lives in the Windows Systray and allows you to eject a CD/DVD from a menu or through a key combination. There is also a key combination to quickly put your Windows in standby.

I’m posting the application (free!) since I recently ran into some users that actually had a use for it even 7 years after developing it.