I recently started to convert all of my movies from MKV to MP4. The main reason for this is that I want to be able to play back videos from all my Apple devices without the need for additional software, like VLC or IINA.
For many people not that deep into video file formats I want to explain what the supported formats for video on macOS are and how to get there from almost any source material.
Even though there are like one million guides on how to secure macOS properly, I decided to throw in my 5c on this topic. In contrast to many other guides, I’d just like to provide you with the best practices that I also use. This one is about the essential things that I always do when getting a new Mac to provide better security while preserving almost all macOS features like iCloud document saving or Time Machine usage.
Current macOS versions are weird… Often when I connect my MacBook Pro to the two screens on my desk, the wallpaper on one of that guys is either gone or changed to a different one.
After many attempts to search them in my bunch of 2k wallpapers, I eventually gave up and wrote a script that sets the wallpaper on all my screens like this:
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to set picture of every desktop to ("/some/path/wallpaper.png" as POSIX file as alias)'
This is a simple call to osascript (Open Scripting Architecture… script) which evaluates the AppleScript provided by -e.
Just as a short update: Starting from the newest AirPods update, they also finally work as a headset on the Mac. Before there was a issue that caused audio quality to drop when using the AirPods both as headphones and microphones at the same time.
macOS has the osascript command line tool that allows you to run embedded AppleScript right from within shell scripts. As AppleScript also has capabilities to show notifications, you can utilize this to show messages in the macOS Notification Center.
Here is an example:
osascript -e 'display notification "Something happened" with title "Test"'
If you have any further tips that will help people supercharge their shell scripts on macOS, feel free to leave them as a comment.
After finishing with the hardware and software parts of my new NAS, I decided to append another little project which is aimed to provide a simplified control panel for macOS in the menu bar on the upper right of the screen.
What I wanted to achieve is a possibility to mount my various shares with one click as well as having controls for power on/off and SSH. Additionally the control should indicate whether the NAS is currently powered on or not.
UPDATE 2018-06-02: I’ve created a new version of this article called “Securing macOS” available here: https://www.davd.io/securing-macos/
While building my new NAS, I came across the question how to provide a Time Machine backup solution for my OS X clients.
As I run OS X on all my machines I want to back up all data to my NAS. netatalk allows to create file shares for OS X
to provide a simple solution for system backups.