macOS
Posts tagged macOS
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They asked me to separate their accounts, not their tools
Isolating an account meant pointing one environment variable at a private directory. It worked. It also silently took away every custom command the user had written, because the vendor kept those in the same place.
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The cube solver that refuses to be confidently wrong
cubeconjure reads a Rubik's cube through your Mac's camera and tells you how to solve it. The hard part was never the solving — it was reading six colors honestly under real light. This is the story of how 'just read the stickers' turned into a lesson about not being confidently wrong, on either side of the camera.
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Why your Mac cleaner found 47 GB (and where it really went)
A friendly teardown of how black-box Mac cleaners work — the big scary number, the invisible delete, the one thing almost none of them tell you about APFS snapshots — so you can judge any cleaner, including ours.
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I wrote a Swift overlay to black out my menu bar. macOS didn't even look at it.
I wanted a black menu bar to hide the MacBook notch — but in Light mode, keeping my daily-shuffling wallpaper. It felt like a tiny app waiting to be built. It wasn't. Here's the teardown: why Apple removed the standalone dark menu bar in Mojave, how TopNotch 'works' by quietly freezing your wallpaper, a two-experiment proof that the menu bar samples your wallpaper and nothing else, and why a bright wallpaper and a black menu bar are the same pixels fighting over one color.
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Microsoft Teams uninstalled itself but kept my microphone hostage
FaceTime showed my mic working — the level meter moved — yet the person on the other end heard nothing. The culprit: a virtual audio driver Teams left behind when it was deleted years ago. Here's how to find and evict an orphaned HAL plugin.
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Your Mac has two Downloads folders. Here's how I made them one.
macOS keeps a local Downloads folder; iPhone and iPad save into a different one inside iCloud Drive. They never sync. Here's the slightly-cursed symlink trick that unifies them — plus a teardown of the one icon you can't get back: how Desktop & Documents keep their glyph in iCloud, why Downloads can't (a SIP-locked xattr and a two-name allowlist), the one-line fix only Apple can ship — and the sting in the tail: why the symlink quietly sends AirDropped files to /private/tmp, where a nightly cleaner deletes them after three days.