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Posted by jpluimers on 2024/02/13
The conditional formatting feature in Excel is so cool!
If you use FALSE and TRUE expressions to check validity, you can easily make these red and green.
[Wayback/Archive] Conditional formatting of TRUE / FALSE values in an Excel 2010 range – Super User (thanks [Wayback/Archive] tbone for asking and [Wayback/Archive] digitxp for answering):
Posted in Apple, Excel, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Office, Office 2010, Office 2011 for Mac, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/02/01
Not long after Figuring out which processes are preventing to eject/unmount my MacOS Time Machine backup USB drive, I wanted to do the opposite: prevent /Volumes/Sandisk1TB from being ejected, as this is the “built-in” MicroSD card I use to store large or infrequently used files on (ISO and other disk images, drivers, hardware and software documentation, stuff to be installed on a fresh machine).
The opposite is straightforward: have a process keep at least one handle open on the Volume as per [Wayback] macos – How do I not accidentally eject external drives? – Ask Different (thanks [Wayback] kLy, [Wayback] dan and [Wayback] gerlos):
If your important external drive is mounted on the following mount point:
/Volumes/important_diskThen you can protect it against an accidental removal by locking this mount point as opened. For this one very simple method consists in opening
Terminaland doing this basic command:$ cd /Volumes/important_diskTo get rid of this locking, you might type within the same
Terminalwindow:$ cd /or you might as well just close this
Terminalwindow ($ exit, or ⌃+D, or ⌘+W).…
An even more elegant way to do it is open a
screensession (just typescreeninTerminal) and open the mount point from that session. This way you can even closeTerminal, since the session will keep running in the background, until you reattach it and stop it (so there’s no need to keep a window open if you don’t need it). I guess you can even create anAutomatoraction for it. For tips onscreensee: [Wayback] kinnetica.com/2011/05/29/using-screen-on-mac-os-x
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, screen, Terminal | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/12/22
Summary of [Wayback/Archive] Print large PDF in Preview over several pages… – Apple Community:
Via [Wayback/Archive] macos print pdf scaled over two pages – Google Search.
–jeroen
Posted in Adobe, Adobe Acrobat, Apple, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, PDF, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/09/19
Boy, two extra modifier keys: [Wayback/Archive] How to Strip Formatting When You Copy and Paste Text: 5 Ways
To paste as plain text on a Mac, you can use the somewhat cumbersome shortcut
Option+Cmd+Shift+Vto paste without formatting. This is a system-wide shortcut, so unlike Windows, it should work everywhere. Technically, the shortcuts pastes and matches the formatting, but this has the same effect of removing the original formatting.
Via [Wayback/Archive] macos word microsoft office paste without formatting – Google Search.
Paste without formatting is an issue on Windows as well. The default should be “paste without formatting” instead of the current “paste with source formatting”. See for instance these tweets:
Posted in Apple, Classic editor, Development, Gutenberg editor, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Office, Office 2011 for Mac, Power User, Software Development, Web Development, WordPress | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/07/10
That was more difficult than I anticipated: [Wayback/Archive] how do I merge the tabs of two open Preview windows if I have more than two open? – Ask Different
First of all, make sure that the “tab bar” is displayed by choosing “view”->”Show Tab Bar”. Then, you should be seeing the tab bar, which displays the file name:Then, in the other preview window, click and hold the tab bar, and drag it onto the tab bar of the target preview window. Using this method, you can merge as many tabs as you want.Tested on MacOS Catalina 10.15.4
Posted in Apple, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, macOS 10.12 Sierra, macOS 10.13 High Sierra, Power User, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/25
A while ago, I learned that MacOS has had a Unicode Hex Input keyboard since ages.
It is not installed by default, so you have to manually add it:
System Preferences.appKeyboard iconInput Sources tab+) iconUnicode Hex Input is the only entry in the listAdd buttonKeyboard tabNow in the menu bar, you can select the Unicode Hex Input.
After that, when holding the Option key, any 4-digit Unicode sequence will get you a Unicode character.
Posted in Apple, Development, Encoding, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Software Development, Unicode | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/01/18
Since I’m on a series of interactive tutorial sites, yesterday’s The SQL Murder Mystery made me bump into a project by [Archive] Noah Veltman (@veltman) / Twitter: [Wayback/Archive] veltman/clmystery: A command-line murder mystery
There’s been a murder in Terminal City, and TCPD needs your help.
To figure out whodunit, you need access to a command line.
Once you’re ready, clone this repo, or download it as a zip file.
Open a Terminal, go to the location of the files, and start by reading the file ‘instructions’.
I did a quick [Archive] clmystery – Twitter Search / Twitter and found the first ever Twitter mention to be this one from 2013 (boy, have I been living under a stone <g>): [Archive] RoR Group on Twitter: “A command-line murder mystery (clmystery) …” / Twitter.
Cool things:
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, Development, Interactive Tutorials, Learning/Teaching, LifeHacker, Linux, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Software Development, Terminal | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/12/28
Years ago, I wrote Getting your public IP address from the command-line. All methods were http based, so were very easy to execute using cURL.
But then in autumn 2021, Chris Bensen wrote this cool little blog-post [Wayback/Archive] Chris Bensen: How do I find my router’s public IP Address from the command line?:
dig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com
At first sight, I thought it was uncool, as the command was quite long and there was no explanation of the dig command trick.
But then, knowing that dig is a DNS client, it occurred to me: this perfectly works when http and https are disabled by your firewall, but the DNS protocol works and gives the correct result:
# dig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com "80.100.143.119"
This added the below commands and aliases to my tool chest for *nix based environments like Linux and MacOS (not sure yet about Windows yet :), but that still doesn’t explain why it worked. So I did some digging…
dig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com
dig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com | xargs
alias "whatismyipv4_dns=dig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com | xargs"
dig -6 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com
dig -6 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com | xargs
alias "whatismyipv6_dns=dig -6 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com | xargs"
Let’s stick to dig and IPv4 as that not having IPv6 (regrettably still) is the most common situation today:
# dig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com "80.100.143.119"
What it does is request the DNS TXT record of o-o.myaddr.l.google.com from the Google DNS server ns1.google.com and returns the WAN IPv4 address used in the DNS request, which is for instance explained in [Wayback/Archive] What is the mechanics behind “dig TXT o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com” : linuxadmin.
Since these are TXT records, dig will automatically double quote them, which xargs can remove (see below how and why):
# dig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com | xargs 80.100.143.119
The DNS query will fail when requesting the Google Public DNS servers 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4:
# dig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @8.8.8.8 "2a00:1450:4013:c1a::103" "edns0-client-subnet 80.101.239.0/24"
Or, with quotes removed (the -L 1 ensures that xargs performs the quote-pair removal action on each line):
# dig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @8.8.8.8 | xargs -L 1 2a00:1450:4013:c1a::103 edns0-client-subnet 80.101.239.0/24
This request is both slower than requesting the ns1.google.com server and wrong.
The reason is that only ns1.google.com understands the special o-o.myaddr.l.google.com hostname which instructs it to return the IP address of the requesting dig DNS client.
That 8.8.8.8 returns a different IP address and an additional edns0-client-subnet with less accurate information is explained in an answer to [Wayback/Archive] linux – Getting the WAN IP: difference between HTTP and DNS – Stack Overflow by [Wayback/Archive] argaz referring to this cool post: [Wayback/Archive] Which CDNs support edns-client-subnet? – CDN Planet.
ns1.google.com: any DNS server serving the google.com domainSince o-o.myaddr.l.google.com is part of the google.com domain, the above works for any DNS server serving the google.com domain (more on that domain: [Wayback/Archive] General DNS overview | Google Cloud).
Getting the list of DNS servers is similar to getting the list of MX servers which I explained in Getting the IP addresses of gmail MX servers, replacing MX record type (main exchange) with the NS record type (name server) and the gmail.com domain with the google.com domain:
# dig @8.8.8.8 +short NS google.com ns3.google.com. ns1.google.com. ns2.google.com. ns4.google.com.
The ns1.google.com DNS server is a special one of the NS servers: it is the start of authority server, which you can query using the SOA record type that also gives slightly more details for this server:
# dig @8.8.8.8 +short SOA google.com ns1.google.com. dns-admin.google.com. 410477869 900 900 1800 60
The difference between using NS and SOA records with dig are explained in the [Wayback] dns – How do I find the authoritative name-server for a domain name? – Stack Overflow answer by [Wayback/Archive] bortzmeyer who also explains how to help figuring out SOA and NS discrepancies (note to self: check out the check_soa tool originally by Michael Fuhr (I could not find recent content of him, so he might have passed away) of which source code is now at [Wayback/Archive] Net-DNS/check_soa at master · NLnetLabs/Net-DNS).
So this works splendid as well using ns4.google.com on my test system:
# dig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns4.google.com | xargs 80.100.143.119
xargs removes outer quotes removal trick[Wayback/Archive] string – Shell script – remove first and last quote (“) from a variable – Stack Overflow (thanks quite anonymous [Wayback/Archive] user1587520):
> echo '"quoted"' | xargs quoted
xargsusesechoas the default command if no command is provided and strips quotes from the input.
Some notes are in [Wayback/Archive] How to get public IP address from Linux shell, but note the telnet trick now fails as myip.gelma.net is gone (latest live version was archived in the Wayback Machine in august 2019).
whatismyipv4='curl ipv4.whatismyip.akamai.com && echo' It’s a quite a bit shorter than the dig construct in your post (;”–jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, bash, bash, Batch-Files, Communications Development, Development, DNS, Internet protocol suite, Linux, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, TCP | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/07/29
More than 10 years ago, I wrote about 7 screens; 3 computers; 1 keyboard/mouse to direct them all: Input Director and started with
At home, I have 7 screens on 3 computers on the same desk. That sounds like a clutter, but all these keyboards and mice hooked up to them add even more clutter. Until I found out about Input Direct…
In the mean time, I’ve mainly used a Mac with MacOS as a front-end to virtually logon to remote machines using both the internal display and one or two external monitors.
Especially when doing video (think Covid-19 and especially on-line meetings!) in addition to software development work, this is far from ideal.
So here are some things on my list of potential enhancements to this situation:
tl;dr:
- Windows machines give [Wayback/Archive.is] Garage Mouse without Borders a try
- Windows and Mac try [Wayback/Archive.is] ShareMouse
- Windows, Mac and Linux try [Wayback/Archive.is] Synergy, which requires one computer to act as host (Only host can control mouse/kb across multiple devices).
- Linux try [Wayback/Archive.is] x2x
- Mouse Without Borders: Free and Easy for Windows
- Synergy & Barrier: Smooth and Cross-Platform
- Input Director: Mouse Without Borders Alternative
- Sharemouse: Synergy Alternative
- KVM Switch: The Hardware Option
- (Chrome & Microsoft) Remote Desktop
–jeroen
Posted in Apple, Hardware, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Uncategorized, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/07/27
A finger print as authentication factor: be sure it is not the only factor, and devise a way to delete it just in case some party wants to force you to use it as an authentication factor.
Some links for my archive:
[Archive.is] Cabel on Twitter: “(Important caveat/warning: if you SSH into that machine, you will NOT be able to sudo, as your fingerprint cannot travel through SSH. 😜)”
sudo … “
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, Apple, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 