Caffeine app in macOS Mojave

The popular menu bar app Caffeine, which keeps your Mac from entering sleep, does not work by default under macOS Mojave (10.14). The original developer has not released a fix. If you’ve had the situation where you were not actively using your computer, but did not want it to sleep, you may have been frustrated. …

Useful Terminal Hacks for OS X

Current as of Yosemite. (Based on user comments on GitHub, probably works fine for El Capitan too.) Use at your own risk. Source: https://gist.github.com/brandonb927/3195465 Expanding the save panel by default defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode -bool true Save to disk, rather than iCloud, by default? defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false Disabling press-and-hold for special keys in favor of key repeat defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false Disable the warning when changing a file extension defaults write com.apple.finder FXEnableExtensionChangeWarning -bool false Allowing text selection in Quick Look/Preview in Finder by default defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool true

Converting Mac PostScript Type 1 Suitcase Fonts

At my workplace we ran into some problems where a couple fonts were not syncing properly via Dropbox. After a little digging, I found the problem: The fonts were old Mac “suitcase” fonts in PostScript Type 1 format. The suitcase font format stores some of its font data as a file system resource, instead as …

Comcast Xfinity and Passive FTP

Over a number of months, I experienced a strange problem with one of my hosted websites: I could not log in via FTP. To be more specific, I could connect, but at the point where the directory information is transmitted back to the FTP client, the software would hang. For the impatient, here is the …

Comcast Xfinity and Forceful Upsells

I had been a mostly happy Comcast Xfinity user for more than six months. Despite occasional flakiness, the router seems to work reliably and the download speeds are good. A couple months ago my wife and I were trying to fix some issues with our home security system, which apparently needed a phone line. So we added Xfinity’s …