KHE (Posts about OS-X)

Web Development Setup on macOS

Kenneth H. East — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 05:00:00 GMT

A Flexible Web Development Setup on macOS

This is a simple way to configure a macOS system for web development. It allows one to develop multiple sites locally, without reconfiguring anything when changing sites/customers.

There are two key components to the strategy: dnsmasq and the httpd daemon's configuration.

Dotfiles Reloaded

Kenneth H. East — Sat, 04 Feb 2017 00:57:14 GMT

About a year and a half ago, I converted to using GNU stow and git for managing my dotfiles. The most recent version of that effort is available here.

The scheme worked well but the OCD part of me grew tired of seeing symbolic links to files instead of the actual files themselves. The symlinks weren't unexpected, after all, the whole point of stow is easily managing lots of links. Then I ran across a post on Hacker News about using a bare git repo to manage dotfiles in place. I very much liked the idea and settled on using vcsh and myrepos to manage my dotfiles going forward.

I should mention that I've known about vcsh for a good while. My impression had been that it was more complicated than necessary for my purposes. I've since changed my mind completely; it's as simple as what I ended up doing with stow, if not simpler. Minor tweaks to dotfiles are a pleasure when using myrepos.

These are my brief notes about the process.

Installing nodejs and npm on OS-X

Kenneth H. East — Fri, 13 May 2016 14:24:52 GMT

How to install nodejs and npm on OS-X.

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OS-X, 'Open With', and emacsclient

Kenneth H. East — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 01:57:02 GMT

Because I've configured my GNU emacs to automatically run in daemon mode I wish to 'use' emacs by running emacsclient exclusively. But emacsclient isn't an OS-X 'app' which means that I can't double click on a file to open it with emacsclient. It also means that I can't use the 'Open With' menu to edit a file via emacsclient. Here is how to resolve those issues.

Gnu Emacs With Server Mode on OS-X

Kenneth H. East — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 20:18:18 GMT

I have used the Emacs for Mac OS-X distribution of Gnu Emacs for years and have been quite pleased with it. Emacs' server-mode is great in that it makes for very fast load times and it allows sharing buffer contents, kill rings, etc., between windows. However, I found it a little tricky to get it working perfectly on OS-X. These are my notes on how to install and configure it so that server-mode works correctly on OS-X.

Print an Agenda from the OS-X Calendar

Kenneth H. East — Tue, 12 May 2015 17:18:36 GMT

I have no idea what Apple has to make it so difficult to simply print a list of scheduled appointments from a calendar. Do some googling - you'll quickly figure out that a simple and acceptable way really doesn't exist. For example, if one simply does a Print->Scheduled Events for the next six months, Apple kindly prints an entry for every single day over the next six months, whether or not the day has an appointment. I don't want to print ten pages simply to get a list of the five appointments in the next six months that I have on a particular calendar.

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Adding Fonts to enscript

Kenneth H. East — Mon, 11 May 2015 05:00:00 GMT

Installing new fonts for use with enscript on OS-X

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email via the command line on OS-X

Kenneth H. East — Sun, 10 May 2015 21:55:05 GMT

I needed to email cron job output from my OS-X machine to off-site recipients. To do this, I had to configure the OS-X Mail Transfer Agent (MTA), postfix, to route outgoing mail through a working SMTP server, in this case, GMail. These are my notes about how to configure this on OS-X Yosemite 10.10.3.

Restoring 'Save As' to OS-X Yosemite

Kenneth H. East — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 06:00:00 GMT

So, Yosemite caused most OS-X apps to loose Save As... in favor of Duplicate or whatever. Here is how to get Save As... back.

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Extending the Filetypes Supported by Quicklook

Kenneth H. East — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Apple's QuickLook is a great service. I have grown to rely upon it a great deal during my daily work. Strangely, Apple seems to have reduced the number of content types that QL can render in Mavericks (e.g., flv), but that's another topic. This note describes how to get QuickLook to display the contents of unknown files as text.

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