Command Line Tools are an optional component of Xcode that bring a variety of advanced utilities to the Mac command line, including compilers, debuggers, and other essentials for software development and command line tinkering. But not everyone has to be a developer to require Command Line Tools be installed on their Mac, because the suite … Read More
Llama is a powerful large language model (LLM) developed by Meta (yes, the same Meta that is Facebook), that is able to process and generate human-like text. It’s quite similar to ChatGPT, but what is unique about Llama is that you can run it locally, directly on your computer. With a little effort, you’ll be … Read More
Want to try running Ubuntu Linux on your Apple Silicon Mac? You can do that easily, running Ubuntu right alongside MacOS, and without having to deal with any partitioning, installation headaches, dual booting, or loss of the Mac operating system itself. This is possible with the help of virtual machines, which allow you to run … Read More
If you have used Homebrew to try and install a particular package onto an Apple Silicon Mac and you see an error message stating “The arm64 architecture is required for this software” that prevents the installation of the package, you might be surprised by this error message given that you’re using an Apple Silicon Mac … Read More
There are various ways to monitor CPU usage on a Mac, with perhaps the two most common being with Activity Monitor on the graphical interface side of things, and htop or top on the command line side. While you can show an optional core graph in Activity Monitor, and htop will show CPU core activity … Read More
If you use Node.js for web development, creation of web apps, and javascript based network applications, you undoubtedly may come across situations where you’d like to make sure that the latest version of Node.js is installed on your Mac. Upgrading to the latest version of Node.js means you’ll have access to the most recent features … Read More
There are various ways to check the health of a hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD) that is used on a Mac with drives that support SMART, which stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis Reporting Technology. These options range from fairly simple using Disk Utility to check the SMART status of a drive, to … Read More
If you have a video file in MOV format, you may wish to convert the MOV video to MP4 format instead. While there are a variety of methods for converting MOV to MP4, the approach we’re going to address here is by using the command line, with a super easy to use and free tool … Read More
If you’re a Windows user, whether on a PC, in a dual boot environment with Boot Camp on an Intel Mac, or you’re running Windows 11 in a virtual machine on an Apple Silicon Mac, you may have an interest in installing Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL. Windows Subsystem for Linux puts a full … Read More
If you’re at the command line and perhaps interacting with Homebrew, Git, or similar, you may run into an error message that says something like the following “warning: unable to access /Users/Name/.config/git/attributes” : Permission denied”. This error message sounds more alarming than it is in most cases, but regardless, you likely want to fix the … Read More
While there are some command line wizards out there who never need to look at references, search manual pages, defer to command lists, LLM queries, or web searches, the rest of us mere mortal commands line users can be helped by a really great tool called cheat. The cheat command is able to provide a … Read More
Many advanced Mac users spend a lot of time working from the command line with the Terminal application. The command line offers ways to interact with various settings in MacOS through defaults commands and other tricks, so it’s a reasonable question to wonder if you can set or change the default web browser on a … Read More
Modern versions of MacOS no longer support HFS, meaning that new Macs can no longer read, mount, or write to classic HFS drives. But a fair amount of longtime Mac users continue to have older Macs and old Mac hard drives that are in HFS format, way back from the days of Mac OS 8, … Read More
As WebP grows in popularity as a compressed image format for the web, many web workers need to convert batches of images to WebP format from their Mac. Bulk converting images like JPG and PNG to WebP is not currently a native feature, but with a little tinkering on the Mac, you can gain functionality … Read More
Do you need to convert images to webp format from the Mac? Converting images to WebP offers tremendous file size savings, often compressing an image up to 70% without losing image quality, so it’s understandable why many Mac users and web developers, designers, and workers would wish to convert and compress images into WebP format. … Read More
Most Mac users will likely see battery stats in the menu bar of MacOS, and head to System Information to investigate cycle count, but some users who spend a lot of time at the command line may find it useful to be able to retrieve battery information from the Terminal. One way to find battery … Read More
The command line grep tool is incredibly powerful and useful for searching for matches in files, sorting text and data, finding strings in large files, and so much more. One common situation many command line users may find themselves in, is seeking to grep match for two different strings in a single line. You can … Read More
The Disk Utility application on MacOS has a command line counterpart, that allows Mac users to run disk maintenance and disk administration tasks, including verifying and repairing disks. There are obvious advantages and benefits to using the command line for tasks like this, particularly for troubleshooting scenarios, and remote management, but some advanced users may … Read More
